Chapter VII: Front Matter (7)

A comparison between the histories of England, France, and Germany, as regards their political development, would be a subject well worth working out in detail. Each country started with much that was common to all three, while the separate course of each has been wholly different. The distinctive character of English history is its continuity. No broad gap separates the present from the past. If there is any point at which a line between the present and the past is to be drawn, it is at all events not to be drawn at the point where a superficial glance might perhaps induce us to draw it,--at the Norman invasion in 1066. At first sight, that event might seem to separate us from all before it in a way to which there is no analogy in the history either of our own or of kindred lands. Neither France nor Germany ever saw any event to be compared to the Norman Conquest. Neither of them has ever received a permanent dynasty of foreign kings; neither has seen its lands divided among the soldiers of a foreign army, and its native sons shut out from every position of wealth or dignity. England, alone of the three, has undergone a real and permanent foreign conquest. One might have expected that the greatest of all possible historical chasms would have divided the ages before and the ages after such an event. Yet in truth modern England has practically far more to do with the England of the West-Saxon kings than modern France or Germany has to do with the Gaul and Germany of Charles the Great, or even of much more recent times. The England of the age before the Norman Conquest is indeed, in all external respects, widely removed from us. But the England of the age immediately succeeding the Norman Conquest is something more widely removed still. The age when Englishmen dwelt in their own land as a conquered race, when their name and tongue were badges of contempt and slavery, when England was counted for little more than an accession of power to the Duke of Rouen in his struggle with the King of Paris, is an age than which we can conceive none more alien to every feeling and circumstance of our own.

When, then, did the England in which we still live and move have its beginning? Where are we to draw the broad line, if any line is to be drawn, between the present and the past? We answer, In the great creative and destructive age of Europe and of civilized Asia--the thirteenth century. The England of Richard Coeur de Lion is an England which is past forever; but the England of Edward the First is essentially the still living England in which we have our own being. Up to the thirteenth century our history is the domain of antiquaries; from that point it becomes the domain of lawyers. A law of King AElfred's Witenagemot is a valuable link in the chain of our political progress, but it could not have been alleged as any legal authority by the accusers of Strafford or the defenders of the Seven Bishops. A statute of Edward the First is quite another matter. Unless it can be shown to have been repealed by some later statute, it is just as good to this day as a statute of Queen Victoria. In the earlier period we may indeed trace the rudiments of our laws, our language, our political institutions; but from the thirteenth century onwards we see the things themselves, in that very essence which we all agree in wishing to retain, though successive generations have wrought improvement in many points of detail and may have left many others capable of further improvement still.

Let us illustrate our meaning by the greatest of all examples. Since the first Teutonic settlers landed on her shores, England has never known full and complete submission to a single will. Some Assembly, Witenagemot, Great Council, or Parliament, there has always been, capable of checking the caprices of tyrants and of speaking, with more or less of right, in the name of the nation. From Hengest to Victoria, England has always had what we may fairly call a parliamentary constitution. Normans, Tudors, and Stewarts might suspend or weaken it, but they could not wholly sweep it away. Our Old-English Witenagemots, our Norman Great Councils, are matters of antiquarian research, whose exact constitution it puzzles our best antiquaries fully to explain. But from the thirteenth century onwards we have a veritable Parliament, essentially as we see it before our own eyes. In the course of the fourteenth century every fundamental constitutional principle becomes fully recognized. The best worthies of the seventeenth century struggled, not for the establishment of anything new, but for the preservation of what even then was already old. It is on the Great Charter that we still rest the foundation of all our rights. And no later parliamentary reformer has ever wrought or proposed so vast a change as when Simon of Montfort, by a single writ, conferred their parliamentary being upon the cities and boroughs of England.

This continuity of English history from the very beginning is a point which cannot be too strongly insisted on, but it is its special continuity from the thirteenth century onwards which forms the most instructive part of the comparison between English history and the history of Germany and France. At the time of the Norman Conquest the many small Teutonic kingdoms in Britain had grown into the one Teutonic kingdom of England, rich in her barbaric greatness and barbaric freedom, with the germs, but as yet only the germs, of every institution which we most dearly prize. At the close of the thirteenth century we see the England with which we are still familiar, young indeed and tender, but still possessing more than the germs,--the very things themselves. She has already King, Lords, and Commons; she has a King, mighty indeed and honored, but who may neither ordain laws nor impose taxes against the will of his people. She has Lords with high hereditary powers, but Lords who are still only the foremost rank of the people, whose children sink into the general mass of Englishmen, and into whose order any Englishman may be raised. She has a Commons still diffident in the exercise of new-born rights; but a Commons whose constitution and whose powers we have altered only by gradual changes of detail; a Commons which, if it sometimes shrank from hard questions of State, was at least resolved that no man should take their money without their leave. The courts of justice, the great offices of State, the chief features of local administration, have assumed, or are rapidly assuming, the form whose essential character they still retain. The struggle with Papal Rome has already begun; doctrines and ceremonies indeed remain as yet unchallenged, but statute after statute is passed to restrain the abuses and exactions of the ever-hateful Roman court. The great middle class of England is rapidly forming; a middle class not, as elsewhere, confined to a few great cities, but spread, in the form of a minor gentry and a wealthy yeomanry, over the whole face of the land. Villanage still exists, but both law and custom are paving the way for that gradual and silent extinction of it, which without any formal abolition of the legal status left, three centuries later, not a legal villain among us.

With this exception, there was in theory equal law for all classes, and imperfectly as the theory may have been carried out, it was at least far less imperfectly so than in any other kingdom. Our language was fast taking its present shape; English, in the main intelligible at the present day, was the speech of the mass of the people, and it was soon to expel French from the halls of princes and nobles. England at the close of the century is, for the first time since the Conquest, ruled by a prince bearing a purely English name, and following a purely English policy. Edward the First was no doubt as despotic as he could be or dared to be; so was every prince of those days who could not practice the superhuman righteousness of St. Lewis. But he ruled over a people who knew how to keep even his despotism within bounds. The legislator of England, the conqueror of Wales and Scotland, seems truly like an old Bretwalda or West-Saxon Basileus, sitting once more on the throne of Cerdic and of AElfred. The modern English nation is now fully formed; it stands ready for those struggles for French dominion in the two following centuries, which, utterly unjust and fruitless as they were, still proved indirectly the confirmation of our liberties at home, and which forever fixed the national character for good and for evil.

Let us here sketch out a comparison between the history and institutions of England and those of France and Germany. As we before said, our modern Parliament is traced up in an unbroken line to the early Great Council, and to the still earlier Witenagemot. The latter institution, widely different as it is from the earlier, has not been substituted for the earlier, but has grown out of it. It would be ludicrous to look for any such continuity between the Diet of ambassadors which meets at Frankfurt and the Assemblies which met to obey Henry the Third and to depose Henry the Fourth. And how stands the case in France? France has tried constitutional government in all its shapes; in its old Teutonic, in its mediaeval, and in all its modern forms--Kings with one Chamber and Kings with two, Republics without Presidents and Republics with, Conventions, Directories, Consulates, and Empires. All of these have been separate experiments; all have failed; there is no historical continuity between any of them. Charles the Great gathered his Great Council around him year by year; his successors in the Eastern _Francia_, the Kings of the Teutonic Kingdom, went on doing so long afterwards. But in Gaul, in Western _Francia_, after it fell away from the common centre, no such assembly could be gathered together. The kingdom split into fragments; every province did what was right in its own eyes; Aquitaine and Toulouse had neither fear nor love enough for their nominal King to contribute any members to a Council of his summoning. Philip the Fair, for his own convenience, summoned the States-General. But the States-General were no historical continuation of the old Frankish Assemblies; they were a new institution of his own, devised, it maybe, in imitation of the English Parliament or of the Spanish Cortes. From that time the French States-General ran a brilliant and a fitful course. Very different indeed were they from the homely Parliaments of England. Our stout knights and citizens were altogether guiltless of political theories. They had no longing after great and comprehensive measures. But if they saw any practical abuses in the land, the King could get no money out of them till he set matters right again. If they saw a bad law, they demanded its alteration; if they saw a wicked minister, they demanded his dismissal. It is this sort of bit-by-bit reform, going on for six hundred years, which has saved us alike from magnificent theories and from massacres in the cause of humanity. Both were as familiar in France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as ever they were at the close of the eighteenth. The demands of the States-General, and of what we may call the liberal party in France generally, throughout those two centuries, are as wide in their extent, and as neatly expressed, as any modern constitution from 1791 to 1848. But while the English Parliament, meeting year after year, made almost every year some small addition or other to the mass of our liberties, the States-General, meeting only now and then, effected nothing lasting, and gradually sank into as complete disuse as the old Frankish Assemblies. By the time of the revolution of 1789, their constitution and mode of proceeding had become matters of antiquarian curiosity. Of later attempts, National Assemblies, National Conventions, Chambers of Deputies, we need not speak. They have risen and they have fallen, while the House of Lords and the House of Commons have gone on undisturbed.

RACE AND LANGUAGE

From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' First Series. London, Macmillan & Co., 1871

Having ruled that races and nations, though largely formed by the working of an artificial law, are still real and living things, groups in which the idea of kindred is the idea around which everything has grown,--how are we to define our races and our nations? How are we to mark them off one from the other? Bearing in mind the cautions and qualifications which have been already given, bearing in mind large classes of exceptions which will presently be spoken of, I say unhesitatingly that for practical purposes there is one test, and one only; and that that test is language.

It is hardly needful to show that races and nations cannot be defined by the merely political arrangements which group men under various governments. For some purposes of ordinary language, for some purposes of ordinary politics, we are tempted, sometimes driven, to take this standard. And in some parts of the world, in our own Western Europe for instance, nations and governments do in a rough way fairly answer to one another. And in any case, political divisions are not without their influence on the formation of national divisions, while national divisions ought to have the greatest influence on political divisions. That is to say, _prima facie_ a nation and a government should coincide. I say only _prima facie_, for this is assuredly no inflexible rule; there are often good reasons why it should be otherwise; only, whenever it is otherwise, there should be some good reason forthcoming. It might even be true that in no case did a government and a nation exactly coincide, and yet it would none the less be the rule that a government and a nation should coincide. That is to say, so far as a nation and a government coincide, we accept it as the natural state of things, and ask no question as to the cause; so far as they do not coincide, we mark the case as exceptional by asking what is the cause. And by saying that a government and a nation should coincide, we mean that as far as possible the boundaries of governments should be so laid out as to agree with the boundaries of nations. That is, we assume the nation as something already existing, something primary, to which the secondary arrangements of government should as far as possible conform. How then do we define the nation which is, if there is no special reason to the contrary, to fix the limits of a government? Primarily, I say, as a rule,--but a rule subject to exceptions,--as a _prima facie_ standard, subject to special reasons to the contrary,--we define the nation by language. We may at least apply the test negatively. It would be unsafe to rule that all speakers of the same language must have a common nationality; but we may safely say that where there is not community of language, there is no common nationality in the highest sense. It is true that without community of language there may be an artificial nationality, a nationality which may be good for all political purposes, and which may engender a common national feeling. Still, this is not quite the same thing as that fuller national unity which is felt where there is community of language.

In fact, mankind instinctively takes language as the badge of nationality. We so far take it as the badge, that we instinctively assume community of language as a nation as the rule, and we set down anything that departs from that rule as an exception. The first idea suggested by the word Frenchman, or German, or any other national name, is that he is a man who speaks French or German as his mother tongue. We take for granted, in the absence of anything to make us think otherwise, that a Frenchman is a speaker of French and that a speaker of French is a Frenchman. Where in any case it is otherwise, we mark that case as an exception, and we ask the special cause. Again, the rule is none the less the rule nor the exceptions the exceptions, because the exceptions may easily outnumber the instances which conform to the rule. The rule is still the rule, because we take the instances which conform to it as a matter of course, while in every case which does not conform to it we ask for the explanation. All the larger countries of Europe provide us with exceptions; but we treat them all as exceptions. We do not ask why a native of France speaks French. But when a native of France speaks as his mother tongue some other tongue than French, when French, or something which popularly passes for French, is spoken as his mother tongue by some one who is not a native of France, we at once ask the reason. And the reason will be found in each case in some special historical cause, which withdraws that case from the operation of the general law. A very good reason can be given why French, or something which popularly passes for French, is spoken in parts of Belgium and Switzerland whose inhabitants are certainly not Frenchmen. But the reason has to be given, and it may fairly be asked.

In the like sort, if we turn to our own country, whenever within the bounds of Great Britain we find any tongue spoken other than English, we at once ask the reason and we learn the special historic cause. In a part of France and a part of Great Britain we find tongues spoken which differ alike from English and from French, but which are strongly akin to one another. We find that these are the survivals of a group of tongues once common to Gaul and Britain, but which the settlement of other nations, the introduction and the growth of other tongues, have brought down to the level of survivals. So again we find islands which both speech and geographical position seem to mark as French, but which are dependencies, and loyal dependencies, of the English crown. We soon learn the cause of the phenomenon which seems so strange. Those islands are the remains of a State and a people which adopted the French tongue, but which, while it remained one, did not become a part of the French State. That people brought England by force of arms under the rule of their own sovereigns. The greater part of that people were afterwards conquered by France, and gradually became French in feeling as well as in language. But a remnant clave to their connection with the land which their forefathers had conquered, and that remnant, while keeping the French tongue, never became French in feeling. This last case, that of the Norman Islands, is a specially instructive one. Normandy and England were politically connected, while language and geography pointed rather to a union between Normandy and France. In the case of Continental Normandy, where the geographical tie was strongest, language and geography together would carry the day, and the Continental Norman became a Frenchman. In the islands, where the geographical tie was less strong, political traditions and manifest interest carried the day against language and a weaker geographical tie. The insular Norman did not become a Frenchman. But neither did he become an Englishman. He alone remained Norman, keeping his own tongue and his own laws, but attached to the English crown by a tie at once of tradition and of advantage. Between States of the relative size of England and the Norman Islands, the relation naturally becomes a relation of dependence on the part of the smaller members of the union. But it is well to remember that our forefathers never conquered the forefathers of the men of the Norman Islands, but that their forefathers did once conquer ours.

These instances and countless others bear out the position, that while community of language is the most obvious sign of common nationality,--while it is the main element, or something more than an element, in the formation of nationality,--the rule is open to exceptions of all kinds; and that the influence of language is at all times liable to be overruled by other influences. But all the exceptions confirm the rule, because we specially remark those cases which contradict the rule, and we do not specially remark those cases which do conform to it.

THE NORMAN COUNCIL AND THE ASSEMBLY OF LILLEBONNE

From 'The History of the Norman Conquest of England'

The case of William had thus to be brought to bear on the minds of his own people, on the minds of the neighboring countries whence he invited and looked for volunteers, on the minds of the foreign princes whose help or at least whose neutrality he asked for, and above all, on the minds of the Roman Pontiff and his advisers. The order of these various negotiations is not very clear, and in all probability all were being carried on at once. But there is little doubt that William's first step, on receiving the refusal of Harold to surrender his crown,--or whatever else was the exact purport of the English King's answer,--was to lay the matter before a select body of his most trusted counselors. The names of most of the men whom William thus honored with his special confidence are already familiar to us. They were the men of his own blood, the friends of his youth, the faithful vassals who had fought at his side against French invaders and Norman rebels. There was his brother, Robert, Count of Mortain, the lord of the castle by the waterfalls, the spoil of the banished Warling. And there was one closer than a brother,--the proud William the son of Osborn, the son of the faithful guardian of his childhood. There, perhaps the only priest in that gathering of warriors, was his other brother, Odo of Bayeux, soon to prove himself a warrior as stout of heart and as strong of arm as any of his race. There too, not otherwise renowned, was Iwun-al-Chapel, the husband of the sister of William, Robert, and Odo. There was a kinsman, nearer in legitimate succession to the stock of Rolf than William himself,--Richard of Evreux, the son of Robert the Archbishop, the grandson of Richard the Fearless. There was the true kinsman and vassal who guarded the frontier fortress of Eu, the brother of the traitor Busac and of the holy prelate of Lisieux. There was Roger of Beaumont, who rid the world of Roger of Toesny, and Ralph, the worthier grandson of that old foe of Normandy and mankind. There was Ralph's companion in banishment, Hugh of Grantmesnil, and Roger of Montgomery, the loyal son-in-law of him who cursed the Bastard in his cradle. There too were the other worthies of the day of Mortemar, Walter Giffard and Hugh of Montfort, and William of Warren, the valiant youth who had received the chiefest guerdon of that memorable ambush. These men, chiefs of the great houses of Normandy, founders, some of them, of greater houses in England, were gathered together at their sovereign's bidding. They were to be the first to share his counsels in the enterprise which he was planning, an enterprise planned against the land which with so many in that assembly was to become a second home, a home perhaps all the more cherished that it was won by the might of their own right hands.

To this select Council the duke made his first appeal. He told them, what some of them at least knew well already, of the wrongs which he had suffered from Harold of England. It was his purpose to cross the sea, in order to assert his rights and to chastise the wrong-doer. With the help of God and with the loyal service of his faithful Normans, he doubted not his power to do what he purposed. He had gathered them together to know their minds upon the matter. Did they approve of his purpose? Did they deem the enterprise within his power? Were they ready themselves to help him to the uttermost to recover his right? The answer of the Norman leaders, the personal kinsmen and friends of their sovereign, was wise and constitutional. They approved his purpose; they deemed that the enterprise was not beyond the power of Normandy to accomplish. The valor of the Norman knighthood, the wealth of the Norman Church, was fully enough to put their duke in possession of all that he claimed. Their own personal service they pledged at once; they would follow him to the war; they would pledge, they would sell, their lands to cover the costs of the expedition. But they would not answer for others. Where all were to share in the work, all ought to share in the counsel. Those whom the duke had gathered together were not the whole baronage of Normandy. There were other wise and brave men in the duchy, whose arms were as strong, and whose counsel would be as sage, as those of the chosen party to whom he spoke. Let the duke call a larger meeting of all the barons of his duchy, and lay his designs before them.

The duke hearkened to this advice, and he at once sent forth a summons for the gathering of a larger Assembly. This is the only time when we come across any details of the proceedings of a Norman Parliament. And we at once see how widely the political condition of Normandy differed from that of England. We see how much further England had advanced, or more truly, how much further Normandy had gone back, in the path of political freedom. The Norman Assembly which assembled to discuss the war against England was a widely different body from the Great Cemor which had voted for the restoration of Godwine. Godwine had made his speech before the King and all the people of the land. That people had met under the canopy of heaven, beneath the walls of the greatest city of the realm. But in William's Assembly we hear of none but barons. The old Teutonic constitution had wholly died away from the memories of the descendants of the men who followed Rolf and Harold Blaatand. The immemorial democracy had passed away, and the later constitution of the mediaeval States had not yet arisen. There was no Third Estate, because the personal right of every freeman to attend had altogether vanished, while the idea of the representation of particular privileged towns had not yet been heard of. And if the Third Order was wanting, the First Order was at least less prominent than it was in other lands. The wealth of the Church had been already pointed out as an important element in the duke's ways and means, and both the wealth and the personal prowess of the Norman clergy were, when the day came, freely placed at William's disposal. The peculiar tradition of Norman Assemblies, which shut out the clergy from all share in the national deliberations, seems now to have been relaxed. It is implied rather than asserted that the bishops of Normandy were present in the Assembly which now met; but it is clear that the main stress of the debates fell on the lay barons, and that the spirit of the Assembly was a spirit which was especially theirs.

Narrow as was the constitution of the Assembly, it showed, when it met, no lack either of political foresight or of parliamentary boldness. In a society so aristocratically constituted as that of Normandy was, the nobles are in truth, in a political sense, the people, and we must expect to find in any gathering of nobles both the virtues and the vices of a real Popular Assembly. William had already consulted his Senate; he had now to bring his resolution, fortified by their approval, before the body which came as near as any body in Normandy could come to the character of an Assembly of the Norman people. The valiant gentlemen of Normandy, as wary as they were valiant, proved good guardians of the public purse, trusty keepers of what one knows not whether to call the rights of the nation or the privileges of their order. The duke laid his case before them. He told once more the tale of his own rights and of the wrong which Harold had done him. He said that his own mind was to assert his rights by force of arms. He would fain enter England in the course of the year on which they had entered. But without their help he could do nothing. Of his own he had neither ships enough nor men enough for such an enterprise. He would not ask whether they would help him in such a cause. He took their zeal and loyalty for granted; he asked only how many ships, how many men, each of his hearers would bring as a free-will offering.

A Norman Assembly was not a body to be surprised into a hasty assent, even when the craft and the eloquence of William was brought to bear upon it. The barons asked for time to consider of their answer. They would debate among themselves, and they would let him know the conclusion to which they came. William was obliged to consent to this delay, and the Assembly broke up into knots, greater or smaller, each eagerly discussing the great question. Parties of fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty, sixty, a hundred, gathered round this or that energetic speaker. Some professed their readiness to follow the duke; others were in debt, and were too poor to venture on such hazards. Other speakers set forth the dangers and difficulties of the enterprise. Normandy could not conquer England; their fair and flourishing land would be ruined by the attempt. The conquest of England was an undertaking beyond the power of a Roman emperor. Harold and his land were rich; they had wealth to take foreign kings and dukes into their service; their own forces were in mere numbers such as Normandy could not hope to strive against. They had abundance of tried soldiers, and above all, they had a mighty fleet, with crews skilled beyond other men in all that pertained to the warfare of the sea. How could a fleet be raised, how could the sailors be gathered together, how could they be taught, within a year's space, to cope with such an enemy? The feeling of the Assembly was distinctly against so desperate an enterprise as the invasion of England. It seemed as if the hopes and schemes of William were about to be shattered in their beginning through the opposition of his own subjects.

A daring though cunning attempt was now made by William Fitz-Osbern, the duke's nearest personal friend, to cajole the Assembly into an assent to his master's will. He appealed to their sense of feudal honor; they owed the duke service for their fiefs: let them come forward and do with a good heart all, and more than all, that their tenure of their fiefs bound them to. Let not their sovereign be driven to implore the services of his subjects. Let them rather forestall his will; let them win his favor by ready offerings even beyond their power to fulfill. He enlarged on the character of the lord with whom they had to deal. William's jealous temper would not brook disappointment at their hands. It would be the worse for them in the end, if the duke should ever have to say that he had failed in his enterprise because they had failed in readiness to support him.

The language of William Fitz-Osbern seems to have startled and perplexed even the stout hearts with whom he had to deal. The barons prayed him to be their spokesman with the duke. He knew their minds and could speak for them all, and they would be bound by what he said. But they gave him no direct commission to bind them to any consent to the duke's demand. Their words indeed tended ominously the other way; they feared the sea,--so changed was the race which had once manned the ships of Rolf and Harold Blaatand,--and they were not bound to serve beyond it.

A point seemed to have been gained, by the seeming license given by the Assembly to the duke's most intimate friend to speak as he would in the name of the whole baronage. William Fitz-Osbern now spoke to the duke. He began with an exordium of almost cringing loyalty, setting forth how great was the zeal and affection of the Normans for their prince, and how there was no danger which they would not willingly undergo in his service. But the orator soon overshot his mark. He promised, in the name of the whole Assembly, that every man would not only cross the sea with the duke, but would bring with him double the contingent to which his holding bound him. The lord of twenty knights' fees would serve with forty knights, and the lord of a hundred with two hundred. He himself, of his love and zeal, would furnish sixty ships, well equipped, and filled with fighting men.

The barons now felt themselves taken in a snare. They were in nearly the same case as the king against whom they were called on to march. They had indeed promised; they had commissioned William Fitz-Osbern to speak in their names. But their commission had been stretched beyond all reasonable construction; their spokesman had pledged them to engagements which had never entered into their minds. Loud shouts of dissent rose through the hall. The mention of serving with double the regular contingent awakened special indignation. With a true parliamentary instinct, the Norman barons feared lest a consent to this demand should be drawn into a precedent, and lest their fiefs should be forever burthened with this double service. The shouts grew louder; the whole hall was in confusion; no speaker could be heard; no man would hearken to reason or render a reason for himself.

The rash speech of William Fitz-Osbern had thus destroyed all hope of a regular parliamentary consent on the part of the Assembly. But it is possible that the duke gained in the end by the hazardous experiment of his seneschal. It is even possible that the manoeuvre may have been concerted beforehand between him and his master. It was not likely that any persuasion could have brought the Assembly as a body to agree to the lavish offer of volunteer service which was put into its mouth by William Fitz-Osbern. There was no hope of carrying any such vote on a formal division. But the confusion which followed the speech of the seneschal hindered any formal division from being taken. The Assembly, in short, as an assembly, was broken up. The fagot was unloosed, and the sticks could now be broken one by one. The baronage of Normandy had lost all the strength of union; they were brought, one by one, within the reach of the personal fascinations of their sovereign. William conferred with each man apart; he employed all his arts on minds which, when no longer strengthened by the sympathy of a crowd, could not refuse anything that he asked. He pledged himself that the doubling of their services should not become a precedent; no man's fief should be burthened with any charge beyond what it had borne from time immemorial. Men thus personally appealed to, brought in this way within the magic sphere of princely influence, were no longer slack to promise; and having once promised, they were not slack to fulfill. William had more than gained his point. If he had not gained the formal sanction of the Norman baronage to his expedition, he had won over each individual Norman baron to serve him as a volunteer. And wary as ever, William took heed that no man who had promised should draw back from his promise. His scribes and clerks were at hand, and the number of ships and soldiers promised by each baron was at once set down in a book. A Domesday of the conquerors was in short drawn up in the ducal hall at Lillebonne, a forerunner of the greater Domesday of the conquered, which twenty years later was brought to King William of England in his royal palace at Winchester.

FERDINAND FREILIGRATH

(1810-1876)

In times of political degradation the poets of Germany, turning from their own surroundings, have sought poetical material either in the glories of a dim past or in the exotic splendors of remote lands. Goethe, disquieted by the French Revolution, took up Chinese and Persian studies; the romantic poets revivified the picturesqueness of the Middle Ages; and during the second quarter of this century the Orient began to exercise a potent charm. Platen wrote his beautiful 'Gaselen,' Rueckert sang in Persian measure and translated the Indian 'Sakuntala,' and Bodenstedt fashioned the dainty songs of "Mirza-Schaffy." Freiligrath too, a child of his time, entered upon his literary career with poems which took their themes from distant climes. Among his earliest verses after 'Moosthee' (Iceland-Moss Tea), written at the age of sixteen, were 'Africa,' 'Der Scheik am Sinai' (The Sheik on Sinai), and 'Der Loewenritt' (The Lion's Ride). Even in these early poems, we find all that brilliancy of Oriental imagery to which he tells us he had been inspired by much poring over an illustrated Bible in his childhood.

But Freiligrath, like Uhland and Herwegh, was a man of action and a patriot. The revolution of 1848 had brought fresh breezes into the stagnation of political life; and though they soon were stilled again, the men who had breathed that air ceased to be the dreamers of dreams that the romantic poets had been. They were conscious of a mission, and became the robust heralds of a larger and a freer time.

Freiligrath was a schoolmaster's son; he was born at Detmold on June 17th, 1810, and much against his private inclinations, he was sent in his sixteenth year to an uncle in Soest to prepare himself for a mercantile career. The death of his father threw him upon his own resources, and he took a position in an Amsterdam bank. Here the inspiration of the sea widened the range of his poetic fancy. To Chamisso is due the credit of introducing the poet to the general public through the pages of the Musenalmanach. This was in 1835. In 1838 appeared the first volume of his poems, and it won instant and unusual favor; Gutzkow called him the German Hugo. With this encouragement Freiligrath definitely abandoned mercantile life. In 1841 he married. At the suggestion of Alexander von Humboldt, the King of Prussia granted him a royal pension; and as no conditions were attached, it was accepted. This was a bitter disappointment to the ardent revolutionary poets, who had counted Freiligrath as one of themselves; but the turbulent times which preceded the revolution soon forced him into an open declaration of principles, and although he had said in one of his poems that the poet was above all party, in 1844, influenced by Hoffmann von Fallersleben, he resigned his pension, announced his position, and in May published a volume of revolutionary poems entitled 'Mein Glaubensbekenntniss' (My Confession of Faith). This book created the wildest enthusiasm, and placed its author at once in the front rank of the people's partisans. He fled to Brussels, and in 1846 published under the title of 'Ca Ira' six new songs, which were a trumpet-call to revolution. The poet deemed it prudent to retire to London, and he was about to accept an invitation from Longfellow to cross the ocean when the revolution broke out, and he returned to Duesseldorf to put himself at the head of the democratic party on the Rhine. But he was a poet and not a leader, and he indiscreetly exposed himself to arrest by an inflammatory poem, 'Die Todten an die Lebenden' (The Dead to the Living). The jury however acquitted him, and he at once assumed the management of the New Rhenish Gazette at Cologne.

It is a curious fact that during this agitated time Freiligrath wrote some of his tenderest poetry. In the collection which appeared in 1849 with the title 'Zwischen den Garben' (Between the Sheaves), was included that exquisite hymn to love: 'Oh, Love So Long as Love Thou Canst,' perhaps the most perfect of all his lyrical productions, and certainly evidence that the poet could touch the strings to deep emotions. In the following year both volumes of his 'New Political and Social Poems' were ready. Once more he prudently retired to London; his fears were confirmed by the immediate confiscation of these new volumes, and by the publication of a letter of apprehension. By way of reprisal he wrote his poem 'The Revolution,' which was published in London.

In 1867 the Swiss bank with which Freiligrath was connected closed its London branch, and the poet again faced an uncertain future. His friends on the Rhine, hearing of his difficulties, raised a generous subscription, and taking advantage of a general amnesty, he returned to the fatherland and became associated with the Stuttgart Illustrated Magazine. In 1870 appeared a complete collection of his poems; in 1876, 'New Poems'; and in the latter year, on March 18th, he died at Cannstatt in Wuertemburg.

The question which Freiligrath asks the emigrants in his early poem of that name,--'O say, why seek ye other lands?'--was destined to find frequent and bitter answer in his own checkered career; but he never swerved from the liberal principles which he had publicly announced. His political poems were among the most powerful influences of his time, and they have a permanent value as the expression of the spirit of freedom. His translations are marvels of fidelity and beauty. His 'Hiawatha' and 'The Ancient Mariner,' together with his versions of Victor Hugo, are perhaps the best examples of his surpassing skill. His own works have been for the most part excellently translated into English. His daughter published during her father's lifetime a volume of his poems, in which were collected all the best English translations then available. The exotic subjects of his early poems make them seem the most original, as for example 'Der Mohrenfuerst' (The Moorish Prince) and 'Der Blumen Rache' (The Revenge of the Flowers); the unusual rhymes hold the attention, and the sonorous melody of the verse delights the ear: but it is in a few of his superb love lyrics that he touches the highest point of his genius, although his fame continues to rest upon his impassioned songs of freedom and his name to be associated with the rich imagery of the Orient.

THE EMIGRANTS

I cannot take my eyes away
From you, ye busy, bustling band,
Your little all to see you lay
Each in the waiting boatman's hand.

Ye men, that from your necks set down
Your heavy baskets on the earth,
Of bread, from German corn baked brown
By German wives on German hearth,--

And you, with braided tresses neat,
Black-Forest maidens, slim and brown,
How careful on the sloop's green seat
You set your pails and pitchers down!

Ah! oft have home's cool shady tanks
Those pails and pitchers filled for you;
By far Missouri's silent banks
Shall these the scenes of home renew,--

The stone-rimmed fount in village street
Where oft ye stooped to chat and draw,--
The hearth, and each familiar seat,--
The pictured tiles your childhood saw.

Soon, in the far and wooded West
Shall log-house walls therewith be graced;
Soon many a tired tawny guest
Shall sweet refreshment from them taste.

From them shall drink the Cherokee,
Faint with the hot and dusty chase;
No more from German vintage, ye
Shall bear them home, in leaf-crowned grace.

O say, why seek ye other lands?
The Neckar's vale hath wine and corn;
Full of dark firs the Schwarzwald stands;
In Spessart rings the Alp-herd's horn.

Ah, in strange forests you will yearn
For the green mountains of your home,--
To Deutschland's yellow wheat-fields turn,--
In spirit o'er her vine-hills roam.

How will the form of days grown pale
In golden dreams float softly by,
Like some old legendary tale,
Before fond memory's moistened eye!

The boatman calls,--go hence in peace!
God bless you,--wife, and child, and sire!
Bless all your fields with rich increase,
And crown each faithful heart's desire!

Translation of C.T. Brooks.

THE LION'S RIDE

What! wilt thou bind him fast with a chain?
Wilt bind the king of the cloudy sands?
Idiot fool! he has burst from thy hands and bands,
And speeds like Storm through his far domain.
See! he crouches down in the sedge,
By the water's edge,
Making the startled sycamore boughs to quiver!
Gazelle and giraffe, I think, will shun that river.

Not so! The curtain of evening falls,
And the Caffre, mooring his light canoe
To the shore, glides down through the hushed karroo,
And the watch-fires burn in the Hottentot kraals,
And the antelope seeks a bed in the bush
Till dawn shall blush,
And the zebra stretches his limbs by the tinkling fountain,
And the changeful signals fade from the Table Mountain.

Now look through the dusk! What seest thou now?
Seest such a tall giraffe! She stalks,
All majesty, through the desert walks,--
In search of water to cool her tongue and brow.
From tract to tract of the limitless waste
Behold her haste!
Till, bowing her long neck down, she buries her face in
The reeds, and kneeling, drinks from the river's basin.

But look again! look! see once more
Those globe-eyes glare! The gigantic reeds
Lie cloven and trampled like puniest weeds,--
The lion leaps on the drinker's neck with a roar!
Oh, what a racer! Can any behold,
'Mid the housings of gold
In the stables of kings, dyes half so splendid
As those on the brindled hide of yon wild animal blended?

Greedily fleshes the lion his teeth
In the breast of his writhing prey; around
Her neck his loose brown mane is wound.
Hark, that hollow cry! She springs up from beneath
And in agony flies over plains and heights.
See, how she unites,
Even under such monstrous and torturing trammel,
With the grace of the leopard, the speed of the camel!

She reaches the central moon-lighted plain,
That spreadeth around all bare and wide;
Meanwhile, adown her spotted side
The dusky blood-gouts rush like rain--
And her woeful eyeballs, how they stare
On the void of air!
Yet on she flies--on, on; for her there is no retreating;
And the desert can hear the heart of the doomed one beating!

And lo! A stupendous column of sand,
A sand-spout out of that sandy ocean, upcurls
Behind the pair in eddies and whirls;
Most like some colossal brand,
Or wandering spirit of wrath
On his blasted path,
Or the dreadful pillar that lighted the warriors and women
Of Israel's land through the wilderness of Yemen.

And the vulture, scenting a coming carouse,
Sails, hoarsely screaming, down the sky;
The bloody hyena, be sure, is nigh,--
Fierce pillager, he, of the charnel-house!
The panther, too, who strangles the Cape-Town sheep
As they lie asleep,
Athirst for his share in the slaughter, follows;
While the gore of their victim spreads like a pool in the sandy
hollows!

She reels,--but the king of the brutes bestrides
His tottering throne to the last: with might
He plunges his terrible claws in the bright
And delicate cushions of her sides.
Yet hold!--fair play!--she rallies again!
In vain, in vain!
Her struggles but help to drain her life-blood faster;
She staggers, gasps, and sinks at the feet of her slayer and master!

She staggers, she falls; she shall struggle no more!
The death-rattle slightly convulses her throat;
Mayest look thy last on that mangled coat,
Besprent with sand, and foam, and gore!
Adieu! The orient glimmers afar,
And the morning-star
Anon will rise over Madagascar brightly.--
So rides the lion in Afric's deserts nightly.

REST IN THE BELOVED

(RUHE IN DER GELIEBTEN)

From 'Lyrics and Ballads of Heine and Other German Poets.'
Copyright 1892, by Frances Hellman. Reprinted by permission
of G.P. Putnam's Sons, publishers, New York.

Oh, here forever let me stay, love!
Here let my resting-place e'er be;
And both thy tender palms then lay, love,
Upon my hot brow soothingly.
Here at thy feet, before thee kneeling,
In heavenly rapture let me rest,
And close my eyes, bliss o'er me stealing,
Within thine arms, upon thy breast.

I'll open them but to the glances
That from thine own in radiance fall;
The look that my whole soul entrances,
O thou who art my life, my all!
I'll open them but at the flowing
Of burning tears that upward swell,
And joyously, without my knowing,
From under drooping lashes well.

Thus am I meek, and kind, and lowly,
And good and gentle evermore;
I have thee--now I'm blessed wholly;
I have thee--now my yearning's o'er.
By thy sweet love intoxicated,
Within thine arms I'm lulled to rest,
And every breath of thine is freighted
With slumber songs that soothe my breast.

A life renewed each seems bestowing;
Oh, thus to lie day after day,
And hearken with a blissful glowing
To what each other's heart-beats say!
Lost in our love, entranced, enraptured,
We disappear from time and space;
We rest and dream; our souls lie captured
Within oblivion's sweet embrace.

OH, LOVE SO LONG AS LOVE THOU CANST

Oh, love so long as love thou canst!
Oh, love so long thy soul have need!
The hour will come, the hour will come,
When by the grave thy heart shall bleed!

And let thy heart forever glow
And throb with love, and hold love's heat,
So long on earth another heart
Shall echo to its yearning beat.

And who to thee his heart shall show,
Oh raise it up and make it glad!
Oh make his every moment blithe,
And not a moment make him sad!

Guard well thy tongue; a bitter word
Soon from the mouth of anger leaps.
O God! it was not meant to wound,--
But ah! the other goes and weeps.

Oh, love so long as love thou canst!
Oh, love so long thy soul have need!
The hour will come, the hour will come,
When by the grave thy heart shall bleed!

Thou kneelest down upon the grave,
And sink'st in agony thine eyes,--
They never more the dead shall see,--
The silent church-yard hears thy sighs.

Thou mourn'st:--"Oh, look upon this heart,
That here doth weep upon this mound!
Forgive me if I caused thee pain,--
O God, it was not meant to wound!"

But he, he sees and hears thee not;
He comes not, he can never know:
The mouth that kissed thee once says not,
"Friend, I forgave thee long ago!"

He did forgive thee long ago,
Though many a hot tear bitter fell
For thee and for thy angry word;
But still he slumbers soft and well!

Oh, love so long as love thou canst!
Oh, love so long thy soul have need!
The hour will come, the hour will come,
When by the grave thy heart shall bleed!

Translation of Dr. Edward Breck.

GUSTAV FREYTAG

(1816-1895)

Gustav Freytag, one of the foremost of German novelists, was born July 13th, 1816, in Kreuzburg, Silesia, where his father was a physician. He studied alternately at Breslau and Berlin, at which latter university he was given the degree of a doctor of philosophy in 1838. In 1839 he settled as a _privatdocent_ at the University of Breslau, where he lectured on the German language and literature until 1844, when he resigned his position to devote himself to literature. He removed to Leipzig in 1846, and the following year to Dresden, where he married. In 1848 he returned to Leipzig to edit with Julian Schmidt the weekly journal Die Grenzboten, which he conducted until 1861, and again from 1869 to 1870. In 1867 he became Liberal member for Erfurt in the North German Reichstag. In 1870, on the breaking out of the Franco-Prussian war, he was attached to the staff of the Crown Prince, later the German Emperor Frederick III., and remained in service until after the battle of Sedan. Subsequently to 1870 his journalistic work was chiefly for the newly established weekly periodical Im Neuen Reich. In 1879 he retired from public life and afterward lived in Wiesbaden, except for the summer months, which he spent on his estate Siebleben near Gotha. He died at Wiesbaden, April 30th, 1895.