196. You are now again surprised, probably, at hearing me oppose France typically to Greece. More strictly, I might oppose only a part of France,—Normandy. But it is better to say, France, {1} as embracing the seat of the established Norman power in the Island of our Lady; and the province in which it was crowned,—Champagne.
{Footnote 1: "Normandie, la franche." "France, la solue;" (chanson de Roland). One of my good pupils referred me to this ancient and glorious French song.}
France is everlastingly, by birth, name, and nature, the country of the Franks, or free persons; and the first source of European frankness, or franchise. The Latin for franchise is libertas. But the modern or Cockney-English word liberty,—Mr. John Stuart Mill's,—is not the equivalent of libertas; and the modern or Cockney-French word liberté,—M. Victor Hugo's,—is not the equivalent of franchise.
197. The Latin for franchise, I have said, is libertas; the Greek is {Greek: *eleupheria*}. In the thoughts of all three nations, the idea is precisely the same, and the word used for the idea by each nation therefore accurately translates the word of the other: {Greek: *eleupheria*}—libertas—franchise—reciprocally translate each other. Leonidas is characteristically {Greek: *eleupheros*} among Greeks; Publicola, characteristically liber, among Romans; Edward III. and the Black Prince, characteristically frank among French. And that common idea, which the words express, as all the careful scholars among you will know, is, with all the three nations, mainly of deliverance from the slavery of passion. To be {Greek: *eleupheros*}, liber, or franc, is first to have learned how to rule our own passions; and then, certain that our own conduct is right, to persist in that conduct against all resistance, whether of counter-opinion, counter pain, or counter-pleasure. To be defiant alike of the mob's thought, of the adversary's threat, and the harlot's temptation,—this is in the meaning of every great nation to be free; and the one condition upon which that freedom can be obtained is pronounced to you in a single verse of the 119th Psalm, "I will walk at liberty, for I seek Thy precepts."
198. Thy precepts:—Law, observe, being dominant over the Gothic as over the Greek king, but a quite different law. Edward III. feeling no anger against the Sieur de Ribaumont, and crowning him with his own pearl chaplet, is obeying the law of love, restraining anger; but Theseus, slaying the Minotaur, is obeying the law of justice, and enforcing anger.
The one is acting under the law of the charity, {Greek: *charis*} or grace of God; the other under the law of His judgment. The two together fulfil His {Greek: *krisis*} and {Greek: *agapae*}.
199. Therefore the Greek dynasties are finally expressed in the kinghoods of Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus, who judge infallibly, and divide arithmetically. But the dynasty of the Gothic king is in equity and compassion, and his arithmetic is in largesse,
"Whose moste joy was, I wis,
When that she gave, and said, Have this."
So that, to put it in shortest terms of all, Greek law is of Stasy, and Gothic of Ecstasy; there is no limit to the freedom of the Gothic hand or heart, and the children are most in the delight and the glory of liberty when they most seek their Father's precepts.
200. The two lines I have just quoted are, as you probably remember, from Chaucer's translation of the French Romance of the Rose, out of which I before quoted to you the description of the virtue of Debonnaireté. Now that Debonnaireté of the Painted Chamber of Westminster is the typical figure used by the French sculptors and painters for 'franchise,' frankness, or Frenchness; but in the Painted Chamber, Debonnaireté, high breeding, 'out of goodnestedness,' or gentleness, is used, as an English king's English, of the Norman franchise. Here, then, is our own royalty,—let us call it Englishness, the grace of our proper kinghood;—and here is French royalty, the grace of French kinghood—Frenchness, rudely but sufficiently drawn by M. Didron from the porch of Chartres. She has the crown of fleur-de-lys, and William the Norman's shield.