UNDER THE DRACHENFELS.
1. Without ignobly trusting the devices of artificial memory--far less
slighting the pleasure and power of resolute and thoughtful memory--my
younger readers will find it extremely useful to note any coincidences
or links of number which may serve to secure in their minds what may
be called Dates of Anchorage, round which others, less important, may
swing at various cables' lengths.
Thus, it will be found primarily a most simple and convenient
arrangement of the years since the birth of Christ, to divide them by
fives of centuries,--that is to say, by the marked periods of the
fifth, tenth, fifteenth, and, now fast nearing us, twentieth
centuries.
And this--at first seemingly formal and arithmetical--division, will
be found, as we use it, very singularly emphasized by signs of most
notable change in the knowledge, disciplines, and morals of the human
race.
2. All dates, it must farther be remembered, falling within the fifth
century, begin with the number 4 (401, 402, etc.); and all dates in
the tenth century with the number 9 (901, 902, etc.); and all dates in
the fifteenth century with the number 14 (1401, 1402, etc.)
In our immediate subject of study, we are concerned with the first of
these marked centuries--the fifth--of which I will therefore ask you
to observe two very interesting divisions.
All dates of years in that century, we said, must begin with the
number 4.
If you halve it for the second figure, you get 42.
And if you double it for the second figure, you get 48.
[Illustration: Plate II.--THE BIBLE OF AMIENS. NORTHERN PORCH BEFORE
RESTORATION.]
Add 1, for the third figure, to each of these numbers, and you get 421
and 481, which two dates you will please fasten well down, and let
there be no drifting about of them in your heads.
For the first is the date of the birth of Venice herself, and her
dukedom, (see 'St. Mark's Rest,' Part I., p. 30); and the second is
the date of birth of the French Venice, and her kingdom; Clovis being
in that year crowned in Amiens.
3. These are the great Birthdays--Birthdates--in the fifth century, of
Nations. Its Deathdays we will count, at another time.
Since, not for dark Rialto's dukedom, nor for fair France's kingdom,
only, are these two years to be remembered above all others in the
wild fifth century; but because they are also the birth-years of a
great Lady, and greater Lord, of all future Christendom--St.
Genevieve, and St. Benedict.
Genevieve, the 'white wave' (Laughing water)--the purest of all the
maids that have been named from the sea-foam or the rivulet's ripple,
unsullied,--not the troubled and troubling Aphrodite, but the
Leucothea of Ulysses, the guiding wave of deliverance.
White wave on the blue--whether of pure lake or sunny
sea--(thenceforth the colours of France, blue field with white
lilies), she is always the type of purity, in active brightness of the
entire soul and life--(so distinguished from the quieter and
restricted innocence of St. Agnes),--and all the traditions of sorrow
in the trial or failure of noble womanhood are connected with her
name; Ginevra, in Italian, passing into Shakespeare's Imogen; and
Guinevere, the torrent wave of the British mountain streams, of whose
pollution your modern sentimental minstrels chant and moan to you,
lugubriously useless;--but none tell you, that I hear, of the victory
and might of this white wave of France.
4. A shepherd maid she was--a tiny thing, barefooted,
bare-headed--such as you may see running wild and innocent, less
cared for now than their sheep, over many a hillside of France and
Italy. Tiny enough;--seven years old, all told, when first
one hears of her: "Seven times one are seven, (I am old, you may trust
me, linnet, linnet[10])," and all around her--fierce as the Furies, and
wild as the winds of heaven--the thunder of the Gothic armies,
reverberate over the ruins of the world.
5. Two leagues from Paris, (_Roman_ Paris, soon to pass away with Rome
herself,) the little thing keeps her flock, not even her own, nor her
father's flock, like David; she is the hired servant of a richer
farmer of Nanterre. Who can tell me anything about Nanterre?--which of
our pilgrims of this omni-speculant, omni-nescient age has thought of
visiting what shrine may be there? I don't know even on what side of
Paris it lies,[11] nor under which heap of railway cinders and iron one
is to conceive the sheep-walks and blossomed fields of fairy St.
Phyllis. There were such left, even in my time, between Paris and St.
Denis, (see the prettiest chapter in all the "Mysteries of Paris,"
where Fleur de Marie runs wild in them for the first time), but now, I
suppose, St. Phyllis's native earth is all thrown up into bastion and
glacis, (profitable and blessed of all saints, and her, as _these_
have since proved themselves!) or else are covered with manufactories
and cabarets. Seven years old she was, then, when on his way to
_England_ from Auxerre, St. Germain passed a night in her village, and
among the children who brought him on his way in the morning in more
kindly manner than Elisha's convoy, noticed this one--wider-eyed in
reverence than the rest; drew her to him, questioned her, and was
sweetly answered: That she would fain be Christ's handmaid. And he
hung round her neck a small copper coin, marked with the cross.
Thencefoward Genevieve held herself as "separated from the world."
[Footnote 10: Miss Ingelow.]
[Footnote 11: On inquiry, I find in the flat between Paris and Sèvres.]
6. It did not turn out so, however. Far the contrary. You must think of
her, instead, as the first of Parisiennes. Queen of Vanity Fair, that
was to be, sedately poor St. Phyllis, with her copper-crossed farthing
about her neck! More than Nitocris was to Egypt, more than Semiramis to
Nineveh, more than Zenobia to the city of palm trees--this
seven-years-old shepherd maiden became to Paris and her France. You have
not heard of her in that kind?--No: how should you?--for she did not
lead armies, but stayed them, and all her power was in peace.
7. There are, however, some seven or eight and twenty lives of her, I
believe; into the literature of which I cannot enter, nor need, all
having been ineffective in producing any clear picture of her to the
modern French or English mind; and leaving one's own poor sagacities
and fancy to gather and shape the sanctity of her into an
intelligible, I do not say a _credible_, form; for there is no
question here about belief,--the creature is as real as Joan of Arc,
and far more powerful;--she is separated, just as St. Martin is, by
his patience, from too provocative prelates--by her quietness of
force, from the pitiable crowd of feminine martyr saints.
There are thousands of religious girls who have never got themselves
into any calendars, but have wasted and wearied away their
lives--heaven knows why, for _we_ cannot; but here is one, at any
rate, who neither scolds herself to martyrdom, nor frets herself into
consumption, but becomes a tower of the Flock, and builder of folds
for them all her days.
8. The first thing, then, you have to note of her, is that she is a
pure native _Gaul_. She does not come as a missionary out of Hungary,
or Illyria, or Egypt, or ineffable space; but grows at Nanterre, like
a marguerite in the dew, the first "Reine Blanche" of Gaul.
I have not used this ugly word 'Gaul' before, and we must be quite
sure what it means, at once, though it will cost us a long
parenthesis.
9. During all the years of the rising power of Rome, her people called
everybody a Gaul who lived north of the sources of Tiber. If you are not
content with that general statement, you may read the article "Gallia"
in Smith's dictionary, which consists of seventy-one columns of close
print, containing each as much as three of my pages; and tells you at
the end of it, that "though long, it is not complete." You may however,
gather from it, after an attentive perusal, as much as I have above told
you.
But, as early as the second century after Christ, and much more
distinctly in the time with which we are ourselves concerned--the
fifth--the wild nations opposed to Rome, and partially subdued, or
held at bay by her, had resolved themselves into two distinct masses,
belonging to two distinct _latitudes_. One, _fixed_ in habitation of
the pleasant temperate zone of Europe--England with her western
mountains, the healthy limestone plateaux and granite mounts of
France, the German labyrinths of woody hill and winding thal, from the
Tyrol to the Hartz, and all the vast enclosed basin and branching
valleys of the Carpathians. Think of these four districts, briefly and
clearly, as 'Britain,' 'Gaul,' 'Germany,' and 'Dacia.'
10. North of these rudely but patiently _resident_ races, possessing
fields and orchards, quiet herds, homes of a sort, moralities and
memories not ignoble, dwelt, or rather drifted, and shook, a shattered
chain of gloomier tribes, piratical mainly, and predatory, nomad
essentially; homeless, of necessity, finding no stay nor comfort in
earth, or bitter sky: desperately wandering along the waste sands and
drenched morasses of the flat country stretching from the mouths of
the Rhine to those of the Vistula, and beyond Vistula nobody knows
where, nor needs to know. Waste sands and rootless bogs their portion,
ice-fastened and cloud-shadowed, for many a day of the rigorous year:
shallow pools and oozings and windings of retarded streams, black
decay of neglected woods, scarcely habitable, never loveable; to this
day the inner main-lands little changed for good[12]--and their
inhabitants now fallen even on sadder times.
[Footnote 12: See generally any description that Carlyle has had
occasion to give of Prussian or Polish ground, or edge of Baltic
shore.]
11. For in the fifth century they had herds of cattle[13] to drive and
kill, unpreserved hunting-grounds full of game and wild deer, tameable
reindeer also then, even so far in the south; spirited hogs, good for
practice of fight as in Meleager's time, and afterwards for bacon;
furry creatures innumerable, all good for meat or skin. Fish of the
infinite sea breaking their bark-fibre nets; fowl innumerable, migrant
in the skies, for their flint-headed arrows; bred horses for their own
riding; ships of no mean size, and of all sorts, flat-bottomed for the
oozy puddles, keeled and decked for strong Elbe stream and furious
Baltic on the one side, for mountain-cleaving Danube and the black
lake of Colchos on the south.
[Footnote 13: Gigantic--and not yet fossilized! See Gibbon's note on
the death of Theodebert: "The King pointed his spear--the Bull
_overturned a tree on his head_,--he died the same day."--vii. 255.
The Horn of Uri and her shield, with the chiefly towering crests of
the German helm, attest the terror of these Aurochs herds.]
12. And they were, to all outward aspect, and in all _felt_ force, the
living powers of the world, in that long hour of its transfiguration.
All else known once for awful, had become formalism, folly, or
shame:--the Roman armies, a mere sworded mechanism, fast falling
confused, every sword against its fellow;--the Roman civil multitude,
mixed of slaves, slave-masters, and harlots; the East, cut off from
Europe by the intervening weakness of the Greek. These starving troops
of the Black forests and White seas, themselves half wolf, half
drift-wood, (as _we_ once called ourselves Lion-hearts, and
Oak-hearts, so they), merciless as the herded hound, enduring as the
wild birch-tree and pine. You will hear of few beside them for five
centuries yet to come: Visigoths, west of Vistula;--Ostrogoths, east
of Vistula; radiant round little Holy Island (Heligoland), our own
Saxons, and Hamlet the Dane, and his foe the sledded Polack on the
ice,--all these south of Baltic; and pouring _across_ Baltic,
constantly, her mountain-ministered strength, Scandinavia, until at
last _she_ for a time rules all, and the Norman name is of disputeless
dominion, from the North Cape to Jerusalem.
13. _This_ is the apparent, this the only recognised world history, as
I have said, for five centuries to come. And yet the real history is
underneath all this. The wandering armies are, in the heart of them,
only living hail, and thunder, and fire along the ground. But the
Suffering Life, the rooted heart of native humanity, growing up in
eternal gentleness, howsoever wasted, forgotten, or spoiled,--itself
neither wasting, nor wandering, nor slaying, but unconquerable by
grief or death, became the seed ground of all love, that was to be
born in due time; giving, then, to mortality, what hope, joy, or
genius it could receive; and--if there be immortality--rendering out
of the grave to the Church her fostering Saints, and to Heaven her
helpful Angels.
14. Of this low-nestling, speechless, harmless, infinitely submissive,
infinitely serviceable order of being, no Historian ever takes the
smallest notice, except when it is robbed or slain. I can give you no
picture of it, bring to your ears no murmur of it, nor cry. I can only
show you the absolute 'must have been' of its unrewarded past, and the
way in which all we have thought of, or been told, is founded on the
deeper facts in its history, unthought of, and untold.
15. The main mass of this innocent and invincible peasant life is, as I
have above told you, grouped in the fruitful and temperate districts of
(relatively) mountainous Europe,--reaching, west to east, from the
Cornish Land's End to the mouth of the Danube. Already, in the times we
are now dealing with, it was full of native passion--generosity--and
intelligence capable of all things. Dacia gave to Rome the four last of
her great Emperors,[14]--Britain to Christianity the first deeds, and
the final legends, of her chivalry,--Germany, to all manhood, the truth
and the fire of the Frank,--Gaul, to all womanhood, the patience and
strength of St. Genevieve.
[Footnote 14: Claudius, Aurelian, Probus, Constantius; and after the
division of the empire, to the East, Justinian. "The emperor Justinian
was born of an obscure race of Barbarians, the inhabitants of a wild and
desolate country, to which the names of Dardania, of Dacia, and of
Bulgaria have been successively applied. The names of these Dardanian
peasants are Gothic, and almost English. Justinian is a translation of
Uprauder (upright); his father, Sabatius,--in Græco-barbarous language,
Stipes--was styled in his village 'Istock' (Stock)."--Gibbon, beginning
of chap. xl. and note.]
16. The _truth_, and the fire, of the Frank,--I must repeat with
insistence,--for my younger readers have probably been in the habit of
thinking that the French were more polite than true. They will find,
if they examine into the matter, that only Truth _can_ be polished:
and that all we recognize of beautiful, subtle, or constructive, in
the manners, the language, or the architecture of the French, comes of
a pure veracity in their nature, which you will soon feel in the
living creatures themselves if you love them: if you understand even
their worst rightly, their very Revolution was a revolt against lies;
and against the betrayal of Love. No people had ever been so loyal in
vain.
17. That they were originally Germans, they themselves I suppose would
now gladly forget; but how they shook the dust of Germany off their
feet--and gave themselves a new name--is the first of the phenomena
which we have now attentively to observe respecting them.
"The most rational critics," says Mr. Gibbon in his tenth chapter,
"_suppose_ that _about_ the year 240" (_suppose_ then, we, for our
greater comfort, say _about_ the year 250, half-way to end of fifth
century, where we are,--ten years less or more, in cases of 'supposing
about,' do not much matter, but some floating buoy of a date will be
handy here.)
'About' A.D. 250, then, "a new confederacy was formed, under the name
of Franks, by the old inhabitants of the lower Rhine and the Weser."
18. My own impression, concerning the old inhabitants of the lower
Rhine and the Weser, would have been that they consisted mostly of
fish, with superficial frogs and ducks; but Mr. Gibbon's note on the
passage informs us that the new confederation composed itself of human
creatures, in these items following.
1. The Chauci, who lived we are not told where.
2. The Sicambri " in the Principality of Waldeck.
3. The Attuarii " in the Duchy of Berg.
4. The Bructeri " on the banks of the Lippe.
5. The Chamavii " in the country of the Bructeri.
6. The Catti " in Hessia.
All this I believe you will be rather easier in your minds if you
forget than if you remember; but if it please you to read, or re-read,
(or best of all, get read to you by some real Miss Isabella Wardour,)
the story of Martin Waldeck in the 'Antiquary,' you will gain from it
a sufficient notion of the central character of "the Principality of
_Waldeck_" connected securely with that important German word;
'woody'--or 'wood_ish_,' I suppose?--descriptive of rock and
half-grown forest; together with some wholesome reverence for Scott's
instinctively deep foundations of nomenclature.
19. But for our present purpose we must also take seriously to our
maps again, and get things within linear limits of space.
All the maps of Germany which I have myself the privilege of possessing,
diffuse themselves, just north of Frankfort, into the likeness of a
painted window broken small by Puritan malice, and put together again by
ingenious churchwardens with every bit of it wrong side upwards;--this
curious vitrerie purporting to represent the sixty, seventy, eighty, or
ninety dukedoms, marquisates, counties, baronies, electorates, and the
like, into which hereditary Alemannia cracked itself in that latitude.
But under the mottling colours, and through the jotted and jumbled
alphabets of distracted dignities--besides a chain-mail of black
railroads over all, the chains of it not in links, but bristling
with legs, like centipedes,--a hard forenoon's work with good
magnifying-glass enables one approximately to make out the course of the
Weser, and the names of certain towns near its sources, deservedly
memorable.
20. In case you have not a forenoon to spare, nor eyesight to waste,
this much of merely necessary abstract must serve you,--that from the
Drachenfels and its six brother felsen, eastward, trending to the north,
there runs and spreads a straggling company of gnarled and mysterious
craglets, jutting and scowling above glens fringed by coppice, and
fretful or musical with stream; the crags, in pious ages, mostly
castled, for distantly or fancifully Christian purposes;--the glens,
resonant of woodmen, or burrowed at the sides by miners, and invisibly
tenanted farther, underground, by gnomes, and above by forest and other
demons. The entire district, clasping crag to crag, and guiding dell to
dell, some hundred and fifty miles (with intervals) between the Dragon
mountain above Rhine, and the Rosin mountain, 'Hartz' shadowy still to
the south of the riding grounds of Black Brunswickers of indisputable
bodily presence;--shadowy anciently with 'Hercynian' (hedge, or fence)
forest, corrupted or coinciding into Hartz, or Rosin forest, haunted by
obscurely apparent foresters of at least resinous, not to say
sulphurous, extraction.
21. A hundred and fifty miles east to west, say half as much north to
south--about a thousand square miles in whole--of metalliferous,
coniferous, and Ghostiferous mountain, fluent, and diffluent for us,
both in mediæval and recent times, with the most Essential oil of
Turpentine, and Myrrh or Frankincense of temper and imagination, which
may be typified by it, producible in Germany; especially if we think
how the more delicate uses of Rosin, as indispensable to the
Fiddle-bow, have developed themselves, from the days of St. Elizabeth
of Marburg to those of St. Mephistopheles of Weimar.
22. As far as I know, this cluster of wayward cliff and dingle has no
common name as a group of hills; and it is quite impossible to make
out the diverse branching of it in any maps I can lay hand on: but we
may remember easily, and usefully, that it is _all_ north of the
Maine,--that it rests on the Drachenfels at one end, and tosses itself
away to the morning light with a concave swoop, up to the Hartz,
(Brocken summit, 3700 feet above sea, nothing higher): with one
notable interval for Weser stream, of which presently.
23. We will call this, in future, the chain, or company, of
the Enchanted mountains; and then we shall all the more easily join on
the Giant mountains, Riesen-Gebirge, when we want them; but these are
altogether higher, sterner, and not yet to be invaded; the nearer
ones, through which our road lies, we might perhaps more aptly call
the Goblin mountains; but that would be scarcely reverent to St.
Elizabeth, nor to the numberless pretty chatelaines of towers, and
princesses of park and glen, who have made German domestic manners
sweet and exemplary, and have led their lightly rippling and
translucent lives down the glens of ages, until enchantment becomes,
perhaps, too canonical in the Almanach de Gotha.
We will call them therefore the Enchanted Mountains, not the Goblin;
perceiving gratefully also that the Rock spirits of them have really
much more of the temper of fairy physicians than of gnomes: each--as
it were with sensitive hazel wand instead of smiting rod--beckoning,
out of sparry caves, effervescent Brunnen, beneficently salt and warm.
24. At the very heart of this Enchanted chain, then--(and the
beneficentest, if one use it and guide it rightly, of all the Brunnen
there,) sprang the fountain of the earliest Frank race; "in the
principality of Waldeck,"--you can trace their current to no farther
source; there it rises out of the earth.
'Frankenberg' (Burg), on right bank of the Eder, nineteen miles north of
Marburg, you may find marked clearly in the map No. 18 of Black's
General Atlas, wherein the cluster of surrounding bewitched mountains,
and the valley of Eder-stream otherwise (as the village higher up the
dell still calls itself) "Engel-Bach," "Angel Brook," joining that of
the Fulda, just above Cassel, are also delineated in a way intelligible
to attentive mortal eyes. I should be plagued with the names in trying a
woodcut; but a few careful pen-strokes, or wriggles, of your own
off-hand touching, would give you the concurrence of the actual sources
of Weser in a comfortably extricated form, with the memorable towns on
them, or just south of them, on the other slope of the watershed,
towards Maine. Frankenberg and Waldeck on Eder, Fulda and Cassel on
Fulda, Eisenach on Werra, who accentuates himself into Weser after
taking Fulda for bride, as Tees the Greta, beyond Eisenach, under the
Wartzburg, (of which you have heard as a castle employed on Christian
mission and Bible Society purposes), town-streets below hard paved with
basalt--name of it, Iron-ach, significant of Thuringian armouries in the
old time,--it is active with mills for many things yet.
25. The rocks all the way from Rhine, thus far, are jets and spurts of
basalt through irony sandstone, with a strip of coal or two northward,
by the grace of God not worth digging for; at Frankenberg even a gold
mine; also, by Heaven's mercy, poor of its ore; but wood and iron
always to be had for the due trouble; and, of softer wealth above
ground,--game, corn, fruit, flax, wine, wool, and hemp! Monastic care
over all, in Fulda's and Walter's houses--which I find marked by a
cross as built by some pious Walter, Knight of Meiningen on the Boden
wasser, Bottom water, as of water having found its way well down at
last: so "Boden-See," of Rhine well got down out of Via Mala.
26. And thus, having got your springs of Weser clear from the rock;
and, as it were, gathered up the reins of your river, you can draw for
yourself, easily enough, the course of its farther stream, flowing
virtually straight north, to the North Sea. And mark it strongly on
your sketched map of Europe, next to the border Vistula, leaving out
Elbe yet for a time. For now, you may take the whole space between
Weser and Vistula (north of the mountains), as wild barbarian (Saxon
or Goth); but, piercing the source of the Franks at Waldeck, you will
find them gradually, but swiftly, filling all the space between Weser
and the mouths of Rhine, passing from mountain foam into calmer
diffusion over the Netherland, where their straying forest and
pastoral life has at last to embank itself into muddy agriculture, and
in bleak-flying sea mist, forget the sunshine on its basalt crags.
27. Whereupon, _we_ must also pause, to embank ourselves somewhat; and
before other things, try what we can understand in this name of Frank,
concerning which Gibbon tells us, in his sweetest tones of satisfied
moral serenity--"The love of liberty was the ruling passion of these
Germans. They deserved, they assumed, they maintained, the honourable
epithet of Franks, or Freemen." He does not, however, tell us in what
language of the time--Chaucian, Sicambrian, Chamavian, or
Cattian,--'Frank' ever meant Free: nor can I find out myself what tongue
of any time it first belongs to; but I doubt not that Miss Yonge
('History of Christian Names,' Articles on Frey and Frank), gives the
true root, in what she calls the High German "Frang," Free _Lord_. Not
by any means a Free _Commoner_, or anything of the sort! but a person
whose nature and name implied the existence around him, and beneath, of
a considerable number of other persons who were by no means 'Frang,' nor
Frangs. His title is one of the proudest then maintainable;--ratified at
last by the dignity of age added to that of valour, into the Seigneur,
or Monseigneur, not even yet in the last cockney form of it, 'Mossoo,'
wholly understood as a republican term!
28. So that, accurately thought of, the quality of Frankness glances
only with the flat side of it into any meaning of 'Libre,' but with all
its cutting edge, determinedly, and to all time, it signifies Brave,
strong, and honest, above other men.[15] The old woodland race were
never in any wolfish sense 'free,' but in a most human sense Frank,
outspoken, meaning what they had said, and standing to it, when they had
got it out. Quick and clear in word and act, fearless utterly and
restless always;--but idly lawless, or weakly lavish, neither in deed
nor word. Their frankness, if you read it as a scholar and a Christian,
and not like a modern half-bred, half-brained infidel, knowing no tongue
of all the world but in the slang of it, is really opposed, not to
Servitude,--but to Shyness![16] It is to this day the note of the
sweetest and Frenchiest of French character, that it makes simply
perfect _Servants_. Unwearied in protective friendship, in meekly
dextrous omnificence, in latent tutorship; the lovingly availablest of
valets,--the mentally and personally bonniest of bonnes. But in no
capacity shy of you! Though you be the Duke or Duchess of Montaltissimo,
you will not find them abashed at your altitude. They will speak 'up' to
you, when they have a mind.
[Footnote 15: Gibbon touches the facts more closely in a sentence of
his 22nd chapter. "The independent warriors of Germany, _who
considered truth as the noblest of their virtues_, and freedom as the
most valuable of their possessions." He is speaking especially of the
Frankish tribe of the Attuarii, against whom the Emperor Julian had to
re-fortify the Rhine from Cleves to Basle: but the first letters of
the Emperor Jovian, after Julian's death, "delegated the military
command of _Gaul_ and Illyrium (what a vast one it was, we shall see
hereafter), to Malarich, a _brave and faithful_ officer of the nation
of the Franks;" and they remain the loyal allies of Rome in her last
struggle with Alaric. Apparently for the sake only of an interesting
variety of language,--and at all events without intimation of any
causes of so great a change in the national character,--we find Mr.
Gibbon in his next volume suddenly adopting the abusive epithets of
Procopius, and calling the Franks "a light and perfidious nation"
(vii. 251). The only traceable grounds for this unexpected description
of them are that they refuse to be bribed either into friendship or
activity, by Rome or Ravenna; and that in his invasion of Italy, the
grandson of Clovis did not previously send exact warning of his
proposed route, nor even entirely signify his intentions till he had
secured the bridge of the Po at Pavia; afterwards declaring his mind
with sufficient distinctness by "assaulting, almost at the same
instant, the hostile camps of the Goths and Romans, who, instead of
uniting their arms, fled with equal precipitation."]
[Footnote 16: For detailed illustration of the word, see 'Val d'Arno,'
Lecture VIII.; 'Fors Clavigera,' Letters XLVI. 231, LXXVII. 137; and
Chaucer, 'Romaunt of Rose,' 1212--"Next _him_" (the knight sibbe to
Arthur) "daunced dame Franchise;"--the English lines are quoted and
commented on in the first lecture of 'Ariadne Florentina'; I give the
French here:--
"Apres tous ceulx estoit Franchise
Que ne fut ne brune ne bise.
Ains fut comme la neige blanche
_Courtoyse_ estoit, _joyeuse_, et _franche_.
Le nez avoit long et tretis,
Yeulx vers, riants; sourcilz faitis;
Les cheveulx eut très-blons et longs
Simple fut comme les coulons
Le coeur eut doulx et debonnaire.
_Elle n'osait dire ne faire
Nulle riens que faire ne deust._"
And I hope my girl readers will never more confuse Franchise with
'Liberty.']
29. Best of servants: best of _subjects_, also, when they have
an equally frank King, or Count, or Captal, to lead them; of which we
shall see proof enough in due time;--but, instantly, note this
farther, that, whatever side-gleam of the thing they afterwards called
Liberty may be meant by the Frank name, you must at once now, and
always in future, guard yourself from confusing their Liberties with
their Activities. What the temper of the army may be towards its
chief, is _one_ question--whether either chief or army can be kept six
months quiet,--another, and a totally different one. That they must
either be fighting somebody or going somewhere, else, their life isn't
worth living to them; the activity and mercurial flashing and
flickering hither and thither, which in the soul of it is set neither
on war nor rapine, but only on change of place, mood--tense, and
tension;--which never needs to see its spurs in the dish, but has them
always bright, and on, and would ever choose rather to ride fasting
than sit feasting,--this childlike dread of being put in a corner, and
continual want of something to do, is to be watched by us with
wondering sympathy in all its sometimes splendid, but too often
unlucky or disastrous consequences to the nation itself as well as to
its neighbours.
30. And this activity, which we stolid beef-eaters, before we had been
taught by modern science that we were no better than baboons
ourselves, were wont discourteously to liken to that of the livelier
tribes of Monkey, did in fact so much impress the Hollanders, when
first the irriguous Franks gave motion and current to their marshes,
that the earliest heraldry in which we find the Frank power blazoned
seems to be founded on a Dutch endeavour to give some distantly
satirical presentment of it. "For," says a most ingenious historian,
Mons. André Favine,--'Parisian, and Advocate in the High Court of the
French Parliament in the year 1620'--"those people who bordered on the
river Sala, called 'Salts,' by the Allemaignes, were on their descent
into Dutch lands called by the Romans 'Franci Salici'" (whence
'Salique' law to come, you observe) "and by abridgment 'Salii,' as if
of the verb 'salire,' that is to say 'saulter,' to leap"--(and in
future therefore--duly also to dance--in an incomparable manner) "to
be quicke and nimble of foot, to leap and mount well, a quality most
notably requisite for such as dwell in watrie and marshy places; So
that while such of the French as dwelt on the great course of the
river" (Rhine) "were called 'Nageurs,' Swimmers, they of the marshes
were called 'Saulteurs,' Leapers, so that it was a nickname given to
the French in regard both of their natural disposition and of their
dwelling; as, yet to this day, their enemies call them French Toades,
(or Frogs, more properly) from whence grew the fable that their
ancient Kings carried such creatures in their Armes."
31. Without entering at present into debate whether fable or not, you
will easily remember the epithet 'Salian' of these fosse-leaping and
river-swimming folk (so that, as aforesaid, all the length of Rhine
must be refortified against them)--epithet however, it appears, in its
origin delicately Saline, so that we may with good discretion, as we
call our seasoned Mariners, '_old_ Salts,' think of these more brightly
sparkling Franks as 'Young Salts,'--but this equivocated presently by
the Romans, with natural respect to their martial fire and 'elan,' into
'Salii'--exsultantes,[17]--such as their own armed priests of war: and
by us now with some little farther, but slight equivocation, into
useful meaning, to be thought of as here first Salient, as a beaked
promontory, towards the France we know of; and evermore, in brilliant
elasticities of temper, a salient or out-sallying nation; lending to us
English presently--for this much of heraldry we may at once glance on
to--their 'Leopard,' not as a spotted or blotted creature, but as an
inevitably springing and pouncing one, for our own kingly and princely
shields.
[Footnote 17: Their first mischievous exsultation into Alsace being
invited by the Romans themselves, (or at least by Constantius in his
jealousy of Julian,)--with "presents and promises,--the hopes of
spoil, and a perpetual grant of all the territories they were able to
subdue." Gibbon, chap. xix. (3, 208.) By any other historian than
Gibbon, who has really no fixed opinion on any character, or question,
but, safe in the general truism that the worst men sometimes do right,
and the best often do wrong, praises when he wants to round a
sentence, and blames when he cannot otherwise edge one--it might have
startled us to be here told of the nation which "deserved, assumed,
and maintained the _honourable_ name of freemen," that "_these
undisciplined robbers_ treated as their natural enemies all the
subjects of the empire who possessed any property which they were
desirous of acquiring." The first campaign of Julian, which throws
both Franks and Alemanni back across the Rhine, but grants the Salian
Franks, under solemn oath, their established territory in the
Netherlands, must be traced at another time.]
Thus much, of their 'Salian' epithet may be enough; but from the
interpretation of the Frankish one we are still as far as ever, and
must be content, in the meantime, to stay so, noting however two ideas
afterwards entangled with the name, which are of much descriptive
importance to us.
32. "The French poet in the first book of his Franciades" (says Mons.
Favine; but what poet I know not, nor can enquire) "encounters" (in the
sense of en-quarters, or depicts as a herald) certain fables on the name
of the French by the adoption and composure of two _Gaulish_ words
joyned together, Phere-Encos which signifieth 'Beare-_Launce_,'
(--Shake-Lance, we might perhaps venture to translate,) a lighter weapon
than the Spear beginning here to quiver in the hand of its chivalry--and
Fere-encos then passing swiftly on the tongue into Francos;"--a
derivation not to be adopted, but the idea of the weapon most
carefully,--together with this following--that "among the arms of the
ancient French, over and beside the Launce, was the Battaile-Axe, which
they called _Anchon_, and moreover, yet to this day, in many Provinces
of France, it is termed an _Achon_, wherewith they served themselves in
warre, by throwing it a farre off at joyning with the enemy, onely to
discover the man and to cleave his shield. Because this _Achon_ was
darted with such violence, as it would cleave the Shield, and compell
the Maister thereof to hold down his arm, and being so discovered, as
naked or unarmed; it made way for the sooner surprizing of him. It
seemeth, that this weapon was proper and particuler to the French
Souldior, as well him on foote, as on horsebacke. For this cause they
called it _Franciscus_. Francisca, _securis oblonga, quam Franci
librabant in Hostes_. For the Horseman, beside his shield and Francisca
(Armes common, as wee have said, to the Footman), had also the Lance,
which being broken, and serving to no further effect, he laid hand on
his Francisca, as we learn the use of that weapon in the Archbishop of
Tours, his second book, and twenty-seventh chapter."
33. It is satisfactory to find how respectfully these lessons of the
Archbishop of Tours were received by the French knights; and curious
to see the preferred use of the Francisca by all the best of
them--down, not only to Coeur de Lion's time, but even to the day of
Poitiers. In the last wrestle of the battle at Poitiers gate, "Là, fit
le Roy Jehan de sa main, merveilles d'armes, et tenoit une hache de
guerre dont bien se deffendoit et combattoit,--si la quartre partie de
ses gens luy eussent ressemblé, la journée eust été pour eux." Still
more notably, in the episode of fight which Froissart stops to tell
just before, between the Sire de Verclef, (on Severn) and the Picard
squire Jean de Helennes: the Englishman, losing his sword, dismounts
to recover it, on which Helennes _casts_ his own at him with such aim
and force "qu'il acconsuit l'Anglois es cuisses, tellement que l'espée
entra dedans et le cousit tout parmi, jusqu'au hans."
On this the knight rendering himself, the squire binds his wound, and
nurses him, staying fifteen days 'pour l'amour de lui' at
Chasteleraut, while his life was in danger; and afterwards carrying
him in a litter all the way to his own chastel in Picardy. His ransom
however is 6000 nobles--I suppose about 25,000 pounds, of our present
estimate; and you may set down for one of the fatallest signs that the
days of chivalry are near their darkening, how "devint celuy Escuyer,
Chevalier, pour le grand profit qu'il eut du Seigneur de Verclef."
I return gladly to the dawn of chivalry, when, every hour and year,
men were becoming more gentle and more wise; while, even through their
worst cruelty and error, native qualities of noblest cast may be seen
asserting themselves for primal motive, and submitting themselves for
future training.
34. We have hitherto got no farther in our notion of a Salian Frank than
a glimpse of his two principal weapons,--the shadow of him, however,
begins to shape itself to us on the mist of the Brocken, bearing the
lance light, passing into the javelin,--but the axe, his woodman's
weapon, heavy;--for economical reasons, in scarcity of iron,
preferablest of all weapons, giving the fullest swing and weight of blow
with least quantity of actual metal, and roughest forging. Gibbon gives
them also a 'weighty' sword, suspended from a 'broad' belt: but Gibbon's
epithets are always gratis, and the belted sword, whatever its measure,
was probably for the leaders only; the belt, itself of gold, the
distinction of the Roman Counts, and doubtless adopted from them by the
allied Frank leaders, afterwards taking the Pauline mythic meaning of
the girdle of Truth--and so finally; the chief mark of Belted
Knighthood.
35. The Shield, for all, was round, wielded like a Highlander's
target:--armour, presumably, nothing but hard-tanned leather, or
patiently close knitted hemp; "Their close apparel," says Mr. Gibbon,
"accurately expressed the figure of their limbs," but 'apparel' is
only Miltonic-Gibbonian for 'nobody knows what.' He is more
intelligible of their persons. "The lofty stature of the Franks, and
their blue eyes, denoted a Germanic origin; the warlike barbarians
were trained from their earliest youth to run, to leap, to swim, to
dart the javelin and battle-axe with unerring aim, to advance without
hesitation against a superior enemy, and to maintain either in life or
death, the invincible reputation of their ancestors' (vi. 95). For the
first time, in 358, appalled by the Emperor Julian's victory at
Strasburg, and besieged by him upon the Meuse, a body of six hundred
Franks "dispensed with the ancient law which commanded them to conquer
or die." "Although they were strongly actuated by the allurements of
rapine, they professed a disinterested love of war, which they
considered as the supreme honour and felicity of human nature; and
their minds and bodies were so hardened by perpetual action that,
according to the lively expression of an orator, the snows of winter
were as pleasant to them as the flowers of spring" (iii. 220).
36. These mental and bodily virtues, or indurations, were probably
universal in the military rank of the nation: but we learn presently,
with surprise, of so remarkably 'free' a people, that nobody but the
King and royal family might wear their hair to their own liking. The
kings wore theirs in flowing ringlets on the back and shoulders,--the
Queens, in tresses rippling to their feet,--but all the rest of the
nation "were obliged, either by law or custom, to shave the hinder
part of their head, to comb their short hair over their forehead, and
to content themselves with the ornament of two small whiskers."
37. Moustaches,--Mr. Gibbon means, I imagine: and I take leave also to
suppose that the nobles, and noble ladies, might wear such tress and
ringlet as became them. But again, we receive unexpectedly
embarrassing light on the democratic institutions of the Franks, in
being told that "the various trades, the labours of agriculture, and
the arts of hunting and fishing, were _exercised by servile_ hands for
the _emolument_ of the Sovereign."
'Servile' and 'Emolument,' however, though at first they sound very
dreadful and very wrong, are only Miltonic-Gibbonian expressions of
the general fact that the Frankish Kings had ploughmen in their
fields, employed weavers and smiths to make their robes and swords,
hunted with huntsmen, hawked with falconers, and were in other
respects tyrannical to the ordinary extent that an English Master of
Hounds may be. "The mansion of the long-haired Kings was surrounded
with convenient yards and stables for poultry and cattle; the garden
was planted with useful vegetables; the magazines filled with corn and
wine either for sale or consumption; and the whole administration
conducted by the strictest rules of private economy."
38. I have collected these imperfect, and not always extremely
consistent, notices of the aspect and temper of the Franks out of Mr.
Gibbon's casual references to them during a period of more than two
centuries,--and the last passage quoted, which he accompanies with the
statement that "one hundred and sixty of these rural palaces were
scattered through the provinces of their kingdom," without telling us
what kingdom, or at what period, must I think be held descriptive of the
general manner and system of their monarchy after the victories of
Clovis. But, from the first hour you hear of him, the Frank, closely
considered, is always an extremely ingenious, well meaning, and
industrious personage;--if eagerly acquisitive, also intelligently
conservative and constructive; an element of order and crystalline
edification, which is to consummate itself one day, in the aisles of
Amiens; and things generally insuperable and impregnable, if the
inhabitants of them had been as sound-hearted as their builders, for
many a day beyond.
39. But for the present, we must retrace our ground a little; for
indeed I have lately observed with compunction, in rereading some of
my books for revised issue, that if ever I promise, in one number or
chapter, careful consideration of any particular point in the next,
the next never _does_ touch upon the promised point at all, but is
sure to fix itself passionately on some antithetic, antipathic, or
antipodic, point in the opposite hemisphere. This manner of conducting
a treatise I find indeed extremely conducive to impartiality and
largeness of view; but can conceive it to be--to the general
reader--not only disappointing, (if indeed I may flatter myself that I
ever interest enough to disappoint), but even liable to confirm in his
mind some of the fallacious and extremely absurd insinuations of
adverse critics respecting my inconsistency, vacillation, and
liability to be affected by changes of the weather in my principles or
opinions. I purpose, therefore, in these historical sketches, at least
to watch, and I hope partly to correct myself in this fault of promise
breaking, and at whatever sacrifice of my variously fluent or
re-fluent humour, to tell in each successive chapter in some measure
what the reader justifiably expects to be told.
40. I left, merely glanced at, in my opening chapter, the story of the
vase of Soissons. It may be found (and it is very nearly the only thing
that _is_ to be found respecting the personal life or character of the
first Louis) in every cheap popular history of France; with cheap
popular moralities engrafted thereon. Had I time to trace it to its
first sources, perhaps it might take another aspect. But I give it as
you may anywhere find it--asking you only to consider whether even as so
read--it may not properly bear a somewhat different moral.
41. The story is, then, that after the battle of Soissons, in the
division of Roman, or Gallic spoil, the king wished to have a
beautifully wrought silver vase for--'himself,' I was going to
write--and in my last chapter _did_ mistakenly infer that he wanted it
for his better self,--his Queen. But he wanted it for neither;--it was
to restore to St. Remy, that it might remain among the consecrated
treasures of Rheims. That is the first point on which the popular
histories do not insist, and which one of his warriors claiming equal
division of treasure, chose also to ignore. The vase was asked by the
King in addition to his own portion, and the Frank knights, while they
rendered true obedience to their king as a leader, had not the
smallest notion of allowing him what more recent kings call
'Royalties'--taxes on everything they touch. And one of these Frank
knights or Counts--a little franker than the rest--and as incredulous
of St. Remy's saintship as a Protestant Bishop, or Positivist
Philosopher--took upon him to dispute the King's and the Church's
claim, in the manner, suppose, of a Liberal opposition in the House of
Commons; and disputed it with such security of support by the public
opinion of the fifth century, that--the king persisting in his
request--the fearless soldier dashed the vase to pieces with his
war-axe, exclaiming "Thou shalt have no more than thy portion by lot."
42. It is the first clear assertion of French 'Liberté, Fraternité and
Egalité,' supported, then, as now, by the destruction, which is the
only possible active operation of "free" personages, on the art they
cannot produce.
The king did not continue the quarrel. Cowards will think that he paused
in cowardice, and malicious persons, that he paused in malignity. He
_did_ pause in anger assuredly; but biding its time, which the anger of
a strong man always can, and burn hotter for the waiting, which is one
of the chief reasons for Christians being told not to let the sun go
down upon it. Precept which Christians now-a-days are perfectly ready to
obey, if it is somebody else who has been injured; and indeed, the
difficulty in such cases is usually to get them to think of the injury
even while the Sun rises on their wrath.[18]
[Footnote 18: Read Mr. Plimsoll's article on coal mines for instance.]
43. The sequel is very shocking indeed--to modern sensibility. I give
it in the, if not polished, at least delicately varnished, language of
the Pictorial History.
"About a year afterwards, on reviewing his troops, he went to the man
who had struck the vase, and _examining his arms, complained_ that
_they_ were in bad condition!" (Italics mine) "and threw them" (What?
shield and sword?) on the ground. The soldier stooped to recover them;
and at that moment the King struck him on the head with his
battle-axe, crying 'Thus didst thou to the vase at Soissons.'" The
Moral modern historian proceeds to reflect that "this--as an evidence
of the condition of the Franks, and of the ties by which they were
united, gives but the idea of a band of Robbers and their chief."
Which is, indeed, so far as I can myself look into and decipher the
nature of things, the Primary idea to be entertained respecting most
of the kingly and military organizations in this world, down to our
own day; and, (unless perchance it be the Afghans and Zulus who are
stealing our lands in England--instead of we theirs, in their several
countries.) But concerning the _manner_ of this piece of military
execution, I must for the present leave the reader to consider with
himself, whether indeed it be less Kingly, or more savage, to strike
an uncivil soldier on the head with one's own battle-axe, than, for
instance, to strike a person like Sir Thomas More on the neck with an
executioner's,--using for the mechanism, and as it were guillotine bar
and rope to the blow--the manageable forms of National Law, and the
gracefully twined intervention of a polite group of noblemen and
bishops.
44. Far darker things have to be told of him than this, as his proud
life draws towards the close,--things which, if any of us could see
clear _through_ darkness, you should be told in all the truth of them.
But we never can know the truth of Sin; for its nature is to deceive
alike on the one side the Sinner, on the other the Judge.
Diabolic--betraying whether we yield to it, or condemn: Here is
Gibbon's sneer--if you care for it; but I gather first from the
confused paragraphs which conduct to it, the sentences of praise, less
niggard than the Sage of Lausanne usually grants to any hero who has
confessed the influence of Christianity.
45. "Clovis, when he was no more than fifteen years of age, succeeded,
by his father's death, to the command of the Salian tribe. The narrow
limits of his kingdom were confined to the island of the Batavians,
with the ancient dioceses of Tournay and Arras; and at the baptism of
Clovis, the number of his warriors could not exceed five thousand. The
kindred tribes of the Franks who had seated themselves along the
Scheldt, the Meuse, the Moselle, and the Rhine, were governed by their
independent kings, of the Merovingian race, the equals, the allies,
and sometimes the enemies of the Salic Prince. When he first took the
field he had neither gold nor silver in his coffers, nor wine and corn
in his magazines; but he imitated the example of Cæsar, who in the
same country had acquired wealth by the sword, and purchased soldiers
with the fruits of conquest. The untamed spirit of the Barbarians was
taught to acknowledge the advantages of regular discipline. At the
annual review of the month of March, their arms were diligently
inspected; and when they traversed a peaceful territory they were
prohibited from touching a blade of grass. The justice of Clovis was
inexorable; and his careless or disobedient soldiers were punished
with instant death. It would be superfluous to praise the valour of a
Frank; but the valour of Clovis was directed by cool and consummate
prudence. In all his transactions with mankind he calculated the
weight of interest, of passion, and of opinion; and his measures were
sometimes adapted to the sanguinary manners of the Germans,
and sometimes moderated by the milder genius of Rome, and
Christianity.
46. "But the savage conqueror of Gaul was incapable of examining the
proofs of a religion, which depends on the laborious investigation of
historic evidence, and speculative theology. He was still more
incapable of feeling the mild influence of the Gospel, which persuades
and purifies the heart of a genuine convert. His ambitious reign was a
perpetual violation of moral and Christian duties: his hands were
stained with blood, in peace as well as in war; and, as soon as Clovis
had dismissed a synod of the Gallican Church, he calmly assassinated
_all_ the princes of the Merovingian race."
47. It is too true; but rhetorically put, in the first place--for we
ought to be told how many 'all' the princes were;--in the second
place, we must note that, supposing Clovis had in any degree "searched
the Scriptures" as presented to the Western world by St. Jerome, he
was likely, as a soldier-king, to have thought more of the mission of
Joshua[19] and Jehu than of the patience of Christ, whose sufferings he
thought rather of avenging than imitating: and the question whether
the other Kings of the Franks should either succeed him, or, in envy
of his enlarged kingdom, attack and dethrone, was easily in his mind
convertible from a personal danger into the chance of the return of
the whole nation to idolatry. And, in the last place, his faith in the
Divine protection of his cause had been shaken by his defeat before
Aries by the Ostrogoths; and the Frank leopard had not so wholly
changed his spots as to surrender to an enemy the opportunity of a
first spring.
[Footnote 19: The likeness was afterwards taken up by legend, and the
walls of Angoulême, after the battle of Poitiers, are said to have
fallen at the sound of the trumpets of Clovis. "A miracle," says
Gibbon, "which may be reduced to the supposition that some clerical
engineer had secretly undermined the foundations of the rampart." I
cannot too often warn my honest readers against the modern habit of
"reducing" all history whatever to 'the supposition that' ... etc.,
etc. The legend is of course the natural and easy expression of a
metaphor.]
48. Finally, and beyond all these personal questions, the forms of
cruelty and subtlety--the former, observe, arising much out of a scorn
of pain which was a condition of honour in their women as well as men,
are in these savage races all founded on their love of glory in war,
which can only be understood by comparing what remains of the same
temper in the higher castes of the North American Indians; and, before
tracing in final clearness the actual events of the reign of Clovis to
their end, the reader will do well to learn this list of the personages
of the great Drama, taking to heart the meaning of the _name_ of each,
both in its probable effect on the mind of its bearer, and in its
fateful expression of the course of their acts, and the consequences of
it to future generations.
1. Clovis. Frank form, Hluodoveh. 'Glorious Holiness,' or
consecration. Latin Chlodovisus, when baptized by St.
Remy, softening afterwards through the centuries into
Lhodovisus, Ludovicus, Louis.
2. Albofleda. 'White household fairy'? His youngest sister;
married Theodoric (Theutreich, 'People's ruler'),
the great King of the Ostrogoths.
3. Clotilde. Hlod-hilda. 'Glorious Battle-maid.' His wife.
'Hilda' first meaning Battle, pure; and then passing
into Queen or Maid of Battle. Christianized to Ste
Clotilde in France, and Ste Hilda of Whitby cliff.
3. Clotilde. His only daughter. Died for the Catholic faith,
under Arian persecution.
4. Childebert. His eldest son by Clotilde, the first Frank
King in Paris. 'Battle Splendour,' softening into
Hildebert, and then Hildebrandt, as in the Nibelung.
5. Chlodomir. 'Glorious Fame.' His second son by Clotilde.
6. Clotaire. His youngest son by Clotilde; virtually the destroyer
of his father's house. 'Glorious Warrior.'
7. Chlodowald. Youngest son of Chlodomir. 'Glorious
Power,' afterwards 'St. Cloud.'
49. I will now follow straight, through their light and shadow, the
course of Clovis' reign and deeds.
A.D. 481. Crowned, when he was only fifteen. Five years afterwards, he
challenges, "in the spirit, and almost in the language of chivalry,"
the Roman governor Syagrius, holding the district of Rheims and
Soissons. "Campum sibi præparari jussit--he commanded his antagonist
to prepare him a battle-field"--see Gibbon's note and reference, chap.
xxxviii. (6, 297). The Benedictine abbey of Nogent was afterwards
built on the field, marked by a circle of Pagan sepulchres. "Clovis
bestowed the adjacent lands of Leuilly and Coucy on the church of
Rheims."[20]
[Footnote 20: When?--for this tradition, as well as that of the vase,
points to a friendship between Clovis and St. Remy, and a singular
respect on the King's side for the Christians of Gaul, though he was
not yet himself converted.]
A.D. 485. The Battle of Soissons. Not dated by Gibbon: the subsequent
death of Syagrius at the court of (the younger) Alaric, was in
486--take 485 for the battle.
50. A.D. 493. I cannot find any account of the relations between Clovis
and the King of Burgundy, the uncle of Clotilde, which preceded his
betrothal to the orphan princess. Her uncle, according to the common
history, had killed both her father and mother, and compelled her sister
to take the veil--motives none assigned, nor authorities. Clotilde
herself was pursued on her way to France,[21] and the litter in which
she travelled captured, with part of her marriage portion. But the
princess herself mounted on horseback, and rode with part of her escort,
forward into France, "ordering her attendants to set fire to everything
that pertained to her uncle and his subjects which they might meet with
on the way."
[Footnote 21: It is a curious proof of the want in vulgar historians of
the slightest sense of the vital interest of anything they tell, that
neither in Gibbon, nor in Messrs. Bussey and Gaspey, nor in the
elaborate 'Histoire des Villes de France,' can I find, with the best
research my winter's morning allows, what city was at this time the
capital of Burgundy, or at least in which of its four nominal
capitals,--Dijon, Besancon, Geneva, and Vienne,--Clotilde was brought
up. The evidence seems to me in favour of Vienne--(called always by
Messrs. B. and G., 'Vienna,' with what effect on the minds of their
dimly geographical readers I cannot say)--the rather that Clotilde's
mother is said to have been "thrown into the _Rhone_ with a stone
round her neck." The author of the introduction to 'Bourgogne' in the
'Histoire des Villes' is so eager to get his little spiteful snarl at
anything like religion anywhere, that he entirely forgets the
existence of the first queen of France,--never names her, nor, as
such, the place of her birth,--but contributes only to the knowledge
of the young student this beneficial quota, that Gondeband, "plus
politique que guerrier, trouva au milieu de ses controverses
théologiques avec Avitus, évêque de _Vienne_, le temps de faire mourir
ses trois frères et de recueillir leur heritage."
The one broad fact which my own readers will find it well to remember
is that Burgundy, at this time, by whatever king or victor tribe its
inhabitants may be subdued, does practically include the whole of
French Switzerland, and even of the German, as far east as
Vindonissa:--the Reuss, from Vindonissa through Lucerne to the St.
Gothard being its effective eastern boundary; that westward--it meant
all Jura, and the plains of the Saone; and southward, included all
Savoy and Dauphiné. According to the author of 'La Suisse Historique'
Clotilde was first addressed by Clovis's herald disguised as a beggar,
while she distributed alms at the gate of St. Pierre at Geneva; and
her departure and pursued flight into France were from Dijon.]
51. The fact is not chronicled, usually, among the sayings or doings
of the Saints: but the punishment of Kings by destroying the property
of their subjects, is too well recognized a method of modern Christian
warfare to allow our indignation to burn hot against Clotilde; driven,
as she was, hard by grief and wrath. The years of her youth are not
counted to us; Clovis was already twenty-seven, and for three years
maintained the faith of his ancestral religion against all the
influence of his queen.
52. A.D. 496. I did not in the opening chapter attach nearly enough
importance to the battle of Tolbiac, thinking of it as merely
compelling the Alemanni to recross the Rhine, and establishing the
Frank power on its western bank. But infinitely wider results are
indicated in the short sentence with which Gibbon closes his account
of the battle. "After the conquest of the western provinces, the
Franks _alone_ retained their ancient possessions beyond the Rhine.
They gradually subdued and _civilized_ the exhausted countries as far
as the Elbe and the mountains of Bohemia; and the _peace of Europe_
was secured by the obedience of Germany."
53. For, in the south, Theodoric had already "sheathed the sword in
the pride of victory and the vigour of his age--and his farther reign
of three and thirty years was consecrated to the duties of civil
government." Even when his son-in-law, Alaric, fell by Clovis' hand in
the battle of Poitiers, Theodoric was content to check the Frank power
at Arles, without pursuing his success, and to protect his infant
grandchild, correcting at the same time some abuses in the civil
government of Spain. So that the healing sovereignty of the great Goth
was established from Sicily to the Danube--and from Sirmium to the
Atlantic ocean.
54. Thus, then, at the close of the fifth century, you have Europe
divided simply by her watershed; and two Christian kings reigning,
with entirely beneficent and healthy power--one in the north--one in
the south--the mightiest and worthiest of them married to the other's
youngest sister: a saint queen in the north--and a devoted and earnest
Catholic woman, queen mother in the south. It is a conjunction of
things memorable enough in the Earth's history,--much to be thought
of, O fast whirling reader, if ever, out of the crowd of pent up
cattle driven across Rhine, or Adige, you can extricate yourself for
an hour, to walk peacefully out of the south gate of Cologne, or
across Fra Giocondo's bridge at Verona--and so pausing look through
the clear air across the battlefield of Tolbiac to the blue
Drachenfels, or across the plain of St. Ambrogio to the mountains of
Garda. For there were fought--if you will think closely--the two
victor-battles of the Christian world. Constantine's only gave changed
form and dying colour to the falling walls of Rome; but the Frank and
Gothic races, thus conquering and thus ruled, founded the arts and
established the laws which gave to all future Europe her joy, and her
virtue. And it is lovely to see how, even thus early, the Feudal
chivalry depended for its life on the nobleness of its womanhood.
There was no _vision_ seen, or alleged, at Tolbiac. The King prayed
simply to the God of Clotilde. On the morning of the battle of Verona,
Theodoric visited the tent of his mother and his sister,
"and requested that on the most illustrious festival of his life, they
would adorn him with the rich garments which they had worked with
their own hands."
55. But over Clovis, there was extended yet another influence--greater
than his queen's. When his kingdom was first extended to the Loire,
the shepherdess of Nanterre was already aged,--no torch-bearing maid
of battle, like Clotilde, no knightly leader of deliverance like
Jeanne, but grey in meekness of wisdom, and now "filling more and more
with crystal light." Clovis's father had known her; he himself made
her his friend, and when he left Paris on the campaign of Poitiers,
vowed that if victorious, he would build a Christian church on the
hills of Seine. He returned in victory, and with St. Genevieve at his
side, stood on the site of the ruined Roman Thermæ, just above the
"Isle" of Paris, to fulfil his vow: and to design the limits of the
foundations of the first metropolitan church of Frankish Christendom.
The King "gave his battle-axe the swing," and tossed it with his full
force.
Measuring with its flight also, the place of his own grave, and of
Clotilde's, and St. Genevieve's.
There they rested, and rest,--in soul,--together. "La Colline tout
entière porte encore le nom de la patronne de Paris; une petite rue
obscure a gardé celui du Roi Conquerant."
"OUR FATHERS HAVE TOLD US."
ADVICE.
The three chapters[22] of "Our Fathers have told us," now submitted to
the public, are enough to show the proposed character and tendencies
of the work, to which, contrary to my usual custom, I now invite
subscription, because the degree in which I can increase its
usefulness by engraved illustration must greatly depend on the known
number of its supporters.
[Footnote 22: Viz., Chapters I. and II., and the separate travellers'
edition of Chapter IV.]
I do not recognize, in the present state of my health, any reason to
fear more loss of general power, whether in conception or industry,
than is the proper and appointed check of an old man's enthusiasm: of
which, however, enough remains in me, to warrant my readers against
the abandonment of a purpose entertained already for twenty years.
The work, if I live to complete it, will consist of ten parts, each
taking up some local division of Christian history, and gathering,
towards their close, into united illustration of the power of the
Church in the Thirteenth Century.
The next chapter, which I hope to issue soon after Christmas,
completes the first part, descriptive of the early Frank power, and of
its final skill, in the Cathedral of Amiens.
The second part, "Ponte della Pietra," will, I hope, do more for
Theodoric and Verona than I have been able to do for Clovis and the
first capital of France.
The third, "Ara Celi," will trace the foundations of the Papal power.
The fourth, "Ponte-a-Mare," and fifth, "Ponte Vecchio," will only with
much difficulty gather into brief form what I have by me of scattered
materials respecting Pisa and Florence.
The sixth, "Valle Crucis," will be occupied with the monastic
architecture of England and Wales.
The seventh, "The Springs of Eure," will be wholly given to the
cathedral of Chartres.
The eighth, "Domrémy," to that of Rouen and the schools of
architecture which it represents.
The ninth, "The Bay of Uri," to the pastoral forms of Catholicism,
reaching to our own times.
And the tenth, "The Bells of Cluse," to the pastoral Protestantism of
Savoy, Geneva, and the Scottish Border.
Each part will consist of four sections only; and one of them, the
fourth, will usually be descriptive of some monumental city or
cathedral, the resultant and remnant of the religious power examined
in the preparatory chapters.
One illustration at least will be given with each chapter,[23] and
drawings made for others, which will be placed at once in the
Sheffield museum for public reference, and engraved as I find support,
or opportunity for binding with the completed work.
[Footnote 23: The first plate for the Bible of Amiens, curiously
enough, failed in the engraving; and I shall probably have to etch it
myself. It will be issued with the fourth, in the full-size edition of
the fourth chapter.]
As in the instance of Chapter IV. of this first part, a smaller
edition of the descriptive chapters will commonly be printed in
reduced form for travellers and non-subscribers; but otherwise, I
intend this work to be furnished to subscribers only.