An ingenious anatomist has written a book[2] to prove that races are
imperishable, but nations are pliant political constructions, easily
changed or destroyed. But this writer did not found his assumed races
on any necessary law, disclosing their ideal or metaphysical necessity;
nor did he, on the other hand, count with precision the existing races,
and settle the true bounds; a point of nicety, and the popular test of
the theory. The individuals at the extremes of divergence in one race
of men are as unlike as the wolf to the lapdog. Yet each variety shades
down imperceptibly into the next, and you cannot draw the line where a
race begins or ends. Hence every writer makes a different count.
Blumenbach reckons five races; Humboldt, three; and Mr. Pickering, who
lately, in our Exploring Expedition, thinks he saw all the kinds of men
that can be on the planet, makes eleven.
[2] The Races, a Fragment. By Robert Knox. London: 1830.
The British Empire is reckoned to contain (in 1848) 222,000,000
souls,--perhaps a fifth of the population of the globe; and to comprise
a territory of 5,000,000 square miles. So far have British people
predominated. Perhaps forty of these millions are of British stock. Add
the United States of America, which reckon (in the same year), exclusive
of slaves, 20,000,000 of people, on a territory of 3,000,000 square
miles, and in which the foreign element, however considerable, is
rapidly assimilated, and you have a population of English descent and
language, of 60,000,000, and governing a population of 245,000,000
souls.
The British census proper reckons twenty-seven and a half millions in
the home countries. What makes this census important is the quality of
the units that compose it. They are free forcible men, in a country
where life is safe, and has reached the greatest value. They give the
bias to the current age; and that, not by chance or by mass, but by
their character, and by the number of individuals among them of personal
ability. It has been denied that the English have genius. Be it as it
may, men of vast intellect have been born on their soil, and they have
made or applied the principal inventions. They have sound bodies, and
supreme endurance in war and in labor. The spawning force of the race
has sufficed to the colonization of great parts of the world; yet it
remains to be seen whether they can make good the exodus of millions
from Great Britain, amounting, in 1852, to more than a thousand a day.
They have assimilating force, since they are imitated by their foreign
subjects; and they are still aggressive and propagandist, enlarging the
dominion of their arts and liberty. Their laws are hospitable, and
slavery does not exist under them. What oppression exists is incidental
and temporary; their success is not sudden or fortunate, but they have
maintained constancy and self-equality for many ages.
Is this power due to their race, or to some other cause? Men hear gladly
of the power of blood or race. Everybody likes to know that his
advantages cannot be attributed to air, soil, sea, or to local wealth,
as mines and quarries, nor to laws and traditions, nor to fortune, but
to superior brain, as it makes the praise more personal to him.
We anticipate in the doctrine of race something like that law of
physiology, that, whatever bone, muscle, or essential organ is found in
one healthy individual, the same part or organ may be found in or near
the same place in its congener; and we look to find in the son every
mental and moral property that existed in the ancestor. In race, it is
not the broad shoulders, or litheness, or stature that give advantage,
but a symmetry that reaches as far as to the wit. Then the miracle and
renown begin. Then first we care to examine the pedigree, and copy
needfully the training,--what food they ate, what nursing, school, and
exercises they had, which resulted in this mother-wit, delicacy of
thought, and robust wisdom. How came such men as King Alfred, and Roger
Bacon, William of Wykeham, Walter Raleigh, Philip Sidney, Isaac Newton,
William Shakspeare, George Chapman, Francis Bacon, George Herbert, Henry
Vane, to exist here? What made these delicate natures? was it the air?
was it the sea? was it the parentage? For it is certain that these men
are samples of their contemporaries. The hearing ear is always found
close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter
anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.
It is race, is it not? that puts the hundred millions of India under the
dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe. Race avails much,
if that be true, which is alleged, that all Celts are Catholics, and all
Saxons are Protestants; that Celts love unity of power, and Saxons the
representative principle. Race is a controlling influence in the Jew,
who, for two millenniums, under every climate, has preserved the same
character and employments. Race in the negro is of appalling
importance. The French in Canada, cut off from all intercourse with the
parent people, have held their national traits. I chanced to read
Tacitus "on the Manners of the Germans," not long since, in Missouri,
and the heart of Illinois, and I found abundant points of resemblance
between the Germans of the Hercynian forest, and our _Hoosiers_,
_Suckers_, and _Badgers_ of the American woods.
But whilst race works immortally to keep its own, it is resisted by
other forces. Civilization is a re-agent, and eats away the old traits.
The Arabs of to-day are the Arabs of Pharaoh; but the Briton of to-day
is a very different person from Cassibelaunus or Ossian. Each religious
sect has its physiognomy. The Methodists have acquired a face; the
Quakers, a face; the nuns, a face. An Englishman will pick out a
dissenter by his manners. Trades and professions carve their own lines
on face and form. Certain circumstances of English life are not less
effective: as, personal liberty; plenty of food; good ale and mutton;
open market, or good wages for every kind of labor; high bribes to
talent and skill; the island life, or the million opportunities and
outlets for expanding and misplaced talent; readiness of combination
among themselves for politics or for business; strikes; and sense of
superiority founded on habit of victory in labor and in war; and the
appetite for superiority grows by feeding.
It is easy to add to the counteracting forces to race. Credence is a
main element. 'T is said, that the views of nature held by any people
determine all their institutions. Whatever influences add to mental or
moral faculty, take men out of nationality, as out of other conditions,
and make the national life a culpable compromise.
These limitations of the formidable doctrine of race suggest others
which threaten to undermine it, as not sufficiently based. The fixity
or inconvertibleness of races as we see them, is a weak argument for the
eternity of these frail boundaries, since all our historical period is a
point to the duration in which nature has wrought. Any the least and
solitariest fact in our natural history, such as the melioration of
fruits and of animal stocks, has the worth of a _power_ in the
opportunity of geologic periods. Moreover, though we flatter the
self-love of men and nations by the legend of pure races, all our
experience is of the gradation and resolution of races, and strange
resemblances meet us everywhere. It need not puzzle us that Malay and
Papuan, Celt and Itonian, Saxon and Tartar, should mix, when we see the
rudiments of tiger and baboon in our human form, and know that the
barriers of races are not so firm, but that some spray sprinkles us from
the antediluvian seas.
The low organizations are simplest; a mere mouth, a jelly, or a straight
worm. As the scale mounts, the organizations become complex. We are
piqued with pure descent, but nature loves inoculation. A child blends
in his face the faces of both parents, and some feature from every
ancestor whose face hangs on the wall. The best nations are those most
widely related; and navigation, as effecting a world-wide mixture, is
the most potent advancer of nations.
The English composite character betrays a mixed origin. Everything
English is a fusion of distant and antagonistic elements. The language
is mixed; the names of men are of different nations,--three languages,
three or four nations;--the currents of thought are counter:
contemplation and practical skill; active intellect and dead
conservatism; world-wide enterprise, and devoted use and wont;
aggressive freedom and hospitable law, with bitter class legislation; a
people scattered by their wars and affairs over the face of the whole
earth, and homesick to a man; a country of extremes,--dukes and
chartists, Bishops of Durham and naked heathen colliers;--nothing can be
praised in it without damning exceptions, and nothing denounced without
salvos of cordial praise.
Neither do this people appear to be of one stem; but collectively a
better race than any from which they are derived. Nor is it easy to
trace it home to its original seats. Who can call by right names what
races are in Britain? Who can trace them historically? Who can
discriminate them anatomically, or metaphysically?
In the impossibility of arriving at satisfaction on the historical
question of race, and--come of whatever disputable ancestry--the
indisputable Englishman before me, himself very well marked, and nowhere
else to be found,--I fancied I could leave quite aside the choice of a
tribe as his lineal progenitors. Defoe said in his wrath, "the
Englishman was the mud of all races." I incline to the belief that, as
water, lime, and sand make mortar, so certain temperaments marry well,
and, by well-managed contrarieties, develop as drastic a character as
the English. On the whole, it is not so much a history of one or of
certain tribes of Saxons, Jutes, or Frisians, coming from one place, and
genetically identical, as it is an anthology of temperaments out of them
all. Certain temperaments suit the sky and soil of England, say eight
or ten or twenty varieties, as, out of a hundred pear-trees, eight or
ten suit the soil of an orchard, and thrive, whilst all the unadapted
temperaments die out.
The English derive their pedigree from such a range of nationalities,
that there needs sea-room and land-room to unfold the varieties of
talent and character. Perhaps the ocean serves as a galvanic battery to
distribute acids at one pole, and alkalies at the other. So England
tends to accumulate her Liberals in America, and her conservatives at
London. The Scandinavians in her race still hear in every age the
murmurs of their mother, the ocean; the Briton in the blood hugs the
homestead still.
Again, as if to intensate the influences that are not of race, what we
think of when we talk of English traits really narrows itself to a small
district. It excludes Ireland, and Scotland, and Wales, and reduces
itself at last to London, that is, to those who come and go thither.
The portraits that hang on the walls in the Academy Exhibition at
London, the figures in Punch's drawings of the public men, or of the
club-houses, the prints in the shop-windows, are distinctive English,
and not American, no, nor Scotch, nor Irish: but 't is a very restricted
nationality. As you go north into the manufacturing and agricultural
districts, and to the population that never travels, as you go into
Yorkshire, as you enter Scotland, the world's Englishman is no longer
found. In Scotland, there is a rapid loss of all grandeur of mien and
manners; a provincial eagerness and acuteness appear; the poverty of the
country makes itself remarked, and a coarseness of manners; and, among
the intellectual, is the insanity of dialectics. In Ireland, are the
same climate and soil as in England, but less food, no right relation to
the land, political dependence, small tenantry, and an inferior or
misplaced race.
These queries concerning ancestry and blood may be well allowed, for
there is no prosperity that seems more to depend on the kind of man than
British prosperity. Only a hardy and wise people could have made this
small territory great. We say, in a regatta or yacht-race, that if the
boats are anywhere nearly matched, it is the man that wins. Put the
best sailing-master into either boat, and he will win.
Yet it is fine for us to speculate in face of unbroken traditions,
though vague, and losing themselves in fable. The traditions have got
footing, and refuse to be disturbed. The kitchen clock is more
convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we
do by the Linnaean classification, for convenience, and not as exact and
final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best-settled
traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely
characteristic of the rival tribe.
I found plenty of well-marked English types, the ruddy complexion fair
and plump, robust men, with faces cut like a die, and a strong island
speech and accent; a Norman type, with the complacency that belongs to
that constitution. Others, who might be Americans, for anything that
appeared in their complexion or form: and their speech was much less
marked, and their thought much less bound. We will call them Saxons.
Then the Roman has implanted his dark complexion in the trinity or
quaternity of bloods.
1. The sources from which tradition derives their stock are mainly
three. And, first, they are of the oldest blood of the world,--the
Celtic. Some peoples are deciduous or transitory. Where are the
Greeks? where the Etrurians? where the Romans? But the Celts or
Sidonides are an old family, of whose beginning there is no memory, and
their end is likely to be still more remote in the future; for they have
endurance and productiveness. They planted Britain, and gave to the
seas and mountains names which are poems, and imitate the pure voices of
nature. They are favorably remembered in the oldest records of Europe.
They had no violent feudal tenure, but the husbandman owned the land.
They had an alphabet, astronomy, priestly culture, and a sublime creed.
They have a hidden and precarious genius. They made the best popular
literature of the Middle Ages in the songs of Merlin, and the tender and
delicious mythology of Arthur.
2. The English come mainly from the Germans, whom the Romans found hard
to conquer in two hundred and ten years,--say, impossible to
conquer,--when one remembers the long sequel; a people about whom, in
the old empire, the rumor ran, there was never any that meddled with
them that repented it not.
3. Charlemagne, halting one day in a town of Narbonnese Gaul, looked out
of a window, and saw a fleet of Northmen cruising in the Mediterranean.
They even entered the port of the town where he was, causing no small
alarm and sudden manning and arming of his galleys. As they put out to
sea again, the emperor gazed long after them, his eyes bathed in tears.
"I am tormented with sorrow," he said, "when I foresee the evils they
will bring on my posterity." There was reason for these Xerxes' tears.
The men who have built a ship and invented the rig,--cordage, sail,
compass, and pump,--the working in and out of port, have acquired much
more than a ship. Now arm them, and every shore is at their mercy.
For, if they have not numerical superiority where they anchor, they have
only to sail a mile or two to find it. Bonaparte's art of war, namely,
of concentrating force on the point of attack, must always be theirs who
have the choice of the battle-ground. Of course they come into the
fight from a higher ground of power than the land-nations; and can
engage them on shore with a victorious advantage in the retreat. As
soon as the shores are sufficiently peopled to make piracy a losing
business, the same skill and courage are ready for the service of trade.
The _Heimskringla_,[3] or Sagas of the Kings of Norway, collected by
Snorro Sturleson, is the Iliad and Odyssey of English history. Its
portraits, like Homer's, are strongly individualized. The Sagas
describe a monarchical republic like Sparta. The government disappears
before the importance of citizens. In Norway, no Persian masses fight
and perish to aggrandize a king, but the actors are bonders or
landholders, every one of whom is named and personally and
patronymically described, as the king's friend and companion. A sparse
population gives this high worth to every man. Individuals are often
noticed as very handsome persons, which trait only brings the story
nearer to the English race. Then the solid material interest
predominates, so dear to English understanding, wherein the association
is logical, between merit and land. The heroes of the Sagas are not the
knights of South Europe. No vaporing of France and Spain has corrupted
them. They are substantial farmers, whom the rough times have forced to
defend their properties. They have weapons which they use in a
determined manner, by no means for chivalry, but for their acres. They
are people considerably advanced in rural arts, living amphibiously on a
rough coast, and drawing half their food from the sea, and half from the
land. They have herds of cows, and malt, wheat, bacon, butter, and
cheese. They fish in the fiord, and hunt the deer. A king among these
farmers has a varying power, sometimes not exceeding the authority of a
sheriff. A king was maintained much as, in some of our country
districts, a winter-schoolmaster is quartered, a week here, a week
there, and a fortnight on the next farm,--on all the farms in rotation.
This the king calls going into guest-quarters; and it was the only way
in which, in a poor country, a poor king, with many retainers, could be
kept alive, when he leaves his own farm to collect his dues through the
kingdom.
[3] Heimskringla. Translated by Samuel Laing, Esq. London: 1844.
These Norsemen are excellent persons in the main, with good sense,
steadiness, wise speech, and prompt action. But they have a singular
turn for homicide; their chief end of man is to murder or to be
murdered; oars, scythes, harpoons, crow-bars, peat-knives, and hay-forks
are tools valued by them all the more for their charming aptitude for
assassinations. A pair of kings, after dinner, will divert themselves
by thrusting each his sword through the other's body, as did Yngve and
Alf. Another pair ride out on a morning for a frolic, and, finding no
weapon near, will take the bits out of their horses' mouths, and crush
each other's heads with them, as did Alric and Eric. The sight of a
tent-cord or a cloak-string puts them on hanging somebody, a wife, or a
husband, or, best of all, a king. If a farmer has so much as a hayfork,
he sticks it into a King Dag. King Ingiald finds it vastly amusing to
burn up half a dozen kings in a hall, after getting them drunk. Never
was poor gentleman so surfeited with life, so furious to be rid of it,
as the Northman. If he cannot pick any other quarrel, he will get
himself comfortably gored by a bull's horns, like Egil, or slain by a
land-slide, like the agricultural King Onund. Odin died in his bed, in
Sweden; but it was a proverb of ill condition, to die the death of old
age. King Hake of Sweden cuts and slashes in battle, as long as he can
stand, then orders his war-ship, loaded with his dead men and their
weapons, to be taken out to sea, the tiller shipped, and the sails
spread; being left alone, he sets fire to some tar-wood, and lies down
contented on deck. The wind blew off the land, the ship flew burning in
clear flame, out between the islets into the ocean, and there was the
right end of King Hake.
The early Sagas are sanguinary and piratical; the later are of a noble
strain. History rarely yields us better passages than the conversation
between King Sigurd the Crusader, and King Eystein, his brother, on
their respective merits,--one, the soldier, and the other, a lover of
the arts of peace.
But the reader of the Norman history must steel himself by holding fast
the remote compensations which result from animal vigor. As the old
fossil world shows that the first steps of reducing the chaos were
confided to saurians and other huge and horrible animals, so the
foundations of the new civility were to be laid by the most savage men.
The Normans came out of France into England worse men than they went
into it, one hundred and sixty years before. They had lost their own
language, and learned the Romance or barbarous Latin of the Gauls; and
had acquired, with the language, all the vices it had names for. The
conquest has obtained, in the chronicles, the name of the "memory of
sorrow." Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings. These founders of
the House of Lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy
and ferocious pirates. They were all alike, they took everything they
could carry, they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and killed, until
everything English was brought to the verge of ruin. Such, however, is
the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent and dignified men now
existing boast their descent from these filthy thieves, who showed a far
juster conviction of their own merits, by assuming for their types the
swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and snake, which they severally
resembled.
England yielded to the Danes and Northmen in the tenth and eleventh
centuries, and was the receptacle into which all the mettle of that
strenuous population was poured. The continued draught of the best men
in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, to these piratical expeditions,
exhausted those countries, like a tree which bears much fruit when
young, and these have been second-rate powers ever since. The power of
the race migrated, and left Norway void. King Olaf said: "When King
Harold, my father, went westward to England, the chosen men in Norway
followed him; but Norway was so emptied then, that such men have not
since been to find in the country, nor especially such a leader as King
Harold was for wisdom and bravery."
It was a tardy recoil of these invasions, when, in 1801, the British
government sent Nelson to bombard the Danish forts in the Sound; and, in
1807, Lord Cathcart, at Copenhagen, took the entire Danish fleet, as it
lay in the basins, and all the equipments from the Arsenal, and carried
them to England. Konghelle, the town where the kings of Norway, Sweden,
and Denmark were wont to meet, is now rented to a private English
gentleman for a hunting-ground.
It took many generations to trim, and comb, and perfume the first
boat-load of Norse pirates into royal highnesses and most noble Knights
of the Garter: but every sparkle of ornament dates back to the Norse
boat. There will be time enough to mellow this strength into civility
and religion. It is a medical fact, that the children of the blind see;
the children of felons have a healthy conscience. Many a mean,
dastardly boy is, at the age of puberty, transformed into a serious and
generous youth.
The mildness of the following ages has not quite effaced these traits of
Odin; as the rudiment of a structure matured in the tiger is said to be
still found unabsorbed in the Caucasian man. The nation has a tough,
acrid, animal nature, which centuries of churching and civilizing have
not been able to sweeten. Alfiori said, "the crimes of Italy were the
proof of the superiority of the stock"; and one may say of England, that
this watch moves on a splinter of adamant. The English uncultured are a
brutal nation. The crimes recorded in their calendars leave nothing to
be desired in the way of cold malignity. Dear to the English heart is a
fair stand-up fight. The brutality of the manners in the lower class
appears in the boxing, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, love of executions,
and in the readiness for a set-to in the streets, delightful to the
English of all classes. The costermongers of London streets hold
cowardice in loathing:--"we must work our fists well; we are all handy
with our fists." The public schools are charged with being bear-gardens
of brutal strength, and are liked by the people for that cause. The
fagging is a trait of the same quality. Medwin, in the Life of Shelley,
relates, that, at a military school, they rolled up a young man in a
snowball, and left him so in his room, while the other cadets went to
church;--and crippled him for life. They have retained impressment,
deck-flogging, army-flogging, and school-flogging. Such is the ferocity
of the army discipline, that a soldier sentenced to flogging, sometimes
prays that his sentence may be commuted to death. Flogging, banished
from the armies of Western Europe, remains here by the sanction of the
Duke of Wellington. The right of the husband to sell the wife has been
retained down to our times. The Jews have been the favorite victims of
royal and popular persecution. Henry III. mortgaged all the Jews in the
kingdom to his brother, the Earl of Cornwall, as security for money
which he borrowed. The torture of criminals, and the rack for extorting
evidence, were slowly disused. Of the criminal statutes, Sir Samuel
Romilly said, "I have examined the codes of all nations, and ours is the
worst, and worthy of the Anthropophagi." In the last session (18:18),
the House of Commons was listening to details of flogging and torture
practised in the jails.
As soon as this land, thus geographically posted, got a hardy people
into it, they could not help becoming the sailors and factors of the
globe. From childhood, they dabbled in water, they swum like fishes,
their playthings were boats. In the case of the ship-money, the judges
delivered it for law, that "England being an island, the very midland
shires therein are all to be accounted maritime": and Fuller adds, "the
genius even of land-locked countries driving the natives with a maritime
dexterity." As early as the conquest, it is remarked in explanation of
the wealth of England, that its merchants trade to all countries.
The English, at the present day, have great vigor of body and endurance.
Other countrymen look slight and undersized beside them, and invalids.
They are bigger men than the Americans. I suppose a hundred English
taken at random out of the street would weigh a fourth more than so many
Americans. Yet, I am told, the skeleton is not larger. They are round,
ruddy, and handsome; at least, the whole bust is well formed; and there
is a tendency to stout and powerful frames. I remarked the stoutness,
on my first landing at Liverpool; porter, drayman, coachman,
guard,--what substantial, respectable, grandfatherly figures, with
costume and manners to suit. The American has arrived at the old
mansion-house, and finds himself among uncles, aunts, and grandsires.
The pictures on the chimney-tiles of his nursery were pictures of these
people. Here they are in the identical costumes and air, which so took
him.
It is the fault of their forms that they grow stocky, and the women have
that disadvantage,--few tall, slender figures of flowing shape, but
stunted and thickset persons. The French say, that the Englishwomen
have two left hands. But, in all ages, they are a handsome race. The
bronze monuments of crusaders lying cross-legged, in the Temple Church
at London, and those in Worcester and in Salisbury Cathedrals, which are
seven hundred years old, are of the same type as the best youthful heads
of men now in England;--please by beauty of the same character, an
expression blending good-nature, valor, and refinement, and, mainly, by
that uncorrupt youth in the face of manhood, which is daily seen in the
streets of London.
Both branches of the Scandinavian race are distinguished for beauty.
The anecdote of the handsome captives which Saint Gregory found at Rome,
A.D. 600, is matched by the testimony of the Norman chroniclers, five
centuries later, who wondered at the beauty and long flowing hair of the
young English captives. Meantime, the Heimskringla has frequent
occasion to speak of the personal beauty of its heroes. When it is
considered what humanity, what resources of mental and moral power, the
traits of the blond race betoken,--its accession to empire marks a new
and finer epoch, wherein the old mineral force shall be subjugated at
last by humanity, and shall plough in its furrow henceforward. It is
not a final race, once a crab always crab, but a race with a future.
On the English face are combined decision and nerve, with the fair
complexion, blue eyes, and open and florid aspect. Hence the love of
truth, hence the sensibility, the fine perception, and poetic
construction. The fair Saxon man, with open front, and honest meaning,
domestic, affectionate, is not the wood out of which cannibal, or
inquisitor, or assassin is made. But he is moulded for law, lawful
trade, civility, marriage, the nurture of children, for colleges,
churches, charities, and colonies.
They are rather manly than warlike. When the war is over, the mask
falls from the affectionate and domestic tastes, which make them women
in kindness. This union of qualities is fabled in their national legend
of _Beauty and the Beast_, or long before, in the Greek legend of
_Hermaphrodite_. The two sexes are co-present in the English mind. I
apply to Britannia, queen of seas and colonies, the words in which her
latest novelist portrays his heroine: "She is as mild as she is game,
and as game as she is mild." The English delight in the antagonism
which combines in one person the extremes of courage and tenderness.
Nelson, dying at Trafalgar, sends his love to Lord Collingwood, and,
like an innocent school-boy that goes to bed, says, "Kiss me, Hardy,"
and turns to sleep. Lord Collingwood, his comrade, was of a nature the
most affectionate and domestic. Admiral Rodney's figure approached to
delicacy and effeminacy, and he declared himself very sensible to fear,
which he surmounted only by considerations of honor and public duty.
Clarendon says, the Duke of Buckingham was so modest and gentle, that
some courtiers attempted to put affronts on him, until they found that
this modesty and effeminacy was only a mask for the most terrible
determination. And Sir Edward Parry said of Sir John Franklin, that,
"if he found Wellington Sound open, he explored it; for he was a man who
never turned his back on a danger, yet of that tenderness, that he would
not brush away a mosquito." Even for their highwaymen the same virtue
is claimed, and Robin Hood comes described to us as _mitissimus
praedonum_, the gentlest thief. But they know where their war-dogs lie.
Cromwell, Blake, Marlborough, Chatham, Nelson, and Wellington are not to
be trifled with, and the brutal strength which lies at the bottom of
society, the animal ferocity of the quays and cock-pits, the bullies of
the costermongers of Shoreditch, Seven Dials, and Spitalfields, they
know how to wake up.
They have a vigorous health, and last well into middle and old age. The
old men are as red as roses, and still handsome. A clear skin, a
peach-bloom complexion, and good teeth are found all over the island.
They use a plentiful and nutritious diet. The operative cannot subsist
on water-cresses. Beef, mutton, wheat-bread, and malt-liquors are
universal among the first-class laborers. Good feeding is a chief point
of national pride among the vulgar, and, in their caricatures, they
represent the Frenchman as a poor, starved body. It is curious that
Tacitus found the English beer already in use among the Germans: "They
make from barley or wheat a drink corrupted into some resemblance to
wine." Lord Chief Justice Fortescue in Henry VI.'s time, says, "The
inhabitants of England drink no water, unless at certain times, on a
religious score, and by way of penance." The extremes of poverty and
ascetic penance, it would seem, never reach cold water in England.
Wood, the antiquary, in describing the poverty and maceration of Father
Lacey, an English Jesuit, does not deny him beer. He says, "his bed was
under a thatching, and the way to it up a ladder; his fare was coarse;
his drink, of a penny a gawn, or gallon."
They have more constitutional energy than any other people. They think,
with Henri Quatre, that manly exercises are the foundation of that
elevation of mind which gives one nature ascendant over another; or,
with the Arabs, that the days spent in the chase are not counted in the
length of life. They box, run, shoot, ride, row, and sail from pole to
pole. They eat and drink, and live jolly in the open air, putting a bar
of solid sleep between day and day. They walk and ride as fast as they
can, their heads bent forward, as if urged on some pressing affair. The
French say, that Englishmen in the street always walk straight before
them like mad dogs. Men and women walk with infatuation. As soon as he
can handle a gun, hunting is the fine art of every Englishman of
condition. They are the most voracious people of prey that ever
existed. Every season turns out the aristocracy into the country, to
shoot and fish. The more vigorous run out of the island to Europe, to
America, to Asia, to Africa, and Australia, to hunt with fury by gun, by
trap, by harpoon, by lasso, with clog, with horse, with elephant, or
with dromedary, all the game that is in nature. These men have written
the game-books of all countries, as Hawker, Scrope, Murray, Herbert,
Maxwell, Gumming, and a host of travellers. The people at home are
addicted to boxing, running, leaping, and rowing matches.
I suppose, the dogs and horses must be thanked for the fact, that the
men have muscles almost as tough and supple as their own. If in every
efficient man, there is first a fine animal, in the English race it is
of the best breed, a wealthy, juicy, broad-chested creature, steeped in
ale and good cheer, and a little overloaded by his flesh. Men of animal
nature rely, like animals, on their instincts. The Englishman
associates well with dogs and horses. His attachment to the horse
arises from the courage and address required to manage it. The horse
finds out who is afraid of it, and does not disguise its opinion. Their
young boiling clerks and lusty collegians like the company of horses
better than the company of professors. I suppose, the horses are better
company for them. The horse has more uses than Buffon noted. If you go
into the streets, every driver in bus or dray is a bully, and, if I
wanted a good troop of soldiers, I should recruit among the stables.
Add a certain degree of refinement to the vivacity of these riders, and
you obtain the precise quality which makes the men and women of polite
society formidable.
They come honestly by their horsemanship, with _Hengst_ and _Horsa_ for
their Saxon founders. The other branch of their race had been Tartar
nomads. The horse was all their wealth. The children were fed on
mares' milk. The pastures of Tartary were still remembered by the
tenacious practice of the Norsemen to eat horse-flesh at religious
feasts. In the Danish invasions, the marauders seized upon horses where
they landed, and were at once converted into a body of expert cavalry.
At one time, this skill seems to have declined. Two centuries ago, the
English horse never performed any eminent service beyond the seas; and
the reason assigned was, that the genius of the English hath always more
inclined them to foot-service, as pure and proper manhood, without any
mixture; whilst, in a victory on horseback, the credit ought to be
divided betwixt the man and his horse. But in two hundred years, a
change has taken place. Now, they boast that they understand horses
better than any other people in the world, and that their horses are
become their second selves.
"William the Conqueror being," says Camden, "better affected to beasts
than to men, imposed heavy fines and punishments on those that should
meddle with his game." The Saxon Chronicle says, "he loved the tall
deer as if he were their father." And rich Englishmen have followed his
example, according to their ability, ever since, in encroaching on the
tillage and commons with their game-preserves. It is a proverb in
England, that it is safer to shoot a man than a hare. The severity of
the game-laws certainly indicates an extravagant sympathy of the nation
with horses and hunters. The gentlemen are always on horseback, and
have brought horses to an ideal perfection,--the English racer is a
factitious breed. A score or two of mounted gentlemen may frequently be
seen running like centaurs down a hill nearly as steep as the roof of a
house. Every inn-room is lined with pictures of races; telegraphs
communicate, every hour, tidings of the heats from Newmarket and Ascot:
and the House of Commons adjourns over the 'Derby Day.'