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THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND.

LECTURES GIVEN IN OXFORD.

BY

JOHN RUSKIN, D.C.L., LL.D.,

HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, AND HONORARY FELLOW OF
CORPUS-CHRISTI COLLEGE.

DURING HIS

_SECOND TENURE OF THE SLADE PROFESSORSHIP._



NEW YORK: JOHN WILEY AND SONS. 1888.

       *       *       *       *       *



CONTENTS


LECTURE I.

THE PLEASURES OF LEARNING. _Bertha to Osburga_ 5


LECTURE II.

THE PLEASURES OF FAITH. _Alfred to the Confessor_ 31


LECTURE III.

THE PLEASURES OF DEED. _Alfred to Cœur de Lion_ 61


LECTURE IV.

THE PLEASURES OF FANCY. _Cœur de Lion to Elizabeth_ 91

       *       *       *       *       *




LECTURE I.

THE PLEASURES OF LEARNING.

_BERTHA TO OSBURGA._


In the short review of the present state of English Art, given you
last year, I left necessarily many points untouched, and others
unexplained. The seventh lecture, which I did not think it necessary
to read aloud, furnished you with some of the corrective statements
of which, whether spoken or not, it was extremely desirable that you
should estimate the balancing weight. These I propose in the present
course farther to illustrate, and to arrive with you at, I hope,
a just--you would not wish it to be a flattering--estimate of the
conditions of our English artistic life, past and present, in order
that with due allowance for them we may determine, with some security,
what those of us who have faculty ought to do, and those who have
sensibility, to admire.

2. In thus rightly doing and feeling, you will find summed a wider
duty, and granted a greater power, than the moral philosophy at this
moment current with you has ever conceived; and a prospect opened to
you besides, of such a Future for England as you may both hopefully
and proudly labour for with your hands, and those of you who are
spared to the ordinary term of human life, even see with your eyes,
when all this tumult of vain avarice and idle pleasure, into which
you have been plunged at birth, shall have passed into its appointed
perdition.

3. I wish that you would read for introduction to the lectures I have
this year arranged for you, that on the Future of England, which I
gave to the cadets at Woolwich in the first year of my Professorship
here, 1869; and which is now placed as the main conclusion of the
"Crown of Wild Olive": and with it, very attentively, the close of
my inaugural lecture given here; for the matter, no less than the
tenor of which, I was reproved by all my friends, as irrelevant and
ill-judged;--which, nevertheless, is of all the pieces of teaching I
have ever given from this chair, the most pregnant and essential to
whatever studies, whether of Art or Science, you may pursue, in this
place or elsewhere, during your lives.

The opening words of that passage I will take leave to read to you
again,--for they must still be the ground of whatever help I can give
you, worth your acceptance.

"There is a destiny now possible to us--the highest ever set before a
nation to be accepted or refused. We are still undegenerate in race:
a race mingled of the best northern blood. We are not yet dissolute in
temper, but still have the firmness to govern, and the grace to obey.
We have been taught a religion of pure mercy, which we must either now
finally betray, or learn to defend by fulfilling. And we are rich in
an inheritance of honour, bequeathed to us through a thousand years
of noble history, which it should be our daily thirst to increase with
splendid avarice; so that Englishmen, if it be a sin to covet honour,
should be the most offending souls alive. Within the last few years
we have had the laws of natural science opened to us with a rapidity
which has been blinding by its brightness; and means of transit and
communication given to us, which have made but one kingdom of the
habitable globe.

"One kingdom;--but who is to be its king? Is there to be no king in
it, think you, and every man to do that which is right in his own
eyes? Or only kings of terror, and the obscene empires of Mammon and
Belial? Or will you, youths of England, make your country again a
royal throne of kings; a sceptred isle; for all the world a source
of light, a centre of peace; mistress of Learning and of the
Arts;--faithful guardian of great memories in the midst of irreverent
and ephemeral visions--faithful servant of time-tried principles,
under temptation from fond experiments and licentious desires; and
amidst the cruel and clamorous jealousies of the nations, worshipped
in her strange valour, of goodwill towards men?"

The fifteen years that have passed since I spoke these words must, I
think, have convinced some of my immediate hearers that the need for
such an appeal was more pressing than they then imagined;--while they
have also more and more convinced me myself that the ground I took
for it was secure, and that the youths and girls now entering on the
duties of active life are able to accept and fulfil the hope I then
held out to them.

In which assurance I ask them to-day to begin the examination with
me, very earnestly, of the question laid before you in that seventh
of my last year's lectures, whether London, as it is now, be indeed
the natural, and therefore the heaven-appointed outgrowth of the
inhabitation, these 1800 years, of the valley of the Thames by a
progressively instructed and disciplined people; or if not, in what
measure and manner the aspect and spirit of the great city may be
possibly altered by your acts and thoughts.

In my introduction to the Economist of Xenophon I said that every
fairly educated European boy or girl ought to learn the history of
five cities,--Athens, Rome, Venice, Florence, and London; that of
London including, or at least compelling in parallel study, knowledge
also of the history of Paris.

A few words are enough to explain the reasons for this choice. The
history of Athens, rightly told, includes all that need be known of
Greek religion and arts; that of Rome, the victory of Christianity
over Paganism; those of Venice and Florence sum the essential facts
respecting the Christian arts of Painting, Sculpture, and Music;
and that of London, in her sisterhood with Paris, the development of
Christian Chivalry and Philosophy, with their exponent art of Gothic
architecture.

Without the presumption of forming a distinct design, I yet hoped at
the time when this division of study was suggested, with the help of
my pupils, to give the outlines of their several histories during
my work in Oxford. Variously disappointed and arrested, alike by
difficulties of investigation and failure of strength, I may yet hope
to lay down for you, beginning with your own metropolis, some of the
lines of thought in following out which such a task might be most
effectively accomplished.

You observe that I speak of architecture as the chief exponent of
the feelings both of the French and English races. Together with
it, however, most important evidence of character is given by the
illumination of manuscripts, and by some forms of jewellery and
metallurgy: and my purpose in this course of lectures is to illustrate
by all these arts the phases of national character which it is
impossible that historians should estimate, or even observe, with
accuracy, unless they are cognizant of excellence in the aforesaid
modes of structural and ornamental craftsmanship.

In one respect, as indicated by the title chosen for this course, I
have varied the treatment of their subject from that adopted in all
my former books. Hitherto, I have always endeavoured to illustrate the
personal temper and skill of the artist; holding the wishes or taste
of his spectators at small account, and saying of Turner you ought to
like him, and of Salvator, you ought not, etc., etc., without in the
least considering what the genius or instinct of the spectator might
otherwise demand, or approve. But in the now attempted sketch of
Christian history, I have approached every question from the people's
side, and examined the nature, not of the special faculties by which
the work was produced, but of the general instinct by which it was
asked for, and enjoyed. Therefore I thought the proper heading for
these papers should represent them as descriptive of the _Pleasures_
of England, rather than of its _Arts_.

And of these pleasures, necessarily, the leading one was that of
Learning, in the sense of receiving instruction;--a pleasure totally
separate from that of finding out things for yourself,--and an
extremely sweet and sacred pleasure, when you know how to seek it, and
receive.

On which I am the more disposed, and even compelled, here to insist,
because your modern ideas of Development imply that you must all
turn out what you are to be, and find out what you are to know, for
yourselves, by the inevitable operation of your anterior affinities
and inner consciences:--whereas the old idea of education was that the
baby material of you, however accidentally or inevitably born, was
at least to be by external force, and ancestral knowledge, bred; and
treated by its Fathers and Tutors as a plastic vase, to be shaped or
mannered as _they_ chose, not as _it_ chose, and filled, when its form
was well finished and baked, with sweetness of sound doctrine, as with
Hybla honey, or Arabian spikenard.

Without debating how far these two modes of acquiring
knowledge--finding out, and being told--may severally be good, and
in perfect instruction combined, I have to point out to you that,
broadly, Athens, Rome, and Florence are self-taught, and internally
developed; while all the Gothic races, without any exception, but
especially those of London and Paris, are afterwards taught by these;
and had, therefore, when they chose to accept it, the delight of being
instructed, without trouble or doubt, as fast as they could read or
imitate; and brought forward to the point where their own northern
instincts might wholesomely superimpose or graft some national ideas
upon these sound instructions. Read over what I said on this subject
in the third of my lectures last year (page 79), and simplify that
already brief statement further, by fastening in your mind Carlyle's
general symbol of the best attainments of northern religious
sculpture,--"three whalecubs combined by boiling," and reflecting that
the mental history of all northern European art is the modification
of that graceful type, under the orders of the Athena of Homer and
Phidias.

And this being quite indisputably the broad fact of the matter, I
greatly marvel that your historians never, so far as I have read,
think of proposing to you the question--what you might have made
of yourselves _without_ the help of Homer and Phidias: what sort of
beings the Saxon and the Celt, the Frank and the Dane, might have been
by this time, untouched by the spear of Pallas, unruled by the rod of
Agricola, and sincerely the native growth, pure of root, and ungrafted
in fruit of the clay of Isis, rock of Dovrefeldt, and sands of Elbe?
Think of it, and think chiefly what form the ideas, and images,
of your natural religion might probably have taken, if no Roman
missionary had ever passed the Alps in charity, and no English king in
pilgrimage.

I have been of late indebted more than I can express to the friend who
has honoured me by the dedication of his recently published lectures
on 'Older England;' and whose eager enthusiasm and far collected
learning have enabled me for the first time to assign their just
meaning and value to the ritual and imagery of Saxon devotion. But
while every page of Mr. Hodgett's book, and, I may gratefully say
also, every sentence of his teaching, has increased and justified the
respect in which I have always been by my own feeling disposed to
hold the mythologies founded on the love and knowledge of the natural
world, I have also been led by them to conceive, far more forcibly
than hitherto, the power which the story of Christianity possessed,
first heard through the wreaths of that cloudy superstition, in the
substitution, for its vaporescent allegory, of a positive and literal
account of a real Creation, and an instantly present, omnipresent, and
compassionate God.

Observe, there is no question whatever in examining this influence,
how far Christianity itself is true, or the transcendental doctrines
of it intelligible. Those who brought you the story of it believed it
with all their souls to be true,--and the effect of it on the hearts
of your ancestors was that of an unquestionable, infinitely lucid
message straight from God, doing away with all difficulties, grief,
and fears for those who willingly received it, nor by any, except
wilfully and obstinately vile persons, to be, by any possibility,
denied or refused.

And it was precisely, observe, the vivacity and joy with which the
main fact of Christ's life was accepted which gave the force and wrath
to the controversies instantly arising about its nature.

Those controversies vexed and shook, but never undermined, the faith
they strove to purify, and the miraculous presence, errorless precept,
and loving promises of their Lord were alike undoubted, alike rejoiced
in, by every nation that heard the word of Apostles. The Pelagian's
assertion that immortality could be won by man's will, and the
Arian's that Christ possessed no more than man's nature, never for
an instant--or in any country--hindered the advance of the moral law
and intellectual hope of Christianity. Far the contrary; the British
heresy concerning Free Will, though it brought bishop after bishop
into England to extinguish it, remained an extremely healthy and
active element in the British mind down to the days of John Bunyan
and the guide Great Heart, and the calmly Christian justice and simple
human virtue of Theodoric were the very roots and first burgeons
of the regeneration of Italy.[1] But of the degrees in which it was
possible for any barbarous nation to receive during the first five
centuries, either the spiritual power of Christianity itself, or
the instruction in classic art and science which accompanied it, you
cannot rightly judge, without taking the pains, and they will not, I
think, be irksome, of noticing carefully, and fixing permanently in
your minds, the separating characteristics of the greater races, both
in those who learned and those who taught.

[Footnote 1: Gibbon, in his 37th chapter, makes Ulphilas also an
Arian, but might have forborne, with grace, his own definition of
orthodoxy:--and you are to observe generally that at this time the
teachers who admitted the inferiority of Christ to the Father as
touching his Manhood, were often counted among Arians, but quite
falsely. Christ's own words, "My Father is greater than I," end that
controversy at once. Arianism consists not in asserting the subjection
of the Son to the Father, but in denying the subjected Divinity.]

Of the Huns and Vandals we need not speak. They are merely forms of
Punishment and Destruction. Put them out of your minds altogether, and
remember only the names of the immortal nations, which abide on their
native rocks, and plough their unconquered plains, at this hour.

Briefly, in the north,--Briton, Norman, Frank, Saxon, Ostrogoth,
Lombard; briefly, in the south,--Tuscan, Roman, Greek, Syrian,
Egyptian, Arabian.

Now of these races, the British (I avoid the word Celtic, because you
would expect me to say Keltic; and I don't mean to, lest you should
be wanting me next to call the patroness of music St. Kekilia), the
British, including Breton, Cornish, Welsh, Irish, Scot, and Pict, are,
I believe, of all the northern races, the one which has deepest love
of external nature;--and the richest inherent gift of pure music and
song, as such; separated from the intellectual gift which raises song
into poetry. They are naturally also religious, and for some centuries
after their own conversion are one of the chief evangelizing powers
in Christendom. But they are neither apprehensive nor receptive;--they
cannot understand the classic races, and learn scarcely anything from
them; perhaps better so, if the classic races had been more careful to
understand _them_.

Next, the Norman is scarcely more apprehensive than the Celt, but he
is more constructive, and uses to good advantage what he learns from
the Frank. His main characteristic is an energy, which never exhausts
itself in vain anger, desire, or sorrow, but abides and rules, like a
living rock:--where he wanders, he flows like lava, and congeals like
granite.

Next, I take in this first sketch the Saxon and Frank together, both
pre-eminently apprehensive, both docile exceedingly, imaginative in
the highest, but in life active more than pensive, eager in desire,
swift of invention, keenly sensitive to animal beauty, but with
difficulty rational, and rarely, for the future, wise. Under the
conclusive name of Ostrogoth, you may class whatever tribes are native
to Central Germany, and develope themselves, as time goes on, into
that power of the German Cæsars which still asserts itself as an
empire against the licence and insolence of modern republicanism,--of
which races, though this general name, no description can be given in
rapid terms.

And lastly, the Lombards, who, at the time we have to deal with, were
sternly indocile, gloomily imaginative,--of almost Norman energy,
and differing from all the other western nations chiefly in this
notable particular, that while the Celt is capable of bright wit and
happy play, and the Norman, Saxon, and Frank all alike delight in
caricature, the Lombards, like the Arabians, never jest.

These, briefly, are the six barbaric nations who are to be taught: and
of whose native arts and faculties, before they receive any tutorship
from the south, I find no well-sifted account in any history:--but
thus much of them, collecting your own thoughts and knowledge, you
may easily discern--they were all, with the exception of the Scots,
practical workers and builders in wood; and those of them who had
coasts, first rate sea-boat builders, with fine mathematical
instincts and practice in that kind far developed, necessarily good
sail-weaving, and sound fur-stitching, with stout iron-work of nail
and rivet; rich copper and some silver work in decoration--the Celts
developing peculiar gifts in linear design, but wholly incapable
of drawing animals or figures;--the Saxons and Franks having enough
capacity in that kind, but no thought of attempting it; the Normans
and Lombards still farther remote from any such skill. More and more,
it seems to me wonderful that under your British block-temple, grimly
extant on its pastoral plain, or beside the first crosses engraved on
the rock at Whithorn--you English and Scots do not oftener consider
what you might or could have come to, left to yourselves.

Next, let us form the list of your tutor nations, in whom, it
generally pleases you to look at nothing but the corruptions. If we
could get into the habit of thinking more of our own corruptions and
more of _their_ virtues, we should have a better chance of learning
the true laws alike of art and destiny. But, the safest way of all, is
to assure ourselves that true knowledge of any thing or any creature
is only of the good of it; that its nature and life are in that, and
that what is diseased,--that is to say, unnatural and mortal,--you
must cut away from it in contemplation, as you would in surgery.

Of the six tutor nations, two, the Tuscan and Arab, have no effect on
early Christian England. But the Roman, Greek, Syrian, and Egyptian
act together from the earliest times; you are to study the influence
of Rome upon England in Agricola, Constantius, St. Benedict, and
St. Gregory; of Greece upon England in the artists of Byzantium and
Ravenna; of Syria and Egypt upon England in St. Jerome, St. Augustine,
St. Chrysostom, and St. Athanase.

St. Jerome, in central Bethlehem; St. Augustine, Carthaginian by
birth, in truth a converted Tyrian, Athanase, Egyptian, symmetric
and fixed as an Egyptian aisle; Chrysostom, golden mouth of all;
these are, indeed, every one teachers of all the western world, but
St. Augustine especially of lay, as distinguished from monastic,
Christianity to the Franks, and finally to us. His rule, expanded into
the treatise of the City of God, is taken for guide of life and policy
by Charlemagne, and becomes certainly the fountain of Evangelical
Christianity, distinctively so called, (and broadly the lay
Christianity of Europe, since, in the purest form of it, that is
to say, the most merciful, charitable, variously applicable, kindly
wise.) The greatest type of it, as far as I know, St. Martin of Tours,
whose character is sketched, I think in the main rightly, in the Bible
of Amiens; and you may bind together your thoughts of its course
by remembering that Alcuin, born at York, dies in the Abbey of
St. Martin, at Tours; that as St. Augustine was in his writings
Charlemagne's Evangelist in faith, Alcuin was, in living presence,
his master in rhetoric, logic, and astronomy, with the other physical
sciences.

A hundred years later than St. Augustine, comes the rule of St.
Benedict--the Monastic rule, virtually, of European Christianity, ever
since--and theologically the Law of Works, as distinguished from the
Law of Faith. St. Augustine and all the disciples of St. Augustine
tell Christians what they should feel and think: St. Benedict and all
the disciples of St. Benedict tell Christians what they should say and
do.

In the briefest, but also the perfectest distinction, the disciples
of St. Augustine are those who open the door to Christ--"If any man
hear my voice"; but the Benedictines those to whom Christ opens the
door--"To him that knocketh it shall be opened."

Now, note broadly the course and action of this rule, as it combines
with the older one. St. Augustine's, accepted heartily by Clovis,
and, with various degrees of understanding, by the kings and queens
of the Merovingian dynasty, makes seemingly little difference in
their conduct, so that their profession of it remains a scandal to
Christianity to this day; and yet it lives, in the true hearts among
them, down from St. Clotilde to her great grand-daughter Bertha, who
in becoming Queen of Kent, builds under its chalk downs her own little
chapel to St. Martin, and is the first effectively and permanently
useful missionary to the Saxons, the beginner of English
Erudition,--the first laid corner stone of beautiful English
character.

I think henceforward you will find the memorandum of dates which I
have here set down for my own guidance more simply useful than those
confused by record of unimportant persons and inconsequent events,
which form the indices of common history.

From the year of the Saxon invasion 449, there are exactly 400 years
to the birth of Alfred, 849. You have no difficulty in remembering
those cardinal years. Then, you have Four great men and great events
to remember, at the close of the fifth century. Clovis, and the
founding of Frank Kingdom; Theodoric and the founding of the Gothic
Kingdom; Justinian and the founding of Civil law; St. Benedict and the
founding of Religious law.

Of, Justinian, and his work, I am not able myself to form any
opinion--and it is, I think, unnecessary for students of history to
form any, until they are able to estimate clearly the benefits, and
mischief, of the civil law of Europe in its present state. But to
Clovis, Theodoric, and St. Benedict, without any question, we owe more
than any English historian has yet ascribed,--and they are easily held
in mind together, for Clovis ascended the Frank throne in the year of
St. Benedict's birth, 481. Theodoric fought the battle of Verona, and
founded the Ostrogothic Kingdom in Italy twelve years later, in 493,
and thereupon married the sister of Clovis. That marriage is always
passed in a casual sentence, as if a merely political one, and while
page after page is spent in following the alternations of furious
crime and fatal chance, in the contests between Fredegonde and
Brunehaut, no historian ever considers whether the great Ostrogoth who
wore in the battle of Verona the dress which his mother had woven for
him, was likely to have chosen a wife without love!--or how far the
perfectness, justice, and temperate wisdom of every ordinance of his
reign was owing to the sympathy and counsel of his Frankish queen.

You have to recollect, then, thus far, only three cardinal dates:--

  449. Saxon invasion.
  481. Clovis reigns and St. Benedict is born.
  493. Theodoric conquers at Verona.

Then, roughly, a hundred years later, in 590, Ethelbert, the fifth
from Hengist, and Bertha, the third from Clotilde, are king and queen
of Kent. I cannot find the date of their marriage, but the date, 590,
which you must recollect for cardinal, is that of Gregory's accession
to the pontificate, and I believe Bertha was then in middle life,
having persevered in her religion firmly, but inoffensively, and
made herself beloved by her husband and people. She, in England,
Theodolinda in Lombardy, and St. Gregory in Rome:--in their hands,
virtually lay the destiny of Europe.

Then the period from Bertha to Osburga, 590 to 849--say 250 years--is
passed by the Saxon people in the daily more reverent learning of the
Christian faith, and daily more peaceful and skilful practice of the
humane arts and duties which it invented and inculcated.

The statement given by Sir Edward Creasy of the result of these 250
years of lesson is, with one correction, the most simple and just that
I can find.

"A few years before the close of the sixth century, the country was
little more than a wide battle-field, where gallant but rude warriors
fought with each other, or against the neighbouring Welsh or Scots;
unheeding and unheeded by the rest of Europe, or, if they attracted
casual attention, regarded with dread and disgust as the fiercest of
barbarians and the most untameable of pagans. In the eighth century,
England was looked up to with admiration and gratitude, as superior to
all the other countries of Western Europe in piety and learning, and
as the land whence the most zealous and successful saints and teachers
came forth to convert and enlighten the still barbarous regions of the
continent."

This statement is broadly true; yet the correction it needs is a very
important one. England,--under her first Alfred of Northumberland,
and under Ina of Wessex, is indeed during these centuries the most
learned, thoughtful, and progressive of European states. But she is
not a missionary power. The missionaries are always to her, not from
her:--for the very reason that she is learning so eagerly, she does
not take to preaching. Ina founds his Saxon school at Rome not to
teach Rome, nor convert the Pope, but to drink at the source of
knowledge, and to receive laws from direct and unquestioned authority.
The missionary power was wholly Scotch and Irish, and that power was
wholly one of zeal and faith, not of learning. I will ask you, in the
course of my next lecture, to regard it attentively; to-day, I must
rapidly draw to the conclusions I would leave with you.

It is more and more wonderful to me as I think of it, that no effect
whatever was produced on the Saxon, nor on any other healthy race
of the North, either by the luxury of Rome, or by her art, whether
constructive or imitative. The Saxon builds no aqueducts--designs
no roads, rounds no theatres in imitation of her,--envies none of
her vile pleasures,--admires, so far as I can judge, none of her
far-carried realistic art. I suppose that it needs intelligence of
a more advanced kind to see the qualities of complete sculpture: and
that we may think of the Northern intellect as still like that of a
child, who cares to picture its own thoughts in its own way, but does
not care for the thoughts of older people, or attempt to copy what it
feels too difficult. This much at least is certain, that for one cause
or another, everything that now at Paris or London our painters most
care for and try to realize, of ancient Rome, was utterly innocuous
and unattractive to the Saxon: while his mind was frankly open to
the direct teaching of Greece and to the methods of bright decoration
employed in the Byzantine Empire: for these alone seemed to his
fancy suggestive of the glories of the brighter world promised by
Christianity. Jewellery, vessels of gold and silver, beautifully
written books, and music, are the gifts of St. Gregory alike to the
Saxon and Lombard; all these beautiful things being used, not for the
pleasure of the present life, but as the symbols of another; while
the drawings in Saxon manuscripts, in which, better than in any other
remains of their life, we can read the people's character, are rapid
endeavours to express for themselves, and convey to others, some
likeness of the realities of sacred event in which they had been
instructed. They differ from every archaic school of former design
in this evident correspondence with an imagined reality. All previous
archaic art whatsoever is symbolic and decorative--not realistic. The
contest of Herakles with the Hydra on a Greek vase is a mere sign that
such a contest took place, not a picture of it, and in drawing that
sign the potter is always thinking of the effect of the engraved
lines on the curves of his pot, and taking care to keep out of the
way of the handle;--but a Saxon monk would scratch his idea of the
Fall of the angels or the Temptation of Christ over a whole page of
his manuscript in variously explanatory scenes, evidently full of
inexpressible vision, and eager to explain and illustrate all that he
felt or believed.

Of the progress and arrest of these gifts, I shall have to speak in my
next address; but I must regretfully conclude to-day with some brief
warning against the complacency which might lead you to regard them
as either at that time entirely original in the Saxon race, or at the
present day as signally characteristic of it. That form of complacency
is exhibited in its most amiable but, therefore, most deceptive guise,
in the passage with which the late Dean of Westminster concluded his
lecture at Canterbury in April, 1854, on the subject of the landing of
Augustine. I will not spoil the emphasis of the passage by comment as
I read, but must take leave afterwards to intimate some grounds for
abatement in the fervour of its self-gratulatory ecstasy.

"Let any one sit on the hill of the little church of St. Martin, and
look on the view which is there spread before his eyes. Immediately
below are the towers of the great abbey of St. Augustine, where
Christian learning and civilization first struck root in the
Anglo-Saxon race; and within which now, after a lapse of many
centuries, a new institution has arisen, intended to carry far and
wide, to countries of which Gregory and Augustine never heard, the
blessings which they gave to us. Carry your view on--and there
rises high above all the magnificent pile of our cathedral, equal
in splendour and state to any, the noblest temple or church that
Augustine could have seen in ancient Rome, rising on the very ground
which derives its consecration from him. And still more than the
grandeur of the outward buildings that rose from the little church
of Augustine and the little palace of Ethelbert have been the
institutions of all kinds of which these were the earliest cradle.
From Canterbury, the first English Christian city,--from Kent, the
first English Christian kingdom--has by degrees arisen the whole
constitution of Church and State in England which now binds together
the whole British Empire. And from the Christianity here established
in England has flowed, by direct consequence, first the Christianity
of Germany; then, after a long interval, of North America; and lastly,
we may trust, in time, of all India and all Australasia. The view from
St. Martin's Church is indeed one of the most inspiriting that can be
found in the world; there is none to which I would more willingly take
any one who doubted whether a small beginning could lead to a great
and lasting good;--none which carries us more vividly back into the
past, or more hopefully forward into the future."

To this Gregorian canticle in praise of the British constitution,
I grieve, but am compelled, to take these following historical
objections. The first missionary to Germany was Ulphilas, and what she
owes to these islands she owes to Iona, not to Thanet. Our missionary
offices to America as to Africa, consist I believe principally in
the stealing of land, and the extermination of its proprietors by
intoxication. Our rule in India has introduced there, Paisley instead
of Cashmere shawls: in Australasia our Christian aid supplies, I
suppose, the pious farmer with convict labour. And although, when
the Dean wrote the above passage, St. Augustine's and the cathedral
were--I take it on trust from his description--the principal
objects in the prospect from St. Martin's Hill, I believe even the
cheerfullest of my audience would not now think the scene one of
the most inspiriting in the world. For recent progress has entirely
accommodated the architecture of the scene to the convenience of the
missionary workers above enumerated; to the peculiar necessities
of the civilization they have achieved. For the sake of which the
cathedral, the monastery, the temple, and the tomb, of Bertha,
contract themselves in distant or despised subservience under the
colossal walls of the county gaol.




LECTURE II.

THE PLEASURES OF FAITH.

_ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR._


I was forced in my last lecture to pass by altogether, and to-day
can only with momentary definition notice, the part taken by Scottish
missionaries in the Christianizing of England and Burgundy. I would
pray you therefore, in order to fill the gap which I think it better
to leave distinctly, than close confusedly, to read the histories of
St. Patrick, St. Columba, and St. Columban, as they are given you by
Montalembert in his 'Moines d'Occident.' You will find in his pages
all the essential facts that are known, encircled with a nimbus of
enthusiastic sympathy which I hope you will like better to see them
through, than distorted by blackening fog of contemptuous rationalism.
But although I ask you thus to make yourselves aware of the greatness
of my omission, I must also certify you that it does not break the
unity of our own immediate subject. The influence of Celtic passion
and art both on Northumbria and the Continent, beneficent in all
respects while it lasted, expired without any permanent share in the
work or emotion of the Saxon and Frank. The book of Kells, and the
bell of St. Patrick, represent sufficiently the peculiar character
of Celtic design; and long since, in the first lecture of the 'Two
Paths,' I explained both the modes of skill, and points of weakness,
which rendered such design unprogressive. Perfect in its peculiar
manner, and exulting in the faultless practice of a narrow skill, it
remained century after century incapable alike of inner growth, or
foreign instruction; inimitable, yet incorrigible; marvellous, yet
despicable, to its death. Despicable, I mean, only in the limitation
of its capacity, not in its quality or nature. If you make a
Christian of a lamb or a squirrel--what can you expect of the lamb
but jumping--what of the squirrel, but pretty spirals, traced with
his tail? He won't steal your nuts any more, and he'll say his prayers
like this--[2]; but you cannot make a Beatrice's griffin, and emblem
of all the Catholic Church, out of him.

[Footnote 2: Making a sign.]

You will have observed, also, that the plan of these lectures does
not include any reference to the Roman Period in England; of which
you will find all I think necessary to say, in the part called _Valle
Crucis_ of 'Our Fathers have told us.' But I must here warn you, with
reference to it, of one gravely false prejudice of Montalembert. He is
entirely blind to the conditions of Roman virtue, which existed in the
midst of the corruptions of the Empire, forming the characters of such
Emperors as Pertinax, Carus, Probus, the second Claudius, Aurelian,
and our own Constantius; and he denies, with abusive violence, the
power for good, of Roman Law, over the Gauls and Britons.

Respecting Roman national character, I will simply beg you to
remember, that both St. Benedict and St. Gregory are Roman patricians,
before they are either monk or pope; respecting its influence on
Britain, I think you may rest content with Shakespeare's estimate of
it. Both Lear and Cymbeline belong to this time, so difficult to our
apprehension, when the Briton accepted both Roman laws and Roman gods.
There is indeed the born Kentish gentleman's protest against them in
Kent's--

            "Now, by Apollo, king,
  Thou swear'st thy gods in vain";

but both Cordelia and Imogen are just as thoroughly Roman ladies, as
Virgilia or Calphurnia.

Of British Christianity and the Arthurian Legends, I shall have a word
or two to say in my lecture on "Fancy," in connection with the similar
romance which surrounds Theodoric and Charlemagne: only the worst of
it is, that while both Dietrich and Karl are themselves more wonderful
than the legends of them, Arthur fades into intangible vision:--this
much, however, remains to this day, of Arthurian blood in us, that
the richest fighting element in the British army and navy is British
native,--that is to say, Highlander, Irish, Welsh, and Cornish.

Content, therefore, (means being now given you for filling gaps,)
with the estimates given you in the preceding lecture of the sources
of instruction possessed by the Saxon capital, I pursue to-day our
question originally proposed, what London might have been by this
time, if the nature of the flowers, trees, and children, born at the
Thames-side, had been rightly understood and cultivated.

Many of my hearers can imagine far better than I, the look that London
must have had in Alfred's and Canute's days.[3] I have not, indeed,
the least idea myself what its buildings were like, but certainly
the groups of its shipping must have been superb; small, but
entirely seaworthy vessels, manned by the best seamen in the then
world. Of course, now, at Chatham and Portsmouth we have our
ironclads,--extremely beautiful and beautifully manageable things, no
doubt--to set against this Saxon and Danish shipping; but the Saxon
war-ships lay here at London shore--bright with banner and shield
and dragon prow,--instead of these you may be happier, but are not
handsomer, in having, now, the coal-barge, the penny steamer, and the
wherry full of shop boys and girls. I dwell however for a moment only
on the naval aspect of the tidal waters in the days of Alfred, because
I can refer you for all detail on this part of our subject to the
wonderful opening chapter of Dean Stanley's History of Westminster
Abbey, where you will find the origin of the name of London given as
"The City of Ships." He does not, however, tell you, that there were
built, then and there, the biggest war-ships in the world. I have
often said to friends who praised my own books that I would rather
have written that chapter than any one of them; yet if I _had_ been
able to write the historical part of it, the conclusions drawn would
have been extremely different. The Dean indeed describes with a
poet's joy the River of wells, which rose from those "once consecrated
springs which now lie choked in Holywell and Clerkenwell, and the
rivulet of Ulebrig which crossed the Strand under the Ivy bridge";
but it is only in the spirit of a modern citizen of Belgravia that he
exults in the fact that "the great arteries of our crowded streets,
the vast sewers which cleanse our habitations, are fed by the
life-blood of those old and living streams; that underneath our tread
the Tyburn, and the Holborn, and the Fleet, and the Wall Brook, are
still pursuing their ceaseless course, still ministering to the good
of man, though in a far different fashion than when Druids drank
of their sacred springs, and Saxons were baptized in their rushing
waters, ages ago."

[Footnote 3: Here Alfred's Silver Penny was shown and commented on,
thus:--Of what London was like in the days of faith, I can show you
one piece of artistic evidence. It is Alfred's silver penny struck in
London mint. The character of a coinage is quite conclusive evidence
in national history, and there is no great empire in progress, but
tells its story in beautiful coins. Here in Alfred's penny, a round
coin with L.O.N.D.I.N.I.A. struck on it, you have just the same
beauty of design, the same enigmatical arrangement of letters, as in
the early inscription, which it is "the pride of my life" to have
discovered at Venice. This inscription ("the first words that Venice
ever speaks aloud") is, it will be remembered, on the Church of St.
Giacomo di Rialto, and runs, being interpreted--"Around this temple,
let the merchant's law be just, his weights true, and his covenants
faithful."]

Whatever sympathy you may feel with these eloquent expressions of that
entire complacency in the present, past, and future, which peculiarly
animates Dean Stanley's writings, I must, in this case, pray you
to observe that the transmutation of holy wells into sewers has,
at least, destroyed the charm and utility of the Thames as a salmon
stream, and I must ask you to read with attention the succeeding
portions of the chapter which record the legends of the river
fisheries in their relation to the first Abbey of Westminster;
dedicated by its builders to St. Peter, not merely in his office of
cornerstone of the Church, nor even figuratively as a fisher of men,
but directly as a fisher of fish:--and which maintained themselves,
you will see, in actual ceremony down to 1382, when a fisherman still
annually took his place beside the Prior, after having brought in a
salmon for St. Peter, which was carried in state down the middle of
the refectory.

But as I refer to this page for the exact word, my eye is caught by
one of the sentences of Londonian[4] thought which constantly pervert
the well-meant books of pious England. "We see also," says the Dean,
"the union of innocent fiction with worldly craft, which marks so
many of the legends both of Pagan and Christian times." I might simply
reply to this insinuation that times which have no legends differ
from the legendary ones merely by uniting guilty, instead of innocent,
fiction, with worldly craft; but I must farther advise you that the
legends of these passionate times are in no wise, and in no sense,
fiction at all; but the true record of impressions made on the minds
of persons in a state of eager spiritual excitement, brought into
bright focus by acting steadily and frankly under its impulses. I
could tell you a great deal more about such things than you would
believe, and therefore, a great deal more than it would do you the
least good to hear;--but this much any who care to use their common
sense modestly, cannot but admit, that unless they choose to try the
rough life of the Christian ages, they cannot understand its practical
consequences. You have all been taught by Lord Macaulay and his school
that because you have Carpets instead of rushes for your feet; and
Feather-beds instead of fern for your backs; and Kickshaws instead
of beef for your eating; and Drains instead of Holy Wells for your
drinking;--that, therefore, you are the Cream of Creation, and
every one of you a seven-headed Solomon. Stay in those pleasant
circumstances and convictions if you please; but don't accuse your
roughly bred and fed fathers of telling lies about the aspect the
earth and sky bore to _them_,--till you have trodden the earth as
they, barefoot, and seen the heavens as they, face to face. If you
care to see and to know for yourselves, you may do it with little
pains; you need not do any great thing, you needn't keep one eye open
and the other shut for ten years over a microscope, nor fight your way
through icebergs and darkness to knowledge of the _celestial_ pole.
Simply, do as much as king after king of the Saxons did,--put rough
shoes on your feet and a rough cloak on your shoulders, and walk to
Rome and back. Sleep by the roadside, when it is fine,--in the first
outhouse you can find, when it is wet; and live on bread and water,
with an onion or two, all the way; and if the experiences which you
will have to relate on your return do not, as may well be, deserve the
name of spiritual; at all events you will not be disposed to let other
people regard them either as Poetry or Fiction.

[Footnote 4: Not _Londinian_.]

With this warning, presently to be at greater length insisted on,
I trace for you, in Dean Stanley's words, which cannot be bettered
except in the collection of their more earnest passages from among
his interludes of graceful but dangerous qualification,--I trace, with
only such omission, the story he has told us of the foundation of that
Abbey, which, he tells you, was the Mother of London, and has ever
been the shrine and the throne of English faith and truth.

"The gradual formation of a monastic body, indicated in the charters
of Offa and Edgar, marks the spread of the Benedictine order
throughout England, under the influence of Dunstan. The 'terror' of
the spot, which had still been its chief characteristic in the charter
of the wild Offa, had, in the days of the more peaceful Edgar, given
way to a dubious 'renown.' Twelve monks is the number traditionally
said to have been established by Dunstan. A few acres further up the
river formed their chief property, and their monastic character was
sufficiently recognized to have given to the old locality of the
'terrible place' the name of the 'Western Monastery,' or 'Minster of
the West.'"

The Benedictines then--twelve Benedictine monks--thus begin the
building of existent Christian London. You know I told you the
Benedictines are the Doing people, as the disciples of St. Augustine
the Sentimental people. The Benedictines find no terror in their
own thoughts--face the terror of places--change it into beauty of
places,--make this terrible place, a Motherly Place--Mother of London.

This first Westminster, however, the Dean goes on to say, "seems to
have been overrun by the Danes," and it would have had no further
history but for the combination of circumstances which directed hither
the notice of Edward the Confessor.

I haven't time to read you all the combination of circumstances. The
last clinching circumstance was this--

"There was in the neighbourhood of Worcester, 'far from men in the
wilderness, on the slope of a wood, in a cave deep down in the grey
rock,' a holy hermit 'of great age, living on fruits and roots.' One
night when, after reading in the Scriptures 'how hard are the pains of
hell, and how the enduring life of Heaven is sweet and to be desired,'
he could neither sleep nor repose, St. Peter appeared to him,
'bright and beautiful, like to a clerk,' and warned him to tell the
King that he was released from his vow; that on that very day his
messengers would return from Rome;" (that is the combination of
circumstances--bringing Pope's order to build a church to release
the King from his vow of pilgrimage); "that 'at Thorney, two leagues
from the city,' was the spot marked out where, in an ancient church,
'situated low,' he was to establish a perfect Benedictine monastery,
which should be 'the gate of heaven, the ladder of prayer, whence
those who serve St. Peter there, shall by him be admitted into
Paradise.' The hermit writes the account of the vision on parchment,
seals it with wax, and brings it to the King, who compares it with the
answer of the messengers, just arrived from Rome, and determines on
carrying out the design as the Apostle had ordered.

"The ancient church, 'situated low,' indicated in this vision the
one whose attached monastery had been destroyed by the Danes, but its
little church remained, and was already dear to the Confessor, not
only from the lovely tradition of its dedication by the spirit of St.
Peter;" (you must read that for yourselves;) "but also because of two
miracles happening there to the King himself.

"The first was the cure of a cripple, who sat in the road between
the Palace and 'the Chapel of St. Peter,' which was 'near,' and who
explained to the Chamberlain Hugolin that, after six pilgrimages to
Rome in vain, St. Peter had promised his cure if the King would, on
his own royal neck, carry him to the Monastery. The King immediately
consented; and, amidst the scoffs of the court, bore the poor man to
the steps of the High Altar. There the cripple was received by Godric
the sacristan, and walked away on his own restored feet, hanging his
stool on the wall for a trophy.

"Before that same High Altar was also believed to have been seen
one of the Eucharistical portents, so frequent in the Middle Ages. A
child, 'pure and bright like a spirit,' appeared to the King in the
sacramental elements. Leofric, Earl of Mercia, who, with his famous
countess, Godiva, was present, saw it also.

"Such as these were the motives of Edward. Under their influence
was fixed what has ever since been the local centre of the English
monarchy."

"Such as these were the _motives_ of Edward," says the Dean. Yes,
certainly; but such as these also, first, were the acts and visions
of Edward. Take care that you don't slip away, by the help of the
glycerine of the word "motives," into fancying that all these tales
are only the after colours and pictorial metaphors of sentimental
piety. They are either plain truth or black lies; take your
choice,--but don't tickle and treat yourselves with the prettiness or
the grotesqueness of them, as if they were Anderssen's fairy tales.
Either the King did carry the beggar on his back, or he didn't; either
Godiva rode through Coventry, or she didn't; either the Earl Leofric
saw the vision of the bright child at the altar--or he lied like a
knave. Judge, as you will; but do not Doubt.

"The Abbey was fifteen years in building. The King spent upon it
one-tenth of the property of the kingdom. It was to be a marvel of
its kind. As in its origin it bore the traces of the fantastic and
childish" (I must pause, to ask you to substitute for these blameful
terms, 'fantastic and childish,' the better ones of 'imaginative and
pure') "character of the King and of the age; in its architecture
it bore the stamp of the peculiar position which Edward occupied in
English history between Saxon and Norman. By birth he was a Saxon, but
in all else he was a foreigner. Accordingly the Church at Westminster
was a wide-sweeping innovation on all that had been seen before.
'Destroying the old building,' he says in his charter, 'I have built
up a new one from the very foundation.' Its fame as a 'new style of
composition' lingered in the minds of men for generations. It was the
first cruciform church in England, from which all the rest of like
shape were copied--an expression of the increasing hold which, in the
tenth century, the idea of the Crucifixion had laid on the imagination
of Europe. The massive roof and pillars formed a contrast with the
rude wooden rafters and beams of the common Saxon churches. Its very
size--occupying, as it did, almost the whole area of the present
building--was in itself portentous. The deep foundations, of large
square blocks of grey stone, were duly laid; the east end was rounded
into an apse; a tower rose in the centre, crowned by a cupola of wood.
At the western end were erected two smaller towers, with five large
bells. The hard strong stones were richly sculptured; the windows
were filled with stained glass; the roof was covered with lead. The
cloisters, chapter-house, refectory, dormitory, the infirmary, with
its spacious chapel, if not completed by Edward, were all begun, and
finished in the next generation on the same plan. This structure,
venerable as it would be if it had lasted to our time, has almost
entirely vanished. Possibly one vast dark arch in the southern
transept, certainly the substructures of the dormitory, with their
huge pillars, 'grand and regal at the bases and capitals,' the
massive, low-browed passage leading from the great cloister to Little
Dean's Yard, and some portions of the refectory and of the infirmary
chapel, remain as specimens of the work which astonished the last age
of the Anglo-Saxon and the first age of the Norman monarchy."

Hitherto I have read to you with only supplemental comment. But in
the next following passage, with which I close my series of extracts,
sentence after sentence occurs, at which as I read, I must raise my
hand, to mark it for following deprecation, or denial.

"In the centre of Westminster Abbey thus lies its Founder, and such is
the story of its foundation. Even apart from the legendary elements
in which it is involved, it is impossible not to be struck by the
fantastic character of all its circumstances. We seem to be in a world
of poetry." (I protest, No.) "Edward is four centuries later than
Ethelbert and Augustine; but the origin of Canterbury is commonplace
and prosaic compared with the origin of Westminster." (Yes, that's
true.) "We can hardly imagine a figure more incongruous to the
soberness of later times than the quaint, irresolute, wayward prince
whose chief characteristics have just been described. His titles of
Confessor and Saint belong not to the general instincts of Christendom
but to the most transitory feelings of the age." (I protest, No.) "His
opinions, his prevailing motives, were such as in no part of modern
Europe would now be shared by any educated teacher or ruler." (That's
true enough.) "But in spite of these irreconcilable differences,
there was a solid ground for the charm which he exercised over his
contemporaries. His childish and eccentric fancies have passed away;"
(I protest, No;) "but his innocent faith and his sympathy with his
people are qualities which, even in our altered times, may still
retain their place in the economy of the world. Westminster Abbey,
so we hear it said, sometimes with a cynical sneer, sometimes with
a timorous scruple, has admitted within its walls many who have been
great without being good, noble with a nobleness of the earth earthy,
worldly with the wisdom of this world. But it is a counterbalancing
reflection, that the central tomb, round which all those famous names
have clustered, contains the ashes of one who, weak and erring as he
was, rests his claims of interment here, not on any act of power or
fame, but only on his artless piety and simple goodness. He, towards
whose dust was attracted the fierce Norman, and the proud Plantagenet,
and the grasping Tudor, and the fickle Stuart, even the Independent
Oliver, the Dutch William, and the Hanoverian George, was one whose
humble graces are within the reach of every man, woman, and child
of every time, if we rightly part the immortal substance from the
perishable form."

Now I have read you these passages from Dean Stanley as the most
accurately investigatory, the most generously sympathetic, the most
reverently acceptant account of these days, and their people, which
you can yet find in any English history. But consider now, point by
point, where it leaves you. You are told, first, that you are living
in an age of poetry. But the days of poetry are those of Shakespeare
and Milton, not of Bede: nay, for their especial wealth in melodious
theology and beautifully rhythmic and pathetic meditation, perhaps
the days which have given us 'Hiawatha,' 'In Memoriam,' 'The Christian
Year,' and the 'Soul's Diary' of George Macdonald, may be not with
disgrace compared with those of Caedmon. And nothing can be farther
different from the temper, nothing less conscious of the effort, of a
poet, than any finally authentic document to which you can be referred
for the relation of a Saxon miracle.

I will read you, for a perfectly typical example, an account of one
from Bede's 'Life of St. Cuthbert,' The passage is a favourite one of
my own, but I do not in the least anticipate its producing upon you
the solemnizing effect which I think I could command from reading,
instead, a piece of 'Marmion,' 'Manfred,' or 'Childe Harold.'

... "He had one day left his cell to give advice to some visitors; and
when he had finished, he said to them, 'I must now go in again, but do
you, as you are inclined to depart, first take food; and when you have
cooked and eaten that goose which is hanging on the wall, go on board
your vessel in God's name and return home.' He then uttered a prayer,
and, having blessed them, went in. But they, as he had bidden them,
took some food; but having enough provisions of their own, which they
had brought with them, they did not touch the goose.

"But when they had refreshed themselves they tried to go on board
their vessel, but a sudden storm utterly prevented them from putting
to sea. They were thus detained seven days in the island by the
roughness of the waves, and yet they could not call to mind what fault
they had committed. They therefore returned to have an interview with
the holy father, and to lament to him their detention. He exhorted
them to be patient, and on the seventh day came out to console their
sorrow, and to give them pious exhortations. When, however, he had
entered the house in which they were stopping, and saw that the goose
was not eaten, he reproved their disobedience with mild countenance
and in gentle language: 'Have you not left the goose still hanging
in its place? What wonder is it that the storm has prevented your
departure? Put it immediately into the caldron, and boil and eat it,
that the sea may become tranquil, and you may return home.'

"They immediately did as he commanded; and it happened most
wonderfully that the moment the kettle began to boil the wind began
to cease, and the waves to be still Having finished their repast, and
seeing that the sea was calm, they went on board, and to their great
delight, though with shame for their neglect, reached home with a fair
wind. Now this, as I have related, I did not pick up from any chance
authority, but I had it from one of those who were present, a most
reverend monk and priest of the same monastery, Cynemund, who still
lives, known to many in the neighbourhood for his years and the purity
of his life."

       *       *       *       *       *

I hope that the memory of this story, which, thinking it myself
an extremely pretty one, I have given you, not only for a type of
sincerity and simplicity, but for an illustration of obedience, may
at all events quit you, for good and all, of the notion that the
believers and witnesses of miracle were poetical persons. Saying
no more on the head of that allegation, I proceed to the Dean's
second one, which I cannot but interpret as also intended to be
injurious,--that they were artless and childish ones; and that because
of this rudeness and puerility, their motives and opinions would not
be shared by any statesmen of the present day.

It is perfectly true that Edward the Confessor was himself in many
respects of really childish temperament; not therefore, perhaps, as I
before suggested to you, less venerable. But the age of which we are
examining the progress, was by no means represented or governed by
men of similar disposition. It was eminently productive of--it was
altogether governed, guided, and instructed by--men of the widest and
most brilliant faculties, whether constructive or speculative, that
the world till then had seen; men whose acts became the romance, whose
thoughts the wisdom, and whose arts the treasure, of a thousand years
of futurity.

I warned you at the close of last lecture against the too agreeable
vanity of supposing that the Evangelization of the world began at St.
Martin's, Canterbury. Again and again you will indeed find the stream
of the Gospel contracting itself into narrow channels, and appearing,
after long-concealed filtration, through veins of unmeasured rock,
with the bright resilience of a mountain spring. But you will find it
the only candid, and therefore the only wise, way of research, to look
in each era of Christendom for the minds of culminating power in all
its brotherhood of nations; and, careless of local impulse, momentary
zeal, picturesque incident, or vaunted miracle, to fasten your
attention upon the force of character in the men, whom, over each
newly-converted race, Heaven visibly sets for its shepherds and kings,
to bring forth judgment unto victory. Of these I will name to you, as
messengers of God and masters of men, five monks and five kings; in
whose arms during the range of swiftly gainful centuries which we are
following, the life of the world lay as a nursling babe. Remember,
in their successive order,--of monks, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, St.
Martin, St. Benedict, and St. Gregory; of kings,--and your national
vanity may be surely enough appeased in recognizing two of them for
Saxon,--Theodoric, Charlemagne, Alfred, Canute, and the Confessor. I
will read three passages to you, out of the literal words of three
of these ten men, without saying whose they are, that you may compare
them with the best and most exalted you have read expressing the
philosophy, the religion, and the policy of to-day,--from which I
admit, with Dean Stanley, but with a far different meaning from his,
that they are indeed separate for evermore. I give you first, for an
example of Philosophy, a single sentence, containing all--so far as I
can myself discern--that it is possible for us to know, or well for us
to believe, respecting the world and its laws.


"OF GOD'S UNIVERSAL PROVIDENCE, RULING ALL, AND COMPRISING ALL.

"Wherefore the great and mighty God; He that made man a reasonable
creature of soul and body, and He that did neither let him pass
unpunished for his sin, nor yet excluded him from mercy; He that gave,
both unto good and bad, essence with the stones, power of production
with the trees, senses with the beasts of the field, and understanding
with the angels; He from whom is all being, beauty, form, and number,
weight, and measure; He from whom all nature, mean and excellent,
all seeds of form, all forms of seed, all motion, both of forms and
seeds, derive and have being; He that gave flesh the original beauty,
strength, propagation, form and shape, health and symmetry; He
that gave the unreasonable soul, sense, memory, and appetite; the
reasonable, besides these, fantasy, understanding, and will; He,
I say, having left neither heaven, nor earth, nor angel, nor man,
no, nor the most base and contemptible creature, neither the bird's
feather, nor the herb's flower, nor the tree's leaf, without the true
harmony of their parts, and peaceful concord of composition:--It is
in no way credible that He would leave the kingdoms of men and their
bondages and freedom loose and uncomprised in the laws of His eternal
providence."[5]

[Footnote 5: From St. Augustine's 'Citie of God,' Book V., ch. xi.
(English trans., printed by George Eld, 1610.)]

This for the philosophy.[6] Next, I take for example of the Religion
of our ancestors, a prayer, personally and passionately offered to the
Deity conceived as you have this moment heard.

[Footnote 6: Here one of the "Stones of Westminster" was shown and
commented on.]

"O Thou who art the Father of that Son which has awakened us, and
yet urgeth us out of the sleep of our sins, and exhorteth us that we
become Thine;" (note you that, for apprehension of what Redemption
means, against your base and cowardly modern notion of 'scaping
whipping. Not to take away the Punishment of Sin, but by His
Resurrection to raise us out of the sleep of sin itself! Compare the
legend at the feet of the Lion of the Tribe of Judah in the golden
Gospel of Charles le Chauve[7]:--

  "HIC LEO SURGENDO PORTAS CONFREGIT AVERNI
  QUI NUNQUAM DORMIT, NUSQUAM DORMITAT IN ÆVUM;")

"to Thee, Lord, I pray, who art the supreme truth; for all the truth
that is, is truth from Thee. Thee I implore, O Lord, who art the
highest wisdom. Through Thee are wise all those that are so. Thou art
the true life, and through Thee are living all those that are so. Thou
art the supreme felicity, and from Thee all have become happy that
are so. Thou art the highest good, and from Thee all beauty springs.
Thou art the intellectual light, and from Thee man derives his
understanding.

[Footnote 7: At Munich: the leaf has been exquisitely drawn and legend
communicated to me by Professor Westwood. It is written in gold on
purple.]

"To Thee, O God, I call and speak. Hear, O hear me, Lord! for Thou art
my God and my Lord; my Father and my Creator; my ruler and my hope; my
wealth and my honour my house, my country, my salvation, and my life!
Hear, hear me, O Lord! Few of Thy servants comprehend Thee. But Thee
alone I _love_,[8] indeed, above all other things. Thee I seek: Thee
I will follow: Thee I am ready to serve. Under Thy power I desire to
abide, for Thou alone art the Sovereign of all. I pray Thee to command
me as Thou wilt."

[Footnote 8: Meaning--not that he is of those few, but that, without
comprehending, at least, as a dog, he can love.]

You see this prayer is simply the expansion of that clause of the
Lord's Prayer which most men eagerly omit from it,--_Fiat voluntas
tua_. In being so, it sums the Christian prayer of all ages. See now,
in the third place, how far this king's letter I am going to read to
you sums also Christian Policy.

    "Wherefore I render high thanks to Almighty God, for the happy
    accomplishment of all the desires which I have set before me,
    and for the satisfying of my every wish.

    "Now therefore, be it known to you all, that to Almighty God
    Himself I have, on my knees, devoted my life, to the end that
    in all things I may do justice, and with justice and rightness
    rule the kingdoms and peoples under me; throughout everything
    preserving an impartial judgment. If, heretofore, I have,
    through being, as young men are, impulsive or careless, done
    anything unjust, I mean, with God's help, to lose no time
    in remedying my fault. To which end I call to witness my
    counsellors, to whom I have entrusted the counsels of the
    kingdom, and I charge them that by no means, be it through
    fear of me, or the favour of any other powerful personage, to
    consent to any injustice, or to suffer any to shoot out in any
    part of my kingdom. I charge all my viscounts and those set
    over my whole kingdom, as they wish to keep my friendship or
    their own safety, to use no unjust force to any man, rich or
    poor; let all men, noble and not noble, rich and poor alike,
    be able to obtain their rights under the law's justice; and
    from that law let there be no deviation, either to favour the
    king or any powerful person, nor to raise money for me. I have
    no need of money raised by what is unfair. I also would have
    you know that I go now to make peace and firm treaty by the
    counsels of all my subjects, with those nations and people who
    wished, had it been possible for them to do so, which it was
    not, to deprive us alike of kingdom and of life. God brought
    down their strength to nought: and may He of His benign love
    preserve us on our throne and in honour. Lastly, when I have
    made peace with the neighbouring nations, and settled and
    pacified all my dominions in the East, so that we may nowhere
    have any war or enmity to fear, I mean to come to England this
    summer, as soon as I can fit out vessels to sail. My reason,
    however, in sending this letter first is to let all the people
    of my kingdom share in the joy of my welfare: for as you
    yourselves know, I have never spared myself or my labour; nor
    will I ever do so, where my people are really in want of some
    good that I can do them."

What think you now, in candour and honour, you youth of the latter
days,--what think you of these types of the thought, devotion, and
government, which not in words, but pregnant and perpetual fact,
animated these which you have been accustomed to call the Dark Ages?

The Philosophy is Augustine's; the Prayer Alfred's; and the Letter
Canute's.

And, whatever you may feel respecting the beauty or wisdom of these
sayings, be assured of one thing above all, that they are sincere; and
of another, less often observed, that they are joyful.

Be assured, in the first place, that they are sincere, The ideas of
diplomacy and priestcraft are of recent times. No false knight or
lying priest ever prospered, I believe, in any age, but certainly
not in the dark ones. Men prospered then, only in following
openly-declared purposes, and preaching candidly beloved and trusted
creeds.

And that they did so prosper, in the degree in which they accepted
and proclaimed the Christian Gospel, may be seen by any of you in your
historical reading, however partial, if only you will admit the idea
that it could be so, and was likely to be so. You are all of you in
the habit of supposing that temporal prosperity is owing either to
worldly chance or to worldly prudence; and is never granted in any
visible relation to states of religious temper. Put that treacherous
doubt away from you, with disdain; take for basis of reasoning
the noble postulate, that the elements of Christian faith are
sound,--instead of the base one, that they are deceptive; reread the
great story of the world in that light, and see what a vividly real,
yet miraculous tenor, it will then bear to you.

Their faith then, I tell you first, was sincere; I tell you secondly
that it was, in a degree few of us can now conceive, joyful. We
continually hear of the trials, sometimes of the victories, of
Faith,--but scarcely ever of its pleasures. Whereas, at this time,
you will find that the chief delight of all good men was in the
recognition of the goodness and wisdom of the Master, who had come
to dwell with them upon earth. It is almost impossible for you to
conceive the vividness of this sense in them; it is totally impossible
for you to conceive the comfort, peace, and force of it. In everything
that you now do or seek, you expose yourselves to countless miseries
of shame and disappointment, because in your doing you depend on
nothing but your own powers, and in seeking choose only your own
gratification. You cannot for the most part conceive of any work but
for your own interests, or the interests of others about whom you are
anxious in the same faithless way; everything about which passion is
excited in you or skill exerted is some object of material life, and
the idea of doing anything except for your own praise or profit has
narrowed itself into little more than the precentor's invitation to
the company with little voice and less practice to "sing to the praise
and glory of God."

I have said that you cannot imagine the feeling of the energy of daily
life applied in the real meaning of those words. You cannot imagine
it, but you _can_ prove it. Are any of you willing, simply as a
philosophical experiment in the greatest of sciences, to adopt the
principles and feelings of these men of a thousand years ago for a
given time, say for a year? It cannot possibly do you any harm to try,
and you cannot possibly learn what is true in these things, without
trying. If after a year's experience of such method you find yourself
no happier than before, at least you will be able to support your
present opinions at once with more grace and more modesty; having
conceded the trial it asked for, to the opposite side. Nor in acting
temporarily on a faith you do not see to be reasonable, do you
compromise your own integrity more, than in conducting, under a
chemist's directions, an experiment of which he foretells inexplicable
consequences. And you need not doubt the power you possess over
your own minds to do this. Were faith not voluntary, it could not be
praised, and would not be rewarded.

If you are minded thus to try, begin each day with Alfred's
prayer,--fiat voluntas tua; resolving that you will stand to it, and
that nothing that happens in the course of the day shall displease
you. Then set to any work you have in hand with the sifted and
purified resolution that ambition shall not mix with it, nor love of
gain, nor desire of pleasure more than is appointed for you; and that
no anxiety shall touch you as to its issue, nor any impatience nor
regret if it fail. Imagine that the thing is being done through you,
not by you; that the good of it may never be known, but that at least,
unless by your rebellion or foolishness, there can come no evil into
it, nor wrong chance to it. Resolve also with steady industry to do
what you can for the help of your country and its honour, and the
honour of its God; and that you will not join hands in its iniquity,
nor turn aside from its misery; and that in all you do and feel you
will look frankly for the immediate help and direction, and to your
own consciences, expressed approval, of God. Live thus, and believe,
and with swiftness of answer proportioned to the frankness of the
trust, most surely the God of hope will fill you with all joy and
peace in believing.

But, if you will not do this, if you have not courage nor heart enough
to break away the fetters of earth, and take up the sensual bed of
it, and walk; if you say that you are _bound_ to win this thing, and
become the other thing, and that the wishes of your friends,--and
the interests of your family,--and the bias of your genius,--and the
expectations of your college,--and all the rest of the bow-wow-wow
of the wild dog-world, must be attended to, whether you like it
or no,--then, at least, for shame give up talk about being free or
independent creatures; recognize yourselves for slaves in whom the
thoughts are put in ward with their bodies, and their hearts manacled
with their hands: and then at least also, for shame, if you refuse to
believe that ever there were men who gave their souls to God,--know
and confess how surely there are those who sell them to His adversary.




LECTURE III.

THE PLEASURES OF DEED.

_ALFRED TO CŒUR DE LION._


It was my endeavour, in the preceding lecture, to vindicate the
thoughts and arts of our Saxon ancestors from whatever scorn might lie
couched under the terms applied to them by Dean Stanley,--'fantastic'
and 'childish.' To-day my task must be carried forward, first, in
asserting the grace in fantasy, and the force in infancy, of the
English mind, before the Conquest, against the allegations contained
in the final passage of Dean Stanley's description of the first
founded Westminster; a passage which accepts and asserts, more
distinctly than any other equally brief statement I have met with,
the to my mind extremely disputable theory, that the Norman invasion
was in every respect a sanitary, moral, and intellectual blessing to
England, and that the arrow which slew her Harold was indeed the Arrow
of the Lord's deliverance.

"The Abbey itself," says Dean Stanley,--"the chief work of the
Confessor's life,--was the portent of the mighty future. When Harold
stood beside his sister Edith, on the day of the dedication, and
signed his name with hers as witness to the Charter of the Abbey, he
might have seen that he was sealing his own doom, and preparing for
his own destruction. The solid pillars, the ponderous arches, the huge
edifice, with triple tower and sculptured stones and storied windows,
that arose in the place and in the midst of the humble wooden churches
and wattled tenements of the Saxon period, might have warned the
nobles who were present that the days of their rule were numbered,
and that the _avenging, civilizing, stimulating_ hand of another and a
mightier race was at work, which would change the whole face of their
language, their manners, their Church, and their commonwealth. The
Abbey, so far exceeding the demands of the _dull and stagnant_ minds
of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, was founded not only in faith, but in
hope: in the hope that England had yet a glorious career to run; that
the line of her sovereigns would not be broken, even when the race of
Alfred had ceased to reign."

There must surely be some among my hearers who are startled, if
not offended, at being told in the terms which I emphasized in
this sentence, that the minds of our Saxon fathers were, although
fantastic, dull, and, although childish, stagnant; that farther, in
their fantastic stagnation; they were savage,--and in their innocent
dullness, criminal; so that the future character and fortune of
the race depended on the critical advent of the didactic and
disciplinarian Norman baron, at once to polish them, stimulate, and
chastise.

Before I venture to say a word in distinct arrest of this judgment,
I will give you a chart, as clear as the facts observed in the two
previous lectures allow, of the state and prospects of the Saxons,
when this violent benediction of conquest happened to them: and
especially I would rescue, in the measure that justice bids, the
memory even of their Pagan religion from the general scorn in
which I used Carlyle's description of the idol of ancient Prussia
as universally exponent of the temper of Northern devotion. That
Triglaph, or Triglyph Idol, (derivation of Triglaph wholly unknown to
me--I use Triglyph only for my own handiest epithet), last set up, on
what is now St. Mary's hill in Brandenburg, in 1023, belonged indeed
to a people wonderfully like the Saxons,--geographically their close
neighbours,--in habits of life, and aspect of native land, scarcely
distinguishable from them,--in Carlyle's words, a "strong-boned,
iracund, herdsman and fisher people, highly averse to be interfered
with, in their religion especially, and inhabiting a moory flat
country, full of lakes and woods, but with plenty also of alluvial
mud, grassy, frugiferous, apt for the plough"--in all things like
the Saxons, except, as I read the matter, in that 'aversion to be
interfered with' which you modern English think an especially Saxon
character in you,--but which is, on the contrary, you will find on
examination, by no means Saxon; but only Wendisch, Czech, Serbic,
Sclavic,--other hard names I could easily find for it among the tribes
of that vehemently heathen old Preussen--"resolutely worshipful
of places of oak trees, of wooden or stone idols, of Bangputtis,
Patkullos, and I know not what diabolic dumb blocks." Your English
"dislike to be interfered with" is in absolute fellowship with these,
but only gathers itself in its places of Stalks, or chimneys, instead
of oak trees, round its idols of iron, instead of wood, diabolically
_vocal_ now; strident, and sibilant, instead of dumb.

Far other than these, their neighbour Saxons, Jutes and
Angles!--tribes between whom the distinctions are of no moment
whatsoever, except that an English boy or girl may with grace remember
that 'Old England,' exactly and strictly so called, was the small
district in the extreme south of Denmark, totally with its islands
estimable at sixty miles square of dead flat land. Directly south
of it, the definitely so-called Saxons held the western shore of
Holstein, with the estuary of the Elbe, and the sea-mark isle,
Heligoland. But since the principal temple of Saxon worship was close
to Leipsic,[9] we may include under our general term, Saxons, the
inhabitants of the whole level district of North Germany, from the
Gulf of Flensburg to the Hartz; and, eastward, all the country watered
by the Elbe as far as Saxon Switzerland.

[Footnote 9: Turner, vol. i., p. 223.]

Of the character of this race I will not here speak at any length:
only note of it this essential point, that their religion was at
once more practical and more imaginative than that of the Norwegian
peninsula; the Norse religion being the conception rather of natural
than moral powers, but the Saxon, primarily of moral, as the lords
of natural--their central divine image, Irminsul,[10] holding the
standard of peace in her right hand, a balance in her left. Such a
religion may degenerate into mere slaughter and rapine; but it has the
making in it of the noblest men.

[Footnote 10: Properly plural 'Images'--Irminsul and Irminsula.]

More practical at all events, whether for good or evil, in this trust
in a future reward for courage and purity, than the mere Scandinavian
awe of existing Earth and Cloud, the Saxon religion was also more
imaginative, in its nearer conception of human feeling in divine
creatures. And when this wide hope and high reverence had distinct
objects of worship and prayer, offered to them by Christianity, the
Saxons easily became pure, passionate, and thoughtful Christians;
while the Normans, to the last, had the greatest difficulty in
apprehending the Christian teaching of the Franks, and still deny the
power of Christianity, even when they have become inveterate in its
form.

Quite the deepest-thoughted creatures of the then animate world, it
seems to me, these Saxon ploughmen of the sand or the sea, with their
worshipped deity of Beauty and Justice, a red rose on her banner, for
best of gifts, and in her right hand, instead of a sword, a balance,
for due doom, without wrath,--of retribution in her left. Far
other than the Wends, though stubborn enough, they too, in battle
rank,--seven times rising from defeat against Charlemagne, and
unsubdued but by death--yet, by no means in that John Bull's manner
of yours, 'averse to be interfered with,' in their opinions, or their
religion. Eagerly docile on the contrary--joyfully reverent--instantly
and gratefully acceptant of whatever better insight or oversight a
stranger could bring them, of the things of God or man.

And let me here ask you especially to take account of that origin of
the true bearing of the Flag of England, the Red Rose. Her own
madness defiled afterwards alike the white and red, into images of the
paleness, or the crimson, of death; but the Saxon Rose was the symbol
of heavenly beauty and peace.

I told you in my first lecture that one swift requirement in our
school would be to produce a beautiful map of England, including
old Northumberland, giving the whole country, in its real geography,
between the Frith of Forth and Straits of Dover, and with only
six sites of habitation given, besides those of Edinburgh and
London,--namely, those of Canterbury and Winchester, York and
Lancaster, Holy Island and Melrose; the latter instead of Iona,
because, as we have seen, the influence of St. Columba expires
with the advance of Christianity, while that of Cuthbert of
Melrose connects itself with the most sacred feelings of the entire
Northumbrian kingdom, and Scottish border, down to the days of
Scott--wreathing also into its circle many of the legends of Arthur.
Will you forgive my connecting the personal memory of having once had
a wild rose gathered for me, in the glen of Thomas the Rhymer, by the
daughter of one of the few remaining Catholic houses of Scotland, with
the pleasure I have in reading to you this following true account
of the origin of the name of St. Cuthbert's birthplace;--the rather
because I owe it to friendship of the same date, with Mr. Cockburn
Muir, of Melrose.

"To those who have eyes to read it," says Mr. Muir, "the name
'Melrose' is written full and fair, on the fair face of all this reach
of the valley. The name is anciently spelt Mailros, and later, Malros,
never Mulros; ('Mul' being the Celtic word taken to mean 'bare'). Ros
is Rose; the forms Meal or Mol imply great quantity or number. Thus
Malros means the place of many roses.

"This is precisely the notable characteristic of the neighbourhood.
The wild rose is indigenous. There is no nook nor cranny, no bank nor
brae, which is not, in the time of roses, ablaze with their exuberant
loveliness. In gardens, the cultured rose is so prolific that it
spreads literally like a weed. But it is worth suggestion that the
word may be of the same stock as the Hebrew _rôsh_ (translated rôs
by the Septuagint), meaning _chief_, _principal_, while it is also
the name of _some_ flower; but of _which_ flower is now unknown.
Affinities of _rôsh_ are not far to seek; Sanskrit, _Raj_(a),
_Ra_(ja)_ni_; Latin, _Rex_, _Reg_(ina)."

I leave it to Professor Max Muller to certify or correct for you the
details of Mr. Cockburn's research,[11]--this main head of it I can
positively confirm, that in old Scotch,--that of Bishop Douglas,--the
word 'Rois' stands alike for King, and Rose.

[Footnote 11: I had not time to quote it fully in the lecture; and in
my ignorance, alike of Keltic and Hebrew, can only submit it here to
the reader's examination. "The ancient Cognizance of the town confirms
this etymology beyond doubt, with customary heraldic precision. The
shield bears a _Rose_; with a _Maul_, as the exact phonetic equivalent
for the expletive. If the herald had needed to express 'bare
promontory,' quite certainly he would have managed it somehow.
Not only this, the Earls of Haddington were first created Earls
of _Melrose_ (1619); and their Shield, quarterly, is charged, for
Melrose, in 2nd and 3rd (fesse wavy between) three _Roses_ gu.

"Beyond this ground of certainty, we may indulge in a little excursus
into lingual affinities of wide range. The root _mol_ is clear enough.
It is of the same stock as the Greek _mála_, Latin _mul_(_tum_), and
Hebrew _m'la_. But, _Rose_? We call her Queen of Flowers, and since
before the Persian poets made much of her, she was everywhere _Regina
Florum_. Why should not the name mean simply the Queen, the Chief?
Now, so few who know Keltic know also Hebrew, and so few who know
Hebrew know also Keltic, that few know the surprising extent of the
affinity that exists--clear as day--between the Keltic and the Hebrew
vocabularies. That the word _Rose_ may be a case in point is not
hazardously speculative."]

Summing now the features I have too shortly specified in the Saxon
character,--its imagination, its docility, its love of knowledge,
and its love of beauty, you will be prepared to accept my conclusive
statement, that they gave rise to a form of Christian faith which
appears to me, in the present state of my knowledge, one of the
purest and most intellectual ever attained in Christendom;--never yet
understood, partly because of the extreme rudeness of its expression
in the art of manuscripts, and partly because, on account of its very
purity, it sought no expression in architecture, being a religion
of daily life, and humble lodging. For these two practical reasons,
first;--and for this more weighty third, that the intellectual
character of it is at the same time most truly, as Dean Stanley
told you, childlike; showing itself in swiftness of imaginative
apprehension, and in the fearlessly candid application of great
principles to small things. Its character in this kind may be
instantly felt by any sympathetic and gentle person who will read
carefully the book I have already quoted to you, the Venerable Bede's
life of St. Cuthbert; and the intensity and sincerity of it in the
highest orders of the laity, by simply counting the members of Saxon
Royal families who ended their lives in monasteries.

Now, at the very moment when this faith, innocence, and ingenuity were
on the point of springing up into their fruitage, comes the Northern
invasion; of the real character of which you can gain a far truer
estimate by studying Alfred's former resolute contest with and victory
over the native Norman in his paganism, than by your utmost endeavours
to conceive the character of the afterwards invading Norman,
disguised, but not changed, by Christianity. The Norman could not, in
the nature of him, become a _Christian_ at all; and he never did;--he
only became, at his best, the enemy of the Saracen. What he was, and
what alone he was capable of being, I will try to-day to explain.

And here I must advise you that in all points of history relating
to the period between 800 and 1200, you will find M. Viollet le
Duc, incidentally throughout his 'Dictionary of Architecture,' the
best-informed, most intelligent, and most thoughtful of guides.
His knowledge of architecture, carried down into the most minutely
practical details,--(which are often the most significant), and
embracing, over the entire surface of France, the buildings even of
the most secluded villages; his artistic enthusiasm, balanced by the
acutest sagacity, and his patriotism, by the frankest candour, render
his analysis of history during that active and constructive period the
most valuable known to me, and certainly, in its field, exhaustive.
Of the later nationality his account is imperfect, owing to his
professional interest in the mere _science_ of architecture, and
comparative insensibility to the power of sculpture;--but of the
time with which we are now concerned, whatever he tells you must be
regarded with grateful attention.

I introduce, therefore, the Normans to you, on their first entering
France, under his descriptive terms of them.[12]

[Footnote 12: Article "Architecture," vol. i., p. 138.]

"As soon as they were established on the soil, these barbarians became
the most hardy and active builders. Within the space of a century
and a half, they had covered the country on which they had definitely
landed, with religious, monastic, and civil edifices, of an extent and
richness then little common. It is difficult to suppose that they had
brought from Norway the elements of art,[13] but they were possessed
by a persisting and penetrating spirit; their brutal force did not
want for grandeur. Conquerors, they raised castles to assure their
domination; they soon recognized the Moral force of the clergy, and
endowed it richly. Eager always to attain their end, when once they
saw it, they _never left one of their enterprises unfinished_, and
in that they differed completely from the Southern inhabitants of
Gaul. Tenacious extremely, they were perhaps the only ones among the
barbarians established in France who had ideas of order; the only ones
who knew how to preserve their conquests, and compose a state. They
found the remains of the Carthaginian arts on the territory where they
planted themselves, they mingled with those their national genius,
positive, grand, and yet supple."

[Footnote 13: They _had_ brought some, of a variously Charybdic,
Serpentine, and Diabolic character.--J.R.]

Supple, 'Delié,'--capable of change and play of the mental muscle, in
the way that savages are not. I do not, myself, grant this suppleness
to the Norman, the less because another sentence of M. le Duc's,
occurring incidentally in his account of the archivolt, is of extreme
counter-significance, and wide application. "The Norman arch," he
says, "is _never derived from traditional classic forms_, but only
from mathematical arrangement of line." Yes; that is true: the Norman
arch is never derived from classic forms. The cathedral,[14] whose
aisles you saw or might have seen, yesterday, interpenetrated
with light, whose vaults you might have heard prolonging the sweet
divisions of majestic sound, would have been built in that stately
symmetry by Norman law, though never an arch at Rome had risen round
her field of blood,--though never her Sublician bridge had been
petrified by her Augustan pontifices. But the _decoration_, though not
the structure of those arches, they owed to another race,[15] whose
words they stole without understanding, though three centuries before,
the Saxon understood, and used, to express the most solemn majesty of
his Kinghood,--

  "EGO, EDGAR, TOTIVS ALBIONIS"--

not Rex, that would have meant the King of Kent or Mercia, not of
England,--no, nor Imperator; that would have meant only the profane
power of Rome, but _BASILEVS_, meaning a King who reigned with sacred
authority given by Heaven and Christ.

[Footnote 14: Of Oxford, during the afternoon service.]

[Footnote 15: See the concluding section of the lecture.]

With far meaner thoughts, both of themselves and their powers, the
Normans set themselves to build impregnable military walls, and
sublime religious ones, in the best possible practical ways; but
they no more made books of their church fronts than of their bastion
flanks; and cared, in the religion they accepted, neither for its
sentiments nor its promises, but only for its immediate results on
national order.

As I read them, they were men wholly of this world, bent on doing the
most in it, and making the best of it that they could;--men, to their
death, of _Deed_, never pausing, changing, repenting, or anticipating,
more than the completed square, ὰνευ ψογου, of their battle, their
keep, and their cloister. Soldiers before and after everything, they
learned the lockings and bracings of their stones primarily in defence
against the battering-ram and the projectile, and esteemed the pure
circular arch for its distributed and equal strength more than for its
beauty. "I believe again," says M. le Duc,[16] "that the feudal castle
never arrived at its perfectness till after the Norman invasion,
and that this race of the North was the first to apply a defensive
system under unquestionable laws, soon followed by the nobles of the
Continent, after they had, at their own expense, learned their
superiority."

[Footnote 16: Article "Château," vol. iii, p. 65.]

The next sentence is a curious one. I pray your attention to it. "The
defensive system of the Norman is born of a profound sentiment of
_distrust_ and _cunning, foreign to the character of the Frank_."
You will find in all my previous notices of the French, continual
insistance upon their natural Franchise, and also, if you take the
least pains in analysis of their literature down to this day, that
the idea of falseness is to them indeed more hateful than to any other
European nation. To take a quite cardinal instance. If you compare
Lucian's and Shakespeare's Timon with Molière's Alceste, you
will find the Greek and English misanthropes dwell only on men's
_ingratitude_ to _themselves_, but Alceste, on their _falsehood to
each other_.

Now hear M. le Duc farther:

"The castles built between the tenth and twelfth centuries along the
Loire, Gironde, and Seine, that is to say, along the lines of the
Norman invasions, and in the neighbourhood of their possessions, have
a peculiar and uniform character which one finds neither in central
France, nor in Burgundy, nor can there be any need for us to throw
light on (_faire ressortir_) the superiority of the warrior spirit
of the Normans, during the later times of the Carlovingian epoch,
over the spirit of the chiefs of Frank descent, established on the
Gallo-Roman soil." There's a bit of honesty in a Frenchman for you!

I have just said that they valued religion chiefly for its influence
of order in the present world: being in this, observe, as nearly as
may be the exact reverse of modern believers, or persons who profess
to be such,--of whom it may be generally alleged, too truly, that they
value religion with respect to their future bliss rather than their
present duty; and are therefore continually careless of its direct
commands, with easy excuse to themselves for disobedience to them.
Whereas the Norman, finding in his own heart an irresistible impulse
to action, and perceiving himself to be set, with entirely strong
body, brain, and will, in the midst of a weak and dissolute confusion
of all things, takes from the Bible instantly into his conscience
every exhortation to Do and to Govern; and becomes, with all his might
and understanding, a blunt and rough servant, knecht, or knight of
God, liable to much misapprehension, of course, as to the services
immediately required of him, but supposing, since the whole make of
him, outside and in, is a soldier's, that God meant him for a soldier,
and that he is to establish, by main force, the Christian faith and
works all over the world so far as he comprehends them; not merely
with the Mahometan indignation against spiritual error, but with a
sound and honest soul's dislike of material error, and resolution to
extinguish _that_, even if perchance found in the spiritual persons to
whom, in their office, he yet rendered total reverence.

Which force and faith in him I may best illustrate by merely putting
together the broken paragraphs of Sismondi's account of the founding
of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily: virtually contemporary with the
conquest of England.

"The Normans surpassed all the races of the west in their ardour for
pilgrimages. They would not, to go into the Holy Land, submit to the
monotony[17] of a long sea voyage--the rather that they found not
on the Mediterranean the storms or dangers they had rejoiced to
encounter on their own sea. They traversed by land the whole of
France and Italy, trusting to their swords to procure the necessary
subsistence,[18] if the charity of the faithful did not enough provide
for it with alms. The towns of Naples, Amalfi, Gaeta, and Bari, held
constant commerce with Syria; and frequent miracles, it was believed,
illustrated the Monte Cassino (St. Benedict again!) on the road of
Naples, and the Mount of Angels (Garganus) above Bari." (Querceta
Gargani--verily, laborant; _now_, et orant.) "The pilgrims wished
to visit during their journey the monasteries built on these two
mountains, and therefore nearly always, either going or returning to
the Holy Land, passed through Magna Græcia.

[Footnote 17: I give Sismondi's idea as it stands, but there was no
question in the matter of monotony or of danger. The journey was made
on foot because it was the most laborious way, and the most humble.]

[Footnote 18: See farther on, p. 110, the analogies with English
arrangements of the same kind.]

"In one of the earliest years of the eleventh century, about forty
of these religious travellers, having returned from the Holy Land,
chanced to have met together in Salerno at the moment when a small
Saracen fleet came to insult the town, and demand of it a military
contribution. The inhabitants of South Italy, at this time, abandoned
to the delights of their enchanted climate, had lost nearly all
military courage. The Salernitani saw with astonishment forty Norman
knights, after having demanded horses and arms from the Prince of
Salerno, order the gates of the town to be opened, charge the Saracens
fearlessly, and put them to flight. The Salernitani followed, however,
the example given them by these brave warriors, and those of the
Mussulmans who escaped their swords were forced to re-embark in all
haste.

"The Prince of Salerno, Guaimar III., tried in vain to keep the
warrior-pilgrims at his court: but at his solicitation other companies
established themselves on the rocks of Salerno and Amalfi, until,
on Christmas Day, 1041, (exactly a quarter of a century before the
coronation here at Westminster of the Conqueror,) they gathered
their scattered forces at Aversa,[19] twelve groups of them
under twelve chosen counts, and all under the Lombard Ardoin, as
commander-in-chief." Be so good as to note that,--a marvellous
key-note of historical fact about the unjesting Lombards, I cannot
find the total Norman number: the chief contingent, under William
of the Iron Arm, the son of Tancred of Hauteville, was only of three
hundred knights; the Count of Aversa's troop, of the same number, is
named as an important part of the little army--admit it for ten times
Tancred's, three thousand men in all. At Aversa, these three thousand
men form, coolly on Christmas Day, 1041, the design of--well, I told
you they didn't _design_ much, only, now we're here, we may as well,
while we're about it,--overthrow the Greek empire! That was their
little game!--a Christmas mumming to purpose. The following year, the
whole of Apulia was divided among them.

[Footnote 19: In Lombardy, south of Pavia.]

I will not spoil, by abstracting, the magnificent following history
of Robert Guiscard, the most wonderful soldier of that or any other
time: I leave you to finish it for yourselves, only asking you to read
together with it, the sketch, in Turner's history of the Anglo-Saxons,
of Alfred's long previous war with the Norman Hasting; pointing out to
you for foci of character in each contest, the culminating incidents
of naval battle. In Guiscard's struggle with the Greeks, he encounters
for their chief naval force the Venetian fleet under the Doge Domenico
Selvo. The Venetians are at this moment undoubted masters in all naval
warfare; the Normans are worsted easily the first day,--the second
day, fighting harder, they are defeated again, and so disastrously
that the Venetian Doge takes no precautions against them on the third
day, thinking them utterly disabled. Guiscard attacks him again on the
third day, with the mere wreck of his own ships, and defeats the tired
and amazed Italians finally!

The sea-fight between Alfred's ships and those of Hasting, ought to be
still more memorable to us. Alfred, as I noticed in last lecture, had
built war ships nearly twice as long as the Normans', swifter, and
steadier on the waves. Six Norman ships were ravaging the Isle of
Wight; Alfred sent nine of his own to take them. The King's fleet
found the Northmen's embayed, and three of them aground. The three
others _engaged Alfred's nine, twice their size_; two of the Viking
ships were taken, but the third escaped, with only five men! A nation
which verily took its pleasures in its Deeds.

But before I can illustrate farther either their deeds or their
religion, I must for an instant meet the objection which I suppose the
extreme probity of the nineteenth century must feel acutely against
these men,--that they all lived by thieving.

Without venturing to allude to the _raison d'être_ of the present
French and English Stock Exchanges, I will merely ask any of you here,
whether of Saxon or Norman blood, to define for himself what he means
by the "possession of India." I have no doubt that you all wish to
keep India in order, and in like manner I have assured you that Duke
William wished to keep England in order. If you will read the lecture
on the life of Sir Herbert Edwardes, which I hope to give in London
after finishing this course,[20] you will see how a Christian British
officer can, and does, verily, and with his whole heart, keep in order
such part of India as may be entrusted to him, and in so doing, secure
our Empire. But the silent feeling and practice of the nation about
India is based on quite other motives than Sir Herbert's. Every
mutiny, every danger, every terror, and every crime, occurring under,
or paralyzing, our Indian legislation, arises directly out of our
national desire to live on the loot of India, and the notion always
entertained by English young gentlemen and ladies of good position,
falling in love with each other without immediate prospect of
establishment in Belgrave Square, that they can find in India,
instantly on landing, a bungalow ready furnished with the
loveliest fans, china, and shawls,--ices and sherbet at
command,--four-and-twenty slaves succeeding each other hourly to
swing the punkah, and a regiment with a beautiful band to "keep order"
outside, all round the house.

[Footnote 20: This was prevented by the necessity for the
re-arrangement of my terminal Oxford lectures: I am now preparing that
on Sir Herbert for publication in a somewhat expanded form.]

Entreating your pardon for what may seem rude in these personal
remarks, I will further entreat you to read my account of the death
of Cœur de Lion in the third number of 'Fors Clavigera'--and also the
scenes in 'Ivanhoe' between Cœur de Lion and Locksley; and commending
these few passages to your quiet consideration, I proceed to give you
another anecdote or two of the Normans in Italy, twelve years later
than those given above, and, therefore, only thirteen years before the
battle of Hastings.

Their division of South Italy among them especially, and their defeat
of Venice, had alarmed everybody considerably,--especially the Pope,
Leo IX., who did not understand this manifestation of their piety. He
sent to Henry III. of Germany, to whom he owed his Popedom, for some
German knights, and got five hundred spears; gathered out of all
Apulia, Campania, and the March of Ancona, what Greek and Latin troops
were to be had, to join his own army of the patrimony of St. Peter;
and the holy Pontiff, with this numerous army, but no general, began
the campaign by a pilgrimage with all his troops to Monte Cassino, in
order to obtain, if it might be, St. Benedict for general.

Against the Pope's collected masses, with St. Benedict, their
contemplative but at first inactive general, stood the little army of
Normans,--certainly not more than the third of their number--but with
Robert Guiscard for captain, and under him his brother, Humphrey of
Hauteville, and Richard of Aversa. Not in fear, but in devotion, they
prayed the Pope 'avec instance,'--to say on what conditions they could
appease his anger, and live in peace under him. But the Pope would
hear of nothing but their evacuation of Italy. Whereupon, they had to
settle the question in the Norman manner.

The two armies met in front of Civitella, on Waterloo day, 18th June,
thirteen years, as I said, before the battle of Hastings. The German
knights were the heart of the Pope's army, but they were only five
hundred; the Normans surrounded _them_ first, and slew them, nearly
to a man--and then made extremely short work with the Italians and
Greeks. The Pope, with the wreck of them, fled into Civitella; but the
townspeople dared not defend their walls, and thrust the Pope himself
out of their gates--to meet, alone, the Norman army.

He met it, _not_ alone, St. Benedict being with him now, when he had
no longer the strength of man to trust in.

The Normans, as they approached him, threw themselves on their
knees,--covered themselves with dust, and implored his pardon and his
blessing.

There's a bit of poetry--if you like,--but a piece of steel-clad fact
also, compared to which the battle of Hastings and Waterloo both, were
mere boys' squabbles.

You don't suppose, you British schoolboys, that _you_ overthrew
Napoleon--_you?_ Your prime Minister folded up the map of Europe at
the thought of him. Not you, but the snows of Heaven, and the hand of
Him who dasheth in pieces with a rod of iron. He casteth forth His ice
like morsels,--who can stand before His cold?

But, so far as you have indeed the right to trust in the courage of
your own hearts, remember also--it is not in Norman nor Saxon, but in
Celtic race that your real strength lies. The battles both of Waterloo
and Alma were won by Irish and Scots--by the terrible Scots Greys, and
by Sir Colin's Highlanders. Your 'thin red line,' was kept steady at
Alma only by Colonel Yea's swearing at them.

But the old Pope, alone against a Norman army, wanted nobody to swear
at him. Steady enough he, having somebody to bless him, instead of
swear at him. St. Benedict, namely; whose (memory shall we say?)
helped him now at his pinch in a singular manner,--for the Normans,
having got the old man's forgiveness, vowed themselves his feudal
servants; and for seven centuries afterwards the whole kingdom of
Naples remained a fief of St. Peter,--won for him thus by a single
man, unarmed, against three thousand Norman knights, captained by
Robert Guiscard!

A day of deeds, gentlemen, to some purpose,--_that_ 18th of June,
anyhow.

Here, in the historical account of Norman character, I must
unwillingly stop for to-day--because, as you choose to spend your
University money in building ball-rooms instead of lecture-rooms, I
dare not keep you much longer in this black hole, with its nineteenth
century ventilation. I try your patience--and tax your breath--only
for a few minutes more in drawing the necessary corollaries respecting
Norman art.[21]

[Footnote 21: Given at much greater length in the lecture, with
diagrams from Iffley and Poictiers, without which the text of them
would be unintelligible. The sum of what I said was a strong assertion
of the incapacity of the Normans for any but the rudest and most
grotesque sculpture,--Poictiers being, on the contrary, examined and
praised as Gallic-French--not Norman.]

How far the existing British nation owes its military prowess to
the blood of Normandy and Anjou, I have never examined its genealogy
enough to tell you;--but this I can tell you positively, that whatever
constitutional order or personal valour the Normans enforced or taught
among the nations they conquered, they did not at first attempt with
their own hands to rival them in any of their finer arts, but used
both Greek and Saxon sculptors, either as slaves, or hired workmen,
and more or less therefore chilled and degraded the hearts of the men
thus set to servile, or at best, hireling, labour.

In 1874, I went to see Etna, Scylla, Charybdis, and the tombs of the
Norman Kings at Palermo; surprised, as you may imagine, to find that
there wasn't a stroke nor a notion of Norman work in them. They are,
every atom, done by Greeks, and are as pure Greek as the temple of
Ægina; but more rich and refined. I drew with accurate care, and
with measured profile of every moulding, the tomb built for Roger
II. (afterwards Frederick II. was laid in its dark porphyry). And it
is a perfect type of the Greek-Christian form of tomb--temple over
sarcophagus, in which the pediments rise gradually, as time goes on,
into acute angles--get pierced in the gable with foils, and their
sculptures thrown outside on their flanks, and become at last in the
fourteenth century, the tombs of Verona. But what is the meaning of
the Normans employing these Greek slaves for their work in Sicily
(within thirty miles of the field of Himera)? Well, the main meaning
is that though the Normans could build, they couldn't carve, and were
wise enough not to try to, when they couldn't, as you do now all over
this intensely comic and tragic town: but, here in England, they only
employed the Saxon with a grudge, and therefore being more and more
driven to use barren mouldings without sculpture, gradually developed
the structural forms of archivolt, which breaking into the lancet,
brighten and balance themselves into the symmetry of early English
Gothic.

But even for the first decoration of the archivolt itself, they were
probably indebted to the Greeks in a degree I never apprehended, until
by pure happy chance, a friend gave me the clue to it just as I was
writing the last pages of this lecture.

In the generalization of ornament attempted in the first volume of
the 'Stones of Venice,' I supposed the Norman _zigzag_ (and with some
practical truth) to be derived from the angular notches with which the
blow of an axe can most easily decorate, or at least vary, the solid
edge of a square fillet. My good friend, and supporter, and for some
time back the single trustee of St. George's Guild, Mr. George Baker,
having come to Oxford on Guild business, I happened to show him the
photographs of the front of Iffley church, which had been collected
for this lecture; and immediately afterwards, in taking him through
the schools, stopped to show him the Athena of Ægina as one of
the most important of the Greek examples lately obtained for us by
Professor Richmond. The statue is (rightly) so placed that in looking
up to it, the plait of hair across the forehead is seen in a steeply
curved arch. "Why," says Mr. Baker, pointing to it, "there's the
Norman arch of Iffley." Sure enough, there it exactly was: and a
moment's reflection showed me how easily, and with what instinctive
fitness, the Norman builders, looking to the Greeks as their absolute
masters in sculpture, and recognizing also, during the Crusades, the
hieroglyphic use of the zigzag, for water, by the Egyptians, might
have adopted this easily attained decoration at once as the sign of
the element over which they reigned, and of the power of the Greek
goddess who ruled both it and them.

I do not in the least press your acceptance of such a tradition,
nor for the rest, do I care myself whence any method of ornament is
derived, if only, as a stranger, you bid it reverent welcome. But much
probability is added to the conjecture by the indisputable transition
of the Greek egg and arrow moulding into the floral cornices of Saxon
and other twelfth century cathedrals in Central France. These and
other such transitions and exaltations I will give you the materials
to study at your leisure, after illustrating in my next lecture the
forces of religious imagination by which all that was most beautiful
in them was inspired.




LECTURE IV.

(_NOV. 8, 1884._)

THE PLEASURES OF FANCY.

_CŒUR DE LION TO ELIZABETH_

(1189 TO 1558).


In using the word "Fancy," for the mental faculties of which I am to
speak to-day, I trust you, at your leisure, to read the Introductory
Note to the second volume of 'Modern Painters' in the small new
edition, which gives sufficient reason for practically including
under the single term Fancy, or Fantasy, all the energies of the
Imagination,--in the terms of the last sentence of that preface,--"the
healthy, voluntary, and necessary,[22] action of the highest powers
of the human mind, on subjects properly demanding and justifying their
exertion."

[Footnote 22: Meaning that all healthy minds possess imagination, and
use it at will, under fixed laws of truthful perception and memory.]

I must farther ask you to read, in the same volume, the close of the
chapter 'Of Imagination Penetrative,' pp. 120 to 130, of which the
gist, which I must give as the first principle from which we start in
our to-day's inquiry, is that "Imagination, rightly so called, has no
food, no delight, no care, no perception, except of truth; it is for
ever looking under masks, and burning up mists; no fairness of form,
no majesty of seeming, will satisfy it; the first condition of its
existence is incapability of being deceived."[23] In that sentence,
which is a part, and a very valuable part, of the original book, I
still adopted and used unnecessarily the ordinary distinction between
Fancy and Imagination--Fancy concerned with lighter things, creating
fairies or centaurs, and Imagination creating men; and I was in
the habit always of implying by the meaner word Fancy, a voluntary
Fallacy, as Wordsworth does in those lines to his wife, making of her
a mere lay figure for the drapery of his fancy--

  Such if thou wert, in all men's view
    An universal show,
  What would my Fancy have to do,
    My feelings to bestow.

But you will at once understand the higher and more universal power
which I now wish you to understand by the Fancy, including all
imaginative energy, correcting these lines of Wordsworth's to a more
worthy description of a true lover's happiness. When a boy falls in
love with a girl, you say he has taken a fancy for her; but if he love
her rightly, that is to say for her noble qualities, you ought to say
he has taken an imagination for her; for then he is endued with the
new light of love which sees and tells of the mind in her,--and this
neither falsely nor vainly. His love does not bestow, it discovers,
what is indeed most precious in his mistress, and most needful for
his own life and happiness. Day by day, as he loves her better, he
discerns her more truly; and it is only the truth of his love that
does so. Falsehood to her, would at once disenchant and blind him.

[Footnote 23: Vide pp. 124-5.]

In my first lecture of this year, I pointed out to you with what
extreme simplicity and reality the Christian faith must have presented
itself to the Northern Pagan's mind, in its distinction from
his former confused and monstrous mythology. It was also in that
simplicity and tangible reality of conception, that this Faith became
to them, and to the other savage nations of Europe, Tutress of the
real power of their imagination and it became so, only in so far as
it indeed conveyed to them statements which, however in some respects
mysterious, were yet most literally and brightly _true_, as compared
with their former conceptions. So that while the blind cunning of
the savage had produced only misshapen logs or scrawls; the _seeing_
imagination of the Christian painters created, for them and for all
the world, the perfect types of the Virgin and of her Son; which
became, indeed, Divine, by being, with the most affectionate truth,
human.

And the association of this truth in loving conception, with the
general honesty and truth of the character, is again conclusively
shown in the feelings of the lover to his mistress; which we recognize
as first reaching their height in the days of chivalry. The truth and
faith of the lover, and his piety to Heaven, are the foundation, in
his character, of all the joy in imagination which he can receive
from the conception of his lady's--now no more mortal--beauty. She is
indeed transfigured before him; but the truth of the transfiguration
is greater than that of the lightless aspect she bears to others. When
therefore, in my next lecture, I speak of the Pleasures of Truth,
as distinct from those of the Imagination,--if either the limits
or clearness of brief title had permitted me, I should have said,
_untransfigured_ truth;--meaning on the one side, truth which we have
not heart enough to transfigure, and on the other, truth of the lower
kind which is incapable of transfiguration. One may look at a girl
till one believes she is an angel; because, in the best of her, she
_is_ one; but one can't look at a cockchafer till one believes it is a
girl.

With this warning of the connection which exists between the honest
intellect and the healthy imagination; and using henceforward the
shorter word 'Fancy' for all inventive vision, I proceed to consider
with you the meaning and consequences of the frank and eager exertion
of the fancy on Religious subjects, between the twelfth and sixteenth
centuries.

Its first, and admittedly most questionable action, the promotion
of the group of martyr saints of the third century to thrones of
uncontested dominion in heaven, had better be distinctly understood,
before we debate of it, either with the Iconoclast or the Rationalist.
This apotheosis by the Imagination is the subject of my present
lecture. To-day I only describe it,--in my next lecture I will discuss
it.

Observe, however, that in giving such a history of the mental
constitution of nascent Christianity, we have to deal with, and
carefully to distinguish, two entirely different orders in its
accepted hierarchy:--one, scarcely founded at all on personal
characters or acts, but mythic or symbolic; often merely the revival,
the baptized resuscitation of a Pagan deity, or the personified
omnipresence of a Christian virtue;--the other, a senate of Patres
Conscripti of real persons, great in genius, and perfect, humanly
speaking, in holiness; who by their personal force and inspired
wisdom, wrought the plastic body of the Church into such noble form
as in each of their epochs it was able to receive; and on the right
understanding of whose lives, nor less of the affectionate traditions
which magnified and illumined their memories, must absolutely depend
the value of every estimate we form, whether of the nature of the
Christian Church herself, or of the directness of spiritual agency by
which she was guided.[24]

[Footnote 24: If the reader believes in no spiritual agency, still his
understanding of the first letters in the Alphabet of History depends
on his comprehending rightly the tempers of the people who _did_.]

An important distinction, therefore, is to be noted at the outset,
in the objects of this Apotheosis, according as they are, or are not,
real persons.

Of these two great orders of Saints, the first; or mythic,
belongs--speaking broadly--to the southern or Greek Church alone.

The Gothic Christians, once detached from the worship of Odin and
Thor, abjure from their hearts all trust in the elements, and all
worship of ideas. They will have their Saints in flesh and blood,
their Angels in plume and armour; and nothing incorporeal or
invisible. In all the Religious sculpture beside Loire and Seine, you
will not find either of the great rivers personified; the dress of the
highest seraph is of true steel or sound broadcloth, neither flecked
by hail, nor fringed by thunder; and while the ideal Charity of Giotto
at Padua presents her heart in her hand to God, and tramples at the
same instant on bags of gold, the treasures of the world, and gives
only corn and flowers; that on the west porch of Amiens is content to
clothe a beggar with a piece of the staple manufacture of the town.

On the contrary, it is nearly impossible to find in the imagery of
the Greek Church, under the former exercise of the Imagination, a
representation either of man or beast which purports to represent
_only_ the person, or the brute. Every mortal creature stands for an
Immortal Intelligence or Influence: a Lamb means an Apostle, a Lion an
Evangelist, an Angel the Eternal justice or benevolence; and the most
historical and indubitable of Saints are compelled to set forth, in
their vulgarly apparent persons, a Platonic myth or an Athanasian
article.

I therefore take note first of the mythic saints in succession, whom
this treatment of them by the Byzantine Church made afterwards the
favourite idols of all Christendom.

I. The most mythic is of course St. Sophia; the shade of the Greek
Athena, passing into the 'Wisdom' of the Jewish Proverbs and Psalms,
and the Apocryphal 'Wisdom of Solomon.' She always remains understood
as a personification only; and has no direct influence on the mind
of the unlearned multitude of Western Christendom, except as a
godmother,--in which kindly function she is more and more accepted as
times go on; her healthy influence being perhaps greater over sweet
vicars' daughters in Wakefield--when Wakefield _was_,--than over the
prudentest of the rarely prudent Empresses of Byzantium.

II. Of St. Catharine of Egypt there are vestiges of personal tradition
which may perhaps permit the supposition of her having really once
existed, as a very lovely, witty, proud, and 'fanciful' girl. She
afterwards becomes the Christian type of the Bride, in the 'Song of
Solomon,' involved with an ideal of all that is purest in the life of
a nun, and brightest in the death of a martyr. It is scarcely possible
to overrate the influence of the conceptions formed of her, in
ennobling the sentiments of Christian women of the higher orders;--to
their practical common sense, as the mistresses of a household or a
nation, her example may have been less conducive.

III. St. Barbara, also an Egyptian, and St. Catharine's contemporary,
though the most practical of the mythic saints, is also, after St.
Sophia, the least corporeal: she vanishes far away into the 'Inclusa
Danae,' and her "Tunis aenea" becomes a myth of Christian safety, of
which the Scriptural significance may be enough felt by merely looking
out the texts under the word "Tower," in your concordance; and whose
effectual power, in the fortitudes alike of matter and spirit, was in
all probability made impressive enough to all Christendom, both by
the fortifications and persecutions of Diocletian. I have endeavoured
to mark her general relations to St. Sophia in the little imaginary
dialogue between them, given in the eighth lecture of the 'Ethics of
the Dust.'

Afterwards, as Gothic architecture becomes dominant, and at last
beyond question the most wonderful of all temple-building, St.
Barbara's Tower is, of course, its perfected symbol and utmost
achievement; and whether in the coronets of countless battlements worn
on the brows of the noblest cities, or in the Lombard bell-tower on
the mountains, and the English spire on Sarum plain, the geometric
majesty of the Egyptian maid became glorious in harmony of defence,
and sacred with precision of symbol.

As the buildings which showed her utmost skill were chiefly exposed
to lightning, she is invoked in defence from it; and our petition
in the Litany, against sudden death, was written originally to her.
The blasphemous corruptions of her into a patroness of cannon and
gunpowder, are among the most ludicrous, (because precisely contrary
to the original tradition,) as well as the most deadly, insolences and
stupidities of Renaissance Art.

IV. St. Margaret of Antioch was a shepherdess; the St. Geneviève of
the East; the type of feminine gentleness and simplicity. Traditions
of the resurrection of Alcestis perhaps mingle in those of her contest
with the dragon; but at all events, she differs from the other three
great mythic saints, in expressing the soul's victory over temptation
or affliction, by Christ's miraculous help, and without any special
power of its own. She is the saint of the meek and of the poor; her
virtue and her victory are those of all gracious and lowly womanhood;
and her memory is consecrated among the gentle households of Europe;
no other name, except those of Jeanne and Jeanie, seems so gifted with
a baptismal fairy power of giving grace and peace.

I must be forgiven for thinking, even on this canonical ground,
not only of Jeanie Deans, and Margaret of Branksome; but of
Meg--Merrilies. My readers will, I fear, choose rather to think of the
more doubtful victory over the Dragon, won by the great Margaret of
German literature.

V. With much more clearness and historic comfort we may approach the
shrine of St. Cecilia; and even on the most prosaic and realistic
minds--such as my own--a visit to her house in Rome has a comforting
and establishing effect, which reminds one of the carter in 'Harry
and Lucy,' who is convinced of the truth of a plaustral catastrophe at
first incredible to him, as soon as he hears the name of the hill on
which it happened. The ruling conception of her is deepened gradually
by the enlarged study of Religious music; and is at its best and
highest in the thirteenth century, when she rather resists than
complies with the already tempting and distracting powers of sound;
and we are told that "cantantibus organis, Cecilia virgo in corde suo
soli Domino decantabat, dicens, 'Fiat, Domine, cor meum et corpus meum
immaculatum, ut non confundar.'"

("While the instruments played, Cecilia the virgin sang in her
heart only to the Lord, saying, Oh Lord, be my heart and body made
stainless, that I be not confounded.")

This sentence occurs in my great Service-book of the convent of
Beau-pré, written in 1290, and it is illustrated with a miniature of
Cecilia sitting silent at a banquet, where all manner of musicians are
playing. I need not point out to you how the law, not of sacred music
only, so called, but of _all_ music, is determined by this sentence;
which means in effect that unless music exalt and purify, it is not
under St. Cecilia's ordinance, and it is not, virtually, music at all.

Her confessed power at last expires amidst a hubbub of odes and
sonatas; and I suppose her presence at a Morning Popular is as little
anticipated as desired. Unconfessed, she is of all the mythic saints
for ever the greatest; and the child in its nurse's arms, and every
tender and gentle spirit which resolves to purify in itself,--as the
eye for seeing, so the ear for hearing,--may still, whether behind the
Temple veil,[25] or at the fireside, and by the wayside, hear Cecilia
sing.

  [Footnote 25:"But, standing in the lowest place,
  And mingled with the work-day crowd,
  A poor man looks, with lifted face,
  And hears the Angels cry aloud.

  "He seeks not how each instant flies,
  One moment is Eternity;
  His spirit with the Angels cries
  To Thee, to Thee, continually.

  "What if, Isaiah-like, he know
  His heart be weak, his lips unclean,
  His nature vile, his office low,
  His dwelling and his people mean?

  "To such the Angels spake of old--
  To such of yore, the glory came;
  These altar fires can ne'er grow cold:
    Then be it his, that cleansing flame."

These verses, part of a very lovely poem, "To Thee all Angels cry
aloud," in the 'Monthly Packet' for September 1873, are only signed
'Veritas.' The volume for that year (the 16th) is well worth getting,
for the sake of the admirable papers in it by Miss Sewell, on
questions of the day; by Miss A.C. Owen, on Christian Art; and the
unsigned Cameos from English History.]

It would delay me too long just now to trace in specialty farther the
functions of the mythic, or, as in another sense they may be truly
called, the universal, Saints: the next greatest of them, St. Ursula,
is essentially British,--and you will find enough about her in
'Fors Clavigera'; the others, I will simply give you in entirely
authoritative order from the St. Louis' Psalter, as he read and
thought of them.

The proper Service-book of the thirteenth century consists first
of the pure Psalter; then of certain essential passages of the Old
Testament--invariably the Song of Miriam at the Red Sea and the last
song of Moses;--ordinarily also the 12th of Isaiah and the prayer of
Habakkuk; while St. Louis' Psalter has also the prayer of Hannah,
and that of Hezekiah (Isaiah xxxviii. 10-20); the Song of the Three
Children; then the Benedictus, the Magnificat, and the Nunc Dimittis.
Then follows the Athanasian Creed; and then, as in all Psalters after
their chosen Scripture passages, the collects to the Virgin, the
Te Deum, and Service to Christ, beginning with the Psalm 'The Lord
reigneth'; and then the collects to the greater individual saints,
closing with the Litany, or constant prayer for mercy to Christ, and
all saints; of whom the order is,--Archangels, Patriarchs, Apostles,
Disciples, Innocents, Martyrs, Confessors, Monks, and Virgins. Of
women the Magdalen _always_ leads; St. Mary of Egypt usually follows,
but _may_ be the last. Then the order varies in every place, and
prayer-book, no recognizable supremacy being traceable; except in
relation to the place, or person, for whom the book was written. In
St. Louis', St. Geneviève (the last saint to whom he prayed on his
death-bed) follows the two Maries; then come--memorable for you best,
as easiest, in this six-foil group,--Saints Catharine, Margaret, and
Scolastica, Agatha, Cecilia, and Agnes; and then ten more, whom
you may learn or not as you like: I note them now only for future
reference,--more lively and easy for your learning,--by their French
names,

Felicité,

Colombe,

Christine,

       *       *       *       *       *

Aurée, Honorine,

       *       *       *       *       *

Radegonde,

Praxède,

Euphémie,

       *       *       *       *       *

Bathilde, Eugénie.

Such was the system of Theology into which the Imaginative Religion of
Europe was crystallized, by the growth of its own best faculties, and
the influence of all accessible and credible authorities, during the
period between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries inclusive. Its
spiritual power is completely represented by the angelic and apostolic
dynasties, and the women-saints in Paradise; for of the men-saints,
beneath the apostles and prophets, none but St. Christopher, St.
Nicholas, St. Anthony, St. James, and St. George, attained anything
like the influence of Catharine or Cecilia; for the very curious
reason, that the men-saints were much more true, real, and numerous.
St. Martin was reverenced all over Europe, but definitely, as a man,
and the Bishop of Tours. So St. Ambrose at Milan, and St. Gregory at
Rome, and hundreds of good men more, all over the world; while the
really good women remained, though not rare, inconspicuous. The
virtues of French Clotilde, and Swiss Berthe, were painfully borne
down in the balance of visible judgment, by the guilt of the Gonerils,
Regans, and Lady Macbeths, whose spectral procession closes only
with the figure of Eleanor in Woodstock maze; and in dearth of
nearer objects, the daily brighter powers of fancy dwelt with
more concentrated devotion on the stainless ideals of the earlier
maid-martyrs. And observe, even the loftier fame of the men-saints
above named, as compared with the rest, depends on precisely the same
character of indefinite personality; and on the representation, by
each of them, of a moral idea which may be embodied and painted in
a miraculous legend; credible, as history, even then, only to the
vulgar; but powerful over them, nevertheless, exactly in proportion
to the degree in which it can be pictured and fancied as a living
creature. Consider even yet in these days of mechanism, how the
dullest John Bull cannot with perfect complacency adore _himself_,
except under the figure of Britannia or the British Lion; and how the
existence of the popular jest-book, which might have seemed secure in
its necessity to our weekly recreation, is yet virtually centred on
the imaginary animation of a puppet, and the imaginary elevation to
reason of a dog. But in the Middle Ages, this action of the Fancy,
now distorted and despised, was the happy and sacred tutress of every
faculty of the body and soul; and the works and thoughts of art, the
joys and toils of men, rose and flowed on in the bright air of it,
with the aspiration of a flame, and the beneficence of a fountain.

And now, in the rest of my lecture, I had intended to give you a broad
summary of the rise and fall of English art, born under this code of
theology, and this enthusiasm of duty;--of its rise, from the rude
vaults of Westminster, to the finished majesty of Wells;--and of its
fall, from that brief hour of the thirteenth century, through the wars
of the Bolingbroke, and the pride of the Tudor, and the lust of the
Stewart, to expire under the mocking snarl and ruthless blow of the
Puritan. But you know that I have always, in my most serious work,
allowed myself to be influenced by those Chances, as they are now
called,--but to my own feeling and belief, guidances, and even, if
rightly understood, commands,--which, as far as I have read history,
the best and sincerest men think providential. Had this lecture been
on common principles of art, I should have finished it as I intended,
without fear of its being the worse for my consistency. But it deals,
on the contrary, with a subject, respecting which every sentence I
write, or speak, is of importance in its issue; and I allowed, as you
heard, the momentary observation of a friend, to give an entirely new
cast to the close of my last lecture. Much more, I feel it incumbent
upon me in this one, to take advantage of the most opportune help,
though in an unexpected direction, given me by my constant tutor,
Professor Westwood. I went to dine with him, a day or two ago,
mainly--being neither of us, I am thankful to say, blue-ribanded--to
drink his health on his recovery from his recent accident. Whereupon
he gave me a feast of good talk, old wine, and purple manuscripts. And
having had as much of all as I could well carry, just as it came to
the good-night, out he brings, for a finish, this leaf of manuscript
in my hand, which he has lent me to show you,--a leaf of the Bible of
Charles the Bald!

A leaf of it, at least, as far as you or I could tell, for Professor
Westwood's copy is just as good, in all the parts finished, as the
original: and, for all practical purpose, I show you here in my hand
a leaf of the Bible which your own King Alfred saw with his own bright
eyes, and from which he learned his child-faith in the days of dawning
thought!

There are few English children who do not know the story of Alfred,
the king, letting the cakes burn, and being chidden by his peasant
hostess. How few English children--nay, how few perhaps of their
educated, not to say learned, elders--reflect upon, if even they know,
the far different scenes through which he had passed when a child!

Concerning his father, his mother, and his own childhood, suppose you
were to teach your children first these following main facts, before
you come to the toasting of the muffin?

His father, educated by Helmstan, Bishop of Winchester, had been
offered the throne of the great Saxon kingdom of Mercia in his early
youth; had refused it, and entered, as a novice under St. Swithin the
monastery at Winchester. From St. Swithin, he received the monastic
habit, and was appointed by Bishop Helmstan one of his sub-deacons!

"The quiet seclusion which Ethelwulph's slow[26] capacity and meek
temper coveted" was not permitted to him by fate. The death of his
elder brother left him the only living representative of the line of
the West Saxon princes. His accession to the throne became the desire
of the people. He obtained a dispensation from the Pope to leave the
cloister; assumed the crown of Egbert; and retained Egbert's prime
minister, Alstan, Bishop of Sherborne, who was the Minister in peace
and war, the Treasurer, and the Counsellor, of the kings of England,
over a space, from first to last, of fifty years.

[Footnote 26: Turner, quoting William of Malmesbury, "Crassioris et
hebetis ingenii,"--meaning that he had neither ardour for war, nor
ambition for kinghood.]

Alfred's mother, Osburga, must have been married for love. She was the
daughter of Oslac, the king's cup-bearer. Extolled for her piety and
understanding, she bore the king four sons; dying before the last,
Alfred, was five years old, but leaving him St. Swithin for his tutor.
How little do any of us think, in idle talk of rain or no rain on St.
Swithin's day, that we speak of the man whom Alfred's father obeyed as
a monk, and whom his mother chose for his guardian!

Alfred, both to father and mother, was the best beloved of their
children. On his mother's death, his father sent him, being then five
years old, with a great retinue through France and across the Alps
to Rome; and there the Pope anointed him King, (heir-apparent to the
English throne), at the request of his father.

Think of it, you travellers through the Alps by tunnels, that you
may go to balls at Rome or hells at Monaco. Here is another manner
of journey, another goal for it, appointed for your little king. At
twelve, he was already the best hunter among the Saxon youths. Be sure
he could sit his horse at five. Fancy the child, with his keen genius,
and holy heart, riding with his Saxon chiefs beside him, by the Alpine
flowers under Velan or Sempione, and down among the olives to Pavia,
to Perugia, to Rome; there, like the little fabled Virgin, ascending
the Temple steps, and consecrated to be King of England by the great
Leo, Leo of the Leonine city, the saviour of Rome from the Saracen.

Two years afterwards, he rode again to Rome beside his father; the
West Saxon king bringing presents to the Pope, a crown of pure gold
weighing four pounds, a sword adorned with pure gold, two golden
images,[27] four Saxon silver dishes; and giving a gift of gold to all
the Roman clergy and nobles,[28] and of silver to the people.

[Footnote 27: Turner, Book IV.,--not a vestige of hint from the stupid
Englishman, what the Pope wanted with crown, sword, or image! My own
guess would be, that it meant an offering of the entire household
strength, in war and peace, of the Saxon nation,--their crown, their
sword, their household gods, Irminsul and Irminsula, their feasting,
and their robes.]

[Footnote 28: Again, what does this mean? Gifts of honour to the
Pope's immediate attendants--silver to all Rome? Does the modern
reader think this is buying little Alfred's consecration too dear, or
that Leo is selling the Holy Ghost?]

No idle sacrifices or symbols, these gifts of courtesy! The Saxon King
rebuilt on the highest hill that is bathed by Tiber, the Saxon street
and school, the Borgo,[29] of whose miraculously arrested burning
Raphael's fresco preserves the story to this day. And further
he obtained from Leo the liberty of all Saxon men from bonds
in penance;--a first phase this of Magna Charta, obtained more
honourably, from a more honourable person, than that document, by
which Englishmen of this day, suppose they live, move, and have being.

[Footnote 29: "Quæ in eorum lingua Burgus dicitur,--the place
where it was situated was called the Saxon street, Saxonum vicum"
(Anastasius, quoted by Turner). There seems to me some evidence in the
scattered passages I have not time to collate, that at this time the
Saxon Burg, or tower, of a village, included the idea of its school.]

How far into Alfred's soul, at seven years old, sank any true image of
what Rome was, and had been; of what her Lion Lord was, who had saved
her from the Saracen, and her Lion Lord had been, who had saved her
from the Hun; and what this Spiritual Dominion was, and was to be,
which could make and unmake kings, and save nations, and put armies to
flight; I leave those to say, who have learned to reverence childhood.
This, at least, is sure, that the days of Alfred were bound each to
each, not only by their natural piety, but by the actual presence and
appeal to his heart, of all that was then in the world most noble,
beautiful, and strong against Death.

In this living Book of God he had learned to read, thus early; and
with perhaps nobler ambition than of getting the prize of a gilded
psalm-book at his mother's knee, as you are commonly told of him. What
sort of psalm-book it was, however, you may see from this leaf in my
hand. For, as his father and he returned from Rome that year, they
stayed again at the Court of Charlemagne's grandson, whose daughter,
the Princess Judith, Ethelwolf was wooing for Queen of England, (not
queen-consort, merely, but crowned queen, of authority equal to his
own.) From whom Alfred was like enough to have had a reading lesson or
two out of her father's Bible; and like enough, the little prince, to
have stayed her hand at this bright leaf of it, the Lion-leaf, bearing
the symbol of the Lion of the tribe of Judah.

You cannot, of course, see anything but the glittering from where
you sit; nor even if you afterwards look at it near, will you find
a figure the least admirable or impressive to you. It is not like
Landseer's Lions in Trafalgar Square; nor like Tenniel's in 'Punch';
still less like the real ones in Regent's Park. Neither do I show it
you as admirable in any respect of art, other than that of skilfullest
illumination. I show it you, as the most interesting Gothic type of
the imagination of Lion; which, after the Roman Eagle, possessed the
minds of all European warriors; until, as they themselves grew selfish
and cruel, the symbols which at first meant heaven-sent victory, or
the strength and presence of some Divine spirit, became to them only
the signs of their own pride or rage: the victor raven of Corvus sinks
into the shamed falcon of Marmion, and the lion-heartedness which gave
the glory and the peace of the gods to Leonidas, casts the glory and
the might of kinghood to the dust before Chalus.[30]

[Footnote 30: 'Fors Clavigera,' March, 1871, p. 19. Yet read the
preceding pages, and learn the truth of the lion heart, while you
mourn its pride. Note especially his absolute law against usury.]

That death, 6th April, 1199, ended the advance of England begun
by Alfred, under the pure law of Religious Imagination. She began,
already, in the thirteenth century, to be decoratively, instead of
vitally, religious. The history of the Religious Imagination expressed
between Alfred's time and that of Cœur de Lion, in this symbol of the
Lion only, has material in it rather for all my seven lectures than
for the closing section of one; but I must briefly specify to you the
main sections of it. I will keep clear of my favourite number seven,
and ask you to recollect the meaning of only Five, Mythic Lions.

First of all, in Greek art, remember to keep yourselves clear about
the difference between the Lion and the Gorgon.

The Gorgon is the power of evil in heaven, conquered by Athena, and
thenceforward becoming her ægis, when she is herself the inflictor of
evil. Her helmet is then the helmet of Orcus.

But the Lion is the power of death on earth, conquered by Heracles,
and becoming thenceforward both his helmet and ægis. All ordinary
architectural lion sculpture is derived from the Heraclean.

Then the Christian Lions are, first, the Lion of the Tribe of
Judah--Christ Himself as Captain and Judge: "He shall rule the
nations with a rod of iron," (the opposite power of His adversary,
is rarely intended in sculpture unless in association with the
serpent--"inculcabis supra leonem et aspidem"); secondly, the Lion of
St. Mark, the power of the Gospel going out to conquest; thirdly, the
Lion of St. Jerome, the wrath of the brute creation changed into love
by the kindness of man; and, fourthly, the Lion of the Zodiac, which
is the Lion of Egypt and of the Lombardic pillar-supports in
Italy; these four, if you remember, with the Nemean Greek one, five
altogether, will give you, broadly, interpretation of nearly all
Lion symbolism in great art. How they degenerate into the British
door knocker, I leave you to determine for yourselves, with such
assistances as I may be able to suggest to you in my next lecture;
but, as the grotesqueness of human history plans it, there is actually
a connection between that last degradation of the Leonine symbol, and
its first and noblest significance.

You see there are letters round this golden Lion of Alfred's
spelling-book, which his princess friend was likely enough to spell
for him. They are two Latin hexameters:--

  Hic Leo, surgendo, portas confregit Averni
  Qui nunquam dormit, nusquam dormitat, in ævum.
  (This Lion, rising, burst the gates of Death:
  This, who sleeps not, nor shall sleep, for ever.)

Now here is the Christian change of the Heraclean conquest of Death
into Christ's Resurrection. Samson's bearing away the gates of Gaza is
another like symbol, and to the mind of Alfred, taught, whether by
the Pope Leo for his schoolmaster, or by the great-granddaughter of
Charlemagne for his schoolmistress, it represented, as it did to all
the intelligence of Christendom, Christ in His own first and last,
Alpha and Omega, description of Himself,--

"I am He that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore,
and _have the keys_ of Hell and of Death." And in His servant St.
John's description of Him--

"Who is the Faithful Witness and the First-begotten of the dead, and
the Prince of the kings of the earth."

All this assuredly, so far as the young child, consecrated like David,
the youngest of his brethren, conceived his own new life in Earth and
Heaven,--he understood already in the Lion symbol. But of all this I
had no thought[31] when I chose the prayer of Alfred as the type of
the Religion of his era, in its dwelling, not on the deliverance from
the punishment of sin, but from the poisonous sleep and death of it.
Will you ever learn that prayer again,--youths who are to be priests,
and knights, and kings of England, in these the latter days? when
the gospel of Eternal Death is preached here in Oxford to you for the
Pride of Truth? and "the mountain of the Lord's House" has become a
Golgotha, and the "new song before the throne" sunk into the rolling
thunder of the death rattle of the Nations, crying, "O Christ, where
is Thy Victory!"

[Footnote 31: The reference to the Bible of Charles le Chauve was
added to my second lecture (page 54), in correcting the press,
mistakenly put into the text instead of the notes.]


NOTES.

1. _The Five Christmas Days_. (These were drawn out on a large and
conspicuous diagram.)

These days, as it happens, sum up the History of their Five Centuries.

  Christmas Day, 496. Clovis baptized.
      "      "   800. Charlemagne crowned.
      "      "  1041. Vow of the Count of Aversa (Page 80).
      "      "  1066. The Conqueror crowned.
      "      "  1130. Roger II. crowned King of the Two Sicilies.

2. For conclusion of the whole matter two pictures were shown and
commented on--the two most perfect pictures in the world.

(1) A small piece from Tintoret's Paradiso in the Ducal Palace,
representing the group of St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Gregory, St.
Augustine, and behind St. Augustine his mother watching him, her chief
joy even in Paradise.

(2) The Arundel Society's reproduction of the Altar-piece by Giorgione
in his native hamlet of Castel Franco. The Arundel Society has done
more for us than we have any notion of.

       *       *       *       *       *




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       *       *       *       *       *


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