THE PROGRESS.
"Great mountains on his right hand,
Both does and roes, dun and red,
And harts aye casting up the head.
Bucks that brays and harts that hailes,
And hindes running into the fields,
And he saw neither rich nor poor,
But moss and ling and bare wild moor."
SIR EGER, SIR GREYSTED, AND SIR GRYME.
In this life there was much of that peculiar charm which seems to
pervade all mankind, of whatever class or country, and in whatever
hemisphere; which irresistibly impels him to return to his, perhaps,
original and primitive state, as a nomadic being, a rover of the
forest and the plain; which, while it often seduces the refined and
civilized man of cities to reject all the conveniences and luxuries of
polite life, for the excitement and freshness, the inartificial
liberty and self-confiding independence of semi-barbarism, has never
been known to allow the native savage to renounce his freeborn
instincts, or to abandon his natural and truant disposition, for all
the advantage, all the powers, conferred by civilization.
And if, even to the freeborn and lofty-minded noble, the careless,
unconventional, equalizing life of the forest was felt as giving a
stronger pulsation to the free heart, a wider expansion to the lungs,
a deeper sense of freedom and power, how must not the same influences
have been enjoyed by those, who now, for the first time since they
were born, tasted that mysterious thing, liberty--of which they had so
often dreamed, for which they had longed so wistfully, and of which
they had formed, indeed, so indefinite an idea--for it is one of the
particulars in the very essence of liberty, as it is, perhaps, of that
kindred gift of God, health, that although all men talk of it as a
thing well understood and perfectly appreciated, not one man in ten
understands or appreciates it in the least, unless he has once enjoyed
it, and then been deprived of its possession.
It is true that, personally, neither Kenric nor Edith had ever known
what it is to be free; but they came of a free, nay! even of an
educated stock, and, being children of that Northern blood, which
never has long brooked even the suspicion of slavery, and, in some
sort, of the same race with their conquerors and masters, they had
never ceased to feel the consciousness of inalienable rights; the
galling sense of injustice done them, of humiliating degradation
inflicted on them, by their unnatural position among, but not of,
their fellows; had never ceased to hope, to pray, and to labor for a
restitution to those self-existing and immutable rights--the rights, I
mean, of living for himself, laboring for himself, acquiring for
himself, holding for himself, thinking, judging, acting for himself,
pleasing and governing himself, so long as he trench not on the
self-same right of others--to which the meanest man that is born of a
woman is entitled, from the instant when he is born into the world, as
the heir of God and nature.
The Saxon serf was, it is true, a being fallen, debased, partially
brutalized, deprived of half the natural qualities of manhood, by the
state of slavery, ignorance, and imbecility, into which he had been
deforced, and in which he was willfully detained by his masters; but
he had not yet become so utterly degraded, so far depressed below the
lowest attributes of humanity, as to acquiesce in his own debasement,
much less to rejoice in his bondage for the sake of the flesh-pots of
Egypt, or to glory in his chains, and honor the name of master.
From this misery, from this last perversion and profanation of the
human intellect divine--the being content to be a slave--the Saxon
serf had escaped thus far; and, thanks to the great God of nature, of
revelation, that last curse, that last profanation, he escaped
forever. His body the task-master had enslaved; his intellect he had
emasculated, debased, shaken, but he had not killed it; for there,
there, amid the dust and ashes of the all-but-extinguished fire, there
lurked alive, ready to be enkindled by a passing breath into a
devouring flame, the sacred spark of liberty.
Ever hoping, ever struggling to be free, when the day dawned of
freedom, the Saxon slave was fit to be free, and became free, with no
fierce outbreak of servile rage and vengeance, consequent on servile
emancipation, but with the calm although enthusiastical gladness which
fitted him to become a freeman, a citizen, and, as he is, the master
of one half of the round world. It is not, ah! it is not the chain, it
is not the lash, it is not the daily toil, it is not the disruption of
domestic ties and affections, that prove, that constitute the sin, the
sorrow, and the shameful reproach of slavery.
Ah! no. But it is the very converse of these--the very point insisted
on so complacently, proclaimed so triumphantly, by the advocates of
this accursed thing--it is that, in spite of the chain, in spite of
the lash, in spite of the enforced labor, in spite of the absence or
disruption of family ties and affections, the slave is sleek,
satisfied, self-content; that he waxes fat among the flesh-pots; that
he comes fawning to the smooth words, and frolics, delighted, fresh
from the lash of his master, in no wise superior to the spaniel,
either in aspiration or in instinct. It is in that he envies not the
free man his freedom, but, in his hideous lack of all self-knowledge,
self-reliance, self-respect, is content to be a slave, content to eat,
and grow fat and die, without a present concern beyond the avoidance
of corporeal pain and the enjoyment of sensual pleasure, without an
aspiration for the future, beyond those of the beasts, which graze and
perish.
It is in this that lies the mortal sin, the never-dying reproach, of
him who would foster, would preserve, would propagate, the curse of
slavery; not that he is a tyrant over the body, but that he is a
destroyer of the soul--that he would continue a state of things which
reduces a human being, a fellow-man, whether of an inferior race or
no--for, as of congenerous cattle there are many distinct tribes, so
of men, and of Caucasian men too, there be many races, distinct in
physical, in moral, in animal, in intellectual qualities, as well as
in color and conformation, if not distinct in origin--to the level of
the beast which knoweth not whence he cometh or whither he goeth, nor
what is to him for good, or what for evil, which hopes not to rise or
to advance, either here or hereafter, but toils day after day,
contented with his daily food, and lies down to sleep, and rises up to
labor and to feed, as if God had created man with no higher purpose
than to sleep and eat alternately, until the night cometh from which,
on earth, there shall be no awakening.
But of this misery the Saxon serf was exempt: and, to do him justice,
of this reproach was the Norman conqueror exempt also. Of the use of
arms, and the knowledge of warfare, he indeed deprived his serfs, for
as they outnumbered him by thousands in the field, equalled him in
resolution, perhaps excelled him in physical strength, to grant such
knowledge would have been to commit immediate suicide--but of no other
knowledge, least of all of the knowledge that leads to immortality,
did he strive to debar him. Admittance to holy orders was patent to
the lowest Saxon, and in those days the cloister was the gate to all
knowledge sacred or profane, to all arts, all letters, all
refinements, and above all to that knowledge which is the greatest
power--the knowledge of dealing with the human heart, to govern
it--the knowledge, which so often set the hempen sandal of the Saxon
monk upon the mailed neck of the Norman king, and which, in the very
reign of which I write, had raised a low-born man of the common Saxon
race to be Archbishop of Canterbury, the keeper of the conscience of
the king, the primate, and for a time the very ruler of the realm.
Often, indeed, did the superior knowledge of the cowled Saxon avenge
on his masters the wrongs of his enslaved brethren; and while the
learned priesthood of the realm were the brethren of its most abject
slaves, no danger that those slaves should ever become wholly
ignorant, hopeless, or degraded--and so it was seen in the end; for
that very knowledge which it was permitted to the servile race to
gain, while it taught them to cherish and fitted them to deserve
freedom, in the end won it for them; at the expense of no floods of
noble blood, through the sordure and soil of no savage Saturnalia,
such as marked the emancipation alike of the white serfs of
revolutionized France, and the black slaves of disenthralled St.
Domingo.
And so it was seen in the deportment of Kenric the serf, and of the
slave girl Edith, even in these first days of their newly-acquired
freedom.
Self-respect they had never lost altogether; and their increased sense
of it was shown in the increased gravity and calmness and becomingness
of their deportment.
Slaves may be merry, or they may be sullen. But they can not be
thoughtful, or calm, or careworn. The French, while they were
feudal slaves, before the Revolution, were the blithest, the most
thoughtless, the merriest, and most frolicsome, of mortals; they had
no morrows for which to take care, no liberties which to study, no
rights which to guard. The English peasant was then, as the French is
fast becoming now, grave rather than frivolous, a thinker more than a
fiddler, a doer very much more than a dancer. Was he, is he, the less
happy, the less respectable, the lower in the scale of intellect, that
he is the farther from the monkey, and the nearer to the man?
The merriment, the riotous glee, the absolute abandonment of the
plantation African to the humor, the glee of the moment, is
unapproached by any thing known of human mirthfulness.
The gravity, the concentrated thought, the stern abstractedness,
the careworn aspect of the free American is proverbial--the first
thing observable in him by foreigners. He has more to guard, more
at which to aspire, more on which he prides himself, at times almost
boastfully, more for which to respect himself, at times almost to the
contempt of others, than any mortal man, his co-equal, under any other
form of government, on any other soil. Is he the less happy for his
cares, or would he change them for the recklessness of the well-clad,
well-fed slave--for the thoughtlessness of the first subject in a
despotic kingdom?
Kenric had been always a thinker, though a serf; his elder brother had
been a monk, a man of strong sense and some attainment; his mother had
been the daughter of one who had known, if he had lost, freedom. With
his mother's milk he had imbibed the love of freedom; from his
brother's love and teachings he had learned what a freeman should be;
by his own passionate and energetic will he had determined to become
free. He would have become so ere long, had not accident anticipated
his resolve; for he had laid by, already, from the earnings of his
leisure hours, above one half of the price whereby to purchase
liberty. He was now even more thoughtful and calmer; but his step was
freer, his carriage bolder, his head was erect. He was neither afraid
to look a freeman in the eye, nor to render meet deference to his
superior. For the freeman ever knows, nor is ashamed to acknowledge,
that while the equality of man in certain rights, which may be called,
for lack of a better title, natural and political, is co-existent with
himself, inalienable, indefeasible, immutable, and eternal, there is
no such thing whatever, nor can ever be, as the equality of man in
things social, more than there can be in personal strength, grace, or
beauty, in the natural gifts of intellect, or in the development of
wisdom. Of him who boasts that he has no superior, it may almost be
said that he has few inferiors.
Thereof Kenric--as he rode along with his harness on his back, and his
weapons in his hand, a freeman among freemen, a feudal retainer among
the retainers, some Norman, some Saxon, of his noble lord--was neither
louder, nor noisier, nor more exultant, perhaps the reverse, than his
wont, though happier far than he had conceived it possible for him to
be.
And by his bearing, his comrades and fellows judged him, and ruled
their own bearing toward him. The Saxons of the company naturally
rejoiced to see their countryman free by his own merit, and, seeing
him in all things their equal, gladly admitted him to be so. The
haughtier Normans, seeing that he bore his bettered fortunes as
became a man, ready for either fortune, admitted him as one who
had won his freedom bravely, and wore it as if it had been his from
his birth--they muttered beneath their thick mustaches, that he
deserved to be a Norman.
Edith, on the contrary, young yet, and unusually handsome, who had
been the pet of her own people, and the favorite of her princely
masters, who had never undergone any severe labor, nor suffered any
poignant sorrow, who knew nothing of the physical hardships of
slavery, more than she did of the real and tangible blessings of
liberty, had ever been as happy and playful as a kitten, and as
tuneful as a bird among the branches.
But now her voice was silent of spontaneous song, subdued in
conversation, full fraught with a suppressed deeper feeling. The very
beauty of the fair face was changed, soberer, more hopeful, farther
seeing, full no longer of an earthly, but more with something of an
angel light.
The spirit had spoken within her, the statue had learned that it had a
soul.
And Guendolen had noted, yet not fully understood the change or its
nature. More than once she had called her to her bridle-rein and
conversed with her, and tried to draw her out, in vain. At last, she
put the question frankly--
"You are quieter, Edith, calmer, sadder, it seems to me," she said,
"than I have ever seen you, since I first came to Waltheofstow. I have
done all that lies in me to make you happy, and I should be sorry that
you were sad or discontented."
"Sad, discontented! Oh! no, lady, no!" she replied, smiling among her
tears. "Only too happy--too happy, to be loud or joyous. All happiest
things, I think, have a touch of melancholy in them. Do you think,
lady, yonder little stream," pointing to one which wound along by the
roadside, now dancing over shelvy rapids, now sleeping in silent
eddies, "is less happy where it lies calm and quiet, reflecting
heaven's face from its deep bosom, and smiling with its hundred
tranquil dimples, than where it frolics and sings among the pebbles,
or leaps over the rocks which toss it into noisy foam-wreaths? No!
lady, no. There it gathers its merriment and its motion, from the mere
force of outward causes; here it collects itself from the depth of its
own heart, and manifests its joy and love, and thanks God in silence.
It is so with me, Lady Guendolen. My heart is too full for music, but
not too shallow to reflect boundless love and gratitude forever."
The lady smiled, and made some slight reply, but she was satisfied;
for it was evident that the girl's poetry and gratitude both came
direct from her heart; and in the smile of the noble demoiselle there
was a touch of half-satiric triumph, as she turned her quick glance to
Sir Yvo, who had heard all that passed, and asked him, slyly, "And do
you, indeed, think, gentle father, that these Saxons are so hopelessly
inferior, that they are fitting for nothing but mere toil; or is this
the mere inspiration that springs from the sense of freedom?"
"I think, indeed," he replied, "that my little Guendolen is but a
spoiled child at the best; and, as to my thoughts in regard to the
Saxons, them I shall best consult my peace of mind and pocket by
keeping my own property; since, by our Lady's Grace! you may take it
into your head to have all the serfs in the north emancipated; and
that is a little beyond my powers of purchase. But see, Guendolen, see
how the sunbeams glint and glitter yonder on the old tower of Barden,
and how redly it stands out from those purple clouds which loom so
dark and thunderous over the peaceful woods of Bolton. Give your
jennet her head, girl, and let her canter over these fair meadows,
that we may reach the abbey and taste the noble prior's hospitality
before the thunder gust is upon us."
And quickening its pace, the long train wound its way upward, by the
bright waters of the beautiful Wharfe, and speedily obtained the
shelter, and the welcome they expected from the good and generous
monks of Bolton, the noblest abbaye in the loveliest dale of all the
broad West Riding.
The next morning found them traversing the broken green country that
lies about the head of the romantic Eyre, and threading the wild
passes of Ribbledale, beneath the shadow of the misty peaks of
Pennigant and Ingleborough, swathed constantly in volumed vapor,
whence the clanging cry of the eagle, as he wheeled far beyond the ken
of mortal eyes, came to the ears of the voyagers, on whom he looked
securely down as he rode the storm.
That night, no castle or abbey, no village even, with its humble
hostelry, being, in those days, to be found among those wild fells and
deep valleys, bowers were built of the materials with which the
hillsides were plentifully feathered throughout that sylvan and
mountainous district, of which the old proverbial distich holds good
to this very day:
"O! the oak, the ash, and the bonny ivy tree,
They flourish best at home in the north countree."
Young sprouts of the juniper, soft ferns, and the delicious purple
heather, now in its most luxurious flush of summer bloom and perfume,
furnished agreeable and elastic couches; and, as the stores carried by
the sumpter mules had been replenished by the large hospitality of the
prior of Bolton, heronshaw and egret, partridge and moorgame, wildfowl
and venison, furnished forth their board, with pasties of carp and
eels, and potted trout and char from the lakes whither they were
wending, and they fared most like crowned heads within the precincts
of a royal city, there, under the shadow of the gray crags and bare
storm-beaten brow of bleak Whernside, there where, in this nineteenth
century, the belated wayfarer would deem himself thrice happy, if he
secured the rudest supper of oat-cakes and skim-milk cheese, with a
draught of thin ale, the luxuries of the hardy agricultural population
of the dales.