It was the sensational paper of the day, and even the most phlegmatic English scholar was stirred by this defiant bugle-blast from a philosophic French explorer who was not only disturbing the settled convictions of English thinkers, but still worse was running counter to cherished prejudices of the English race. That historic hyphenation of racial appellatives—"Anglo-Saxon"—was a sacred immemorial conjunction of names representing a fusion of racial elements not to be shaken asunder by a blast upon the ram's horn of a wandering Gaul. The assault was not altogether "Pickwickian"; but the Frenchman was a stout antagonist, and found an incidental confirmation of his theory in the occasional flash of Berserker rage which followed his masterly game of parry and thrust. Nor was he ill-equipped for his controversial work. From certain antiquities which he had found during his recent explorations in the North he inferred the existence of commercial relations between the Northmen of that period and the peoples of the Mediterranean Sea, Rome and Greece being at that time in direct communication with these seafaring peoples of the North. The tribes of Germania, on the contrary, were "a shipless people," and according to the Roman writers were still in an uncivilized state. He said there were settlements in Britain by the Northmen during the Roman occupation; that England was always called by the Northmen one of their Northern lands; that the language of the North and of England were similar in the early times; that the early Northern Kings claimed part of England as their own; that the Northmen were bold and enterprising navigators, pushing their explorations wherever a ship could survive the perils of the sea. On the contrary, neither the Saxons nor the Franks were a seafaring people, either at the time of Charlemagne or at any earlier period.
GENERAL GEORGE ROGERS CLARK.
It was this Scandinavian element which had infused a spirit of enterprise into the English race that they had never lost, and which had made it in all its branches, wherever they had sailed their fleets or pushed their invading columns, the invincible masters of earth and sea. Its resistless movement across the American continent, he declared, was the most dramatic spectacle in history.
This, in brief, was the Frenchman's startling theory; first broached in England on the borders of that rude North Sea which the Vikings had swept in early days, and upon the banks of the peaceful Tyne, where many a Scandinavian rover had moored his little barque. The discussion of M. Du Chaillu's paper took a wide range, all the distinguished ethnologists present—Dawkins, Taylor, Turner, Evans, Galton, and others—participating in this rattling ethnological debate. Du Chaillu, who had very much the attitude of a French suspect in a German camp, maintained throughout his Gallic aplomb, listening with admirable composure and with apparent interest, though his dark skin visibly reddened at times under the critical lash, however courteously applied. Canon Taylor, who evidently was in full sympathy with Du Chaillu's startling views, gave a happy turn to the little imbroglio by a cleverly parodied quotation from Tennyson's Welcome to the Sea-King's Daughter from over the Sea—
"For Saxon or Dane or Norman,
Teuton or Celt—or whatever we—
Saxon or Norse—it is nothing to me,
We are all of us one in our welcome of thee,"
the closing line being given with a politely sympathetic inclination of the head toward the gentleman from France, and with a gracious smile more expressive than his words—the smile interpreting to his hearers the startling disclaimer: "It is nothing to me." The clever ecclesiast read a very learned paper at the same meeting on a similar theme, and the two gentlemen who sat near him, Du Chaillu and Nansen, were ideal representatives of two of his four ethnological types, the Auvergnat type of Central France and the long-headed Scandinavian of the North. Indeed, as a matter for courteous rational discussion the question of "Saxon or Norse" had the profoundest interest for the amiable savant, who seemed to possess in perfection that fine philosophical quality of intellect which the French have happily termed justesse d'esprit—a quality of mind in which even the ablest disputant may sometimes be deficient.