one does not lessen the force of the evil by modifying or "softening"
the form of the oath. The essence remains unchanged. When Pecksniff
slams the door in a rage, he simply "swears" what Hood describes as
a "wooden damn." The devout Moslem will not tread upon a scrap of
paper in his path, "Lest," he says, "the name of God be written upon
it"; but the impetuous Anglo-Norman recklessly flings the name of
God into the contaminated environment of his daily life. And he has
done so, history attests, since the day he sprang full-armed upon the
planetary sphere--the most portentous apparition of mediæval days.
"Long ago," says Canon Bardsley, "under the offensive title of _Jean
Gotdam_, we [the English] had become known as a people given to strange
and unpleasant oaths." The very name--_Jean Gotdam_--vouches for its
antiquity, as well as for the fearless sincerity of him who swore.
There came into one of our Bluegrass communities just after the war a
clever Confederate adventurer, who speedily established very pleasant
social relations by exploiting his military record. A venerable
Kentuckian, who had come through the war with his Confederate
principles and Virginian prejudices intact, was asked by a friend how
he liked their Virginian visitor--the ci-devant "aide to General Lee."
"I don't _like_ him, sir," he said with vicious emphasis, "he is not
what he professes to be; I never in my life heard a Virginian gentleman
say 'God _dern_!' He either swore or he _didn't_ swear." He had no
indulgence for a marked card nor for an emasculated oath. He would not
substitute a sickly, modernized variant for a venerated traditional
form. By "Gad" or by "gosh" or by "gobbs" was good enough for a
reforming purist; for himself he preferred to say, with the irascible
Robert of Normandy, "Ne se, by God!" It is not the form, after all, but
the sentiment or suggestion, that lies behind the "swear."
It is discouraging to the spirit of philosophic optimism to note the
slinking figure of the iconoclast now running amuck in every field.
The instinct and habit of reverence is almost gone, and the solidest
traditional reputations are no longer safe. We no longer say with
Wallenstein--
"There is a consecrating power in Time,
And what is gray with years to man is godlike."
Even the fine historic character of WASHINGTON is "at a discount" in
the modern world--partly on account of his alleged indulgence in
profane speech, but chiefly because of his recognized incapacity to
tell a lie. He had not only lost (we are told by one biographer) the
useful--the indispensable--instinct of "prevarication," but (as we are
told by another) "when deeply angered, he would _swear a hearty English
oath_." One may survive in the Darwinian struggle without the capacity
to _swear_, but scarcely without the capacity to deceive. There seems
to be no salvation in this life except for the successful liar; but for
the man of many oaths there appears to be no salvation either in this
life or the next. Happily, the material prosperity of Virginia was but
little affected by the ethics of the Washingtonian Code. Her commercial
instincts had been powerfully quickened in her early years by an
admonitory imprecation from a royal, or official, source. When the
Commissioners of Virginia were pleading the interests of "learning and
religion" before the Attorney-General of Charles II (an Anglo-Norman
lawyer, no doubt), he promptly responded with a hearty English
oath--"Damn your souls! _Grow tobacco!_" There is no need for such an
adjuration to the planters of the fine old Anglo-Norman Commonwealth
of Kentucky. The tobacco will be planted, whatever may become of their
souls.
X
An English scholar of sound judgment and exceptionally sound views
has recently said that the Emperor Napoleon was the greatest
administrator of all time. His greatest work, perhaps, is the system
of administrative centralization which, through a century of the
severest tests that political madness could apply, has maintained the
conditions of social order even in the midst of war and under every
form of organized misrule, and secured almost unparalleled prosperity
for the municipalities and provinces of France. But it must not be
forgotten that William the Norman solved a like problem with apparently
even greater success, and under antagonizing conditions which only a
statesman of original genius could successfully confront. Not for one
century, only, of marvelous effectiveness in civic administration, but
for eight hundred years of advancing and expanding _civilization_,
the conceptions evolved by the Norman's brain have been doing
their beneficent work; and great as was the genius of the Corsican
adventurer, it is not incredible that even he, the master of Europe,
did not disdain the lesson which had been taught the nations by that
magnificent Son of France. The Corsican was a close student of military
history, and secretly meditated a descent upon modern England in
imitation of the earlier Conqueror's work. It is not likely that he
would overlook the methods of reorganization that followed the war,
with its machinery of sheriffs, judges, justiciaries, etc.--executive
officers directly responsible to the king--bringing the throne in
direct touch with the people, and drawing every subject, at least in
every central shire, in direct personal allegiance to the throne. The
_Marquessess_, or wardens of the Marches, were able and ambitious
warriors whose sole concern was with dangers from _without_. But even
Napoleon could not foresee, in this guarded initiatory recognition of
the landowner, the ultimate evolution of a territorial democracy that
was to affect the political and social destinies of the English race.
Monarchs of a later date--Henry the Eighth and his masterful daughter
Elizabeth--saw in the people the sole source of _power_; and the loyal
Englishman even of this generation will proudly tell you that in his
country the sole fountain of _honor_ is the _king_. There were at
least two American statesmen who were illustrious disciples of the
Norman's political school. They were men of Norman blood, who wrought
in American statecraft with the Norman's constructive brain--and
there was still another of the same imperial strain who, with a
philosophic conception of all that was of value in the principles
of Anglo-Norman administration and a just appreciation by actual
experience of government as a practical art, never failed throughout a
long, brilliant, and successful career to teach the doctrine that the
_People Themselves_ were the sole fountain of honor and the exclusive
source of power--a principle in the philosophy of government and in
political administration equally patent to William the Conqueror,
when he anxiously sought a declaration of "personal" allegiance _from
the subjects_ in that great gathering of potential "sovereigns"
upon Salisbury Plain. In the long succession of administrators that
followed the Norman king, there was none that seems to have grasped
so completely and applied so skillfully his principles and methods of
political administration as a daughter of the Tudor race. She may not
have loved the people in any modern sense; but she knew their power,
she recognized their rights; she studied their interests, and her
jeweled finger was always upon their pulse. The best of all treatment,
she thought, was to anticipate with soothing remedies the rude
distempers of the times. She considered rather the Constitution of the
Subject than the Constitution of the State; since, collectively, one
embraced the other.
Mr. Barrett Wendell, in his admirable work, "A Literary History
of America," discourses with great brilliancy and charm upon the
Elizabethan influences that governed in a large measure the development
of the Puritan and the Virginian race. The reader of the present paper
will note with curious interest the bearing of the following quotations
from this work upon the theories which the present writer has
discussed. "Broadly speaking," he says, "all our Northern colonies were
developed from those planted in Massachusetts; and all our Southern
from that planted in Virginia." The statement is "socially" true, he
says, to an extraordinary degree. The Elizabethan type of character
"displayed a marked power of _assimilating_ whatever came within its
influence." This trait, akin to that which centuries before had made
the conquered English slowly but surely _assimilate their Norman
conquerors_, the Yankees of our own day have not quite lost. Our native
type still "absorbs" the foreign. The children of immigrants insensibly
become native. The irresistible power of a _common language_ and of the
_common ideals_ which underlie it still dominates. This tendency, he
adds, declared itself from the earliest settlements of Jamestown and
Plymouth. "North and South alike may be regarded as regions finally
settled by Elizabethan Englishmen." The dominant traits of the English
race of that time were "spontaneity, enthusiasm, and versatility." But
the Elizabethan English of _Virginia_, he says, were notably different
in this: they were men of a less "austere" type of character than their
compatriots of the North; of more adventurous "instincts," and were
"men of action" as the New Englanders were "men of God." The peculiar
power of assimilation and the "pristine alertness of mind" were the
same in both. The economic superiority of the North was manifest; the
political ability of the South seemed generally superior. Pleasantly
putting aside the traditional claims of exclusive "cavalier" descent,
Mr. Wendell says: "At least up to the Civil War the personal temper of
the better classes in the South remained more like that of the better
classes in Seventeenth Century England than anything else in the modern
world." He frankly concedes that the most eminent statesmen of Colonial
and Revolutionary days were Virginians. Recalling what has been said
in regard to the constitutional sluggishness of the Anglo-Saxon, his
mental inertness, his settled or stereotyped habits of thought, and
his absolute lack of racial initiative _until the Norman came_, we
read the following passage from Mr. Wendell with curious interest:
"Such literature as the English world has left us bespeaks a public
whose spontaneous alertness of mind, whose instant perception of every
subtle variety of phrase and allusion, was more akin to that of our
_contemporary French_ than to anything which we are now accustomed to
consider native to insular England." This transformation Mr. Wendell
attributes to "the spontaneous, enthusiastic versatility of the
English temperament," in the spacious Elizabethan days. What has
produced or determined this extraordinary differentiation of race? What
are the original, genetic factors behind this varied manifestation
of power in that old, Elizabethan stock? With the advent of the
Seventeenth Century; with the turbulence, and trouble, and austerity
of Cromwellian days; with migrations following Cromwellian war; with
the evolution of a transatlantic type of the English race, there came
an end to those spacious and splendid days--to the creative, prolific
epoch of the Virgin Queen.
[Illustration: HONORABLE JOHN C. BRECKINRIDGE.]
The most trivial fact that connects the name of Shakespeare with
Virginia is of interest to the Virginian and his multitudinous clans.
Captain Newport, Vice-Admiral of Virginia, commanded the ship _Sea
Adventure_, which was wrecked on the Devil's Islands. Sir George
Somers, sitting on the poop and misled by a flaming apparition on the
masts, unconsciously guided the vessel in a fatal course. William
Strachey, "Secretary in Virginia," wrote the account of the "Tempest"
published in Purchas. Thus was the "king's ship" boarded and burned by
the spirit Ariel at the command of his master Prospero, and wrecked on
those "Bermoothes" which are "still vext" by that rude, tempestuous
sea. It is of interest, too, to note that the special Supervisors
and Directors of this Elizabethan colony were William Shakespeare's
friends--the Earl of Southampton; the Earl of Pembroke; the Earl
of Montgomery; Viscount Lisle (brother of Sir Philip Sidney); Lord
Howard of Walden; Lord Sheffield; and Lord Carew of Clopton, who sold
Shakespeare, in 1597, the house in which he lived till 1616--all of
them Elizabethan cavaliers derived from Anglo-Norman stock. There is
another Elizabethan name of still greater interest to all people of the
Anglo-Virginian race--Sir Edwin Sandys, the author of the political
charters upon which the free institutions of Virginia rest; and not
only Virginia, but the United States. Educated at Geneva and the son of
an English Archbishop, he was thoroughly seasoned with the doctrines of
the Genevan school; and aimed not only to found the American Republic
on Genevan lines by the creation of a "free state" on the Atlantic
coast, but to make ample provision _in the charter itself_ for the
ultimate "expansion" of the young republic toward the Pacific Ocean.
This statement may not, even yet, be universally accepted; but it is
incontestably true.
XI
In the spring of 1885, a pamphlet was published by a citizen of
Kentucky directing attention to the effect of certain racial influences
in molding the institutions of this State. It was entitled "The Genesis
of a Pioneer Commonwealth." The suggestions offered by the writer as
to the sources of our organic life were subsequently illustrated and
confirmed by an eminent Virginian scholar, Dr. Alexander Brown, in
his "Genesis of the United States," published in 1890--a marvel of
masterly investigation; a work which throws a flood of light upon the
broad expanse of early American history, and is especially remarkable
for the critical elaboration, lucidity, and acuteness with which the
author has arranged the results of his extensive scheme of historic
research. In this work he has noted and traced, from English records
contemporary with the first settlement of Virginia, the beginnings of
that great duel between conflicting civilizations which closed with
the destruction of Spain's naval power at Manila and Santiago. And
every scholar who seeks a precise comprehension of the _origines_ of
the late war should closely follow the course of investigation pursued
by Dr. Brown. Every accessible detail of the desperate and protracted
Anglo-Spanish conflict--including the exploits of Elizabeth's captains
and the destruction of the Great Armada--come out under this historic
searchlight as distinctly and vividly as material objects under
the light of day. To citizens of Kentucky who have a critical and
philosophic interest in the historic evolution of the Commonwealth, it
will be peculiarly attractive in the circumstance that it connects,
and in a special sense includes, the Genesis of Kentucky with that
of the United States. He suggests in a most interesting way that
this Commonwealth is not only a lineal product of the Elizabethan
civilization which he has sought to trace, but that--cartographically
at least--_it formed an integral part of the first Republic established
in the New World_. In an explanatory communication addressed some
years ago to the present writer, Dr. Brown says: "The bounds of the
charters which contained the _popular charter rights_ which were the
germ of this republic extended between thirty-four degrees (34°) and
forty degrees (40°) north latitude, and from ocean to ocean. Kentucky,
therefore, was embraced within the first Republic in America."
The sagacious statesmen of Spain were not slow to detect the
menacing significance of this Virginian settlement, small as it was;
and the conflict then initiated did not cease until the navies of
Spain went down under the guns of Dewey and Schley. The persistent
machinations of Spanish _intrigants_ to obtain control of Kentucky
in the closing years of the Eighteenth Century were part of the same
prolonged contest for supremacy upon American soil. Every resource
of diplomacy, intrigue, and corruption--or, in modern phrase, of
_craft_ and _graft_--was exhausted by Spain to wrest the germinant
Commonwealth from the parent stem. On the other hand, no scheme was
more popular with the bold and enterprising Kentuckians--the Vikings
of the West--than to wrest the control of the Mississippi River
from the desperate grasp of Spain. Even the splendid and seducing
allurement of a Spanish alliance was powerless against the transmitted
instincts of a Scandinavian or Anglo-Norman stock. But the racial
inclination for territorial expansion Kentucky never lost. There was
a later manifestation of this spirit or instinct in the annexation of
California; an appropriation by force, to be sure, but under recognized
"legal forms"; and, still later, it was manifested in disastrous
expeditions to the Cuban coast, in which the reckless survivors barely
escaped, like the man of Uz, with the skin of their teeth--thanks to
a swift steamship and to an indulgent interpretation of the violated
law. In the near future, perhaps, we shall have an annexation of
the Island under forms which will fully justify the act; annexation
on the old lines. As far as race could make them so, the daring
adventurers who poured to foreign war from the vast network of streams
and streamlets that flowed seaward from the mountains and lowlands
of Kentucky were _Vikings_, with all the fighting characteristics of
that ancient breed.[6] Not _Vi_-Kings, nor "kings" of any sort, but
simply the Vik-ings or "Creek-men" who followed their expatriated Jarls
wherever a dragon-prow would float; to the land of the Saxon under
his greatest king; to the heart of Ireland, where the natives were
already "absorbing" the alien Norse; to the ancient Kingdom of Gaul;
to Scotland and to the islands of the Atlantic Ridge; and above all
to Iceland, the land of mist and snow and fire; to the incomparable
mistress of the Northern seas. Through the beautiful Mediterranean,
too, they sailed; and gathering to the support of the decadent
despotisms of the East, became famous in history and romance as the
_Varangian_ Guard which held at bay the Saracen and the Hun. They were
"rebels" when they fled from the consolidating despotism of Harold
Fairhair. They have been rulers or rebels ever since.
[6] That acute and philosophic observer, Goldwin Smith, says in his
description of the "Night-hawk" Kentuckians (1812): "In all his
proceedings he showed a _lawless vigor_ which might prove the wild
stock of civilized virtue." _Gens effrenatissima!_
But the story of their greatest exploits you read in the histories
of the English race. We have analyzed the claims which Mr. Barrett
Wendell has made for the Elizabethan settler upon the Atlantic Coast;
and it is instructive to note that another gifted son of New England,
Mr. John Fiske, has reached conclusions which he at least would
acknowledge give confirmation to the present views, as strong as proof
of Holy Writ. "The descendants of these Northmen," he says, "formed a
very large proportion of the population of the East Anglian counties,
and consequently of the men who founded New England. The East Anglian
counties have been conspicuous for resistance to tyranny and for
freedom of thought." By parity of reasoning, we may easily prove that
the kindred Norman was the founder of civilization in England, and, in
direct sequence and by filiation of race, of civilization in the Colony
of Virginia; and, by a gradual evolution, in the States of the South
and West.
* * * * *
Far back in the history of our race there stands, luminous and large,
in his _milieu_ of mediæval mist, a mounted conqueror with sword and
torch--the immediate offspring of Scandinavian Jarls--the remote
progenitor of the Virginian "Cavalier." It is the founder of that
Anglo-Norman civilization of which we form a part, and which, in many
ways, still responds to the impulse of that imperial brain.
William the Norman presented in vivid epitome the characteristic
traits of his race, with other traits or variations of these traits
that made him almost an abnormal figure even in the history of those
times. He has been commonly depicted as physically a giant among his
fellows; but Lord Lytton (a good authority) discredits these legends of
gigantic stature; it is seldom we find, he declares, the association
of great size and commanding intellect in great men; it is really a
violation of the natural law, though possibly the great Norman may
have been, like Abraham Lincoln, an exception to the general rule. His
physical forces were certainly subjected to severe tests. His personal
leadership in the wintry marches through the North of England were,
practically, paralleled in later days by the wintry marches of our
Scandinavian general, George Rogers Clark, in the vast territories of
the North and West. The prodigious fortitude and endurance manifested
in these campaigns proved beyond all question the staying capacity
of the Scandinavian blood. The royal Norman had all the tastes of
a forest-born man; not a mere taste for the sports of the field as
known to the English gentlemen of a later period, but a wild, almost
demoniac passion for the atrocities of the chase as practised by the
early Norman kings. A love of royal sport does not discredit a modern
ruler of men; but scarcely such sport as this. The "wild king," says
an old English chronicler, "loves wild beasts as if he were a wild
beast himself and the father of wild beasts." Churches and manors were
swept away to create forests and dens and retreats for the creatures
he loved to slay. He ruled, conquered, hunted, ravaged, "harried,"
and subjugated from Brittany to Scotland; and yet, says the same old
chronicler in his "Flowers of History," "he was such a lover of peace
that a girl laden with gold might traverse the whole of England without
harm."
[Illustration: HONORABLE WILLIAM PRESTON.]
This may or may not be a "flower of history"; but if true, it is a
startling historic fact.
XII
As the Conqueror stood among the sovereigns of that day, so stood
the Normans among the contemporary races. They were of peculiar
type, these men--both sovereign and subject--and were cast in a like
mold. They had body, sap, color, concentrated vigor, and inbred
Thracian fire. They had a sort of racial distinction which in its
merely personal aspects was never lost. Mingling with all races,
they yet stood in a sense separate and apart from all. They were
as the _Haut Brion_ among the wines of the Bordelais. But, unlike
their native vine, they bore transplantation to any land, and drew
perpetual vigor from every soil. Strange as it may seem, there is a
confessed incapacity for colonization in the Frenchman of to-day,
and stranger still is the remedy for this defect which some of their
leading thinkers have proposed, to wit, that the Frenchman should
transmogrify himself _into an Anglo-Saxon_. Certainly a grotesque
transformation, if effected in the manner proposed by those pessimistic
prophets Demolins and Lemaître. France (they say) must have colonial
expansion! The Anglo-Saxon is the only successful expansionist; we must
_Anglo-Saxonize_ France! They forget that the Anglo-Saxon himself is
indebted for his success as a colonist and trader to the Scandinavian
Frenchmen who colonized England under William the Conqueror, and
that it was not until the Norman's demoniac spirit of "enterprise"
took possession of the Anglo-Saxon thegns and ceorls that they even
felt the impulse to "go down to the sea in ships." Later, too, they
should remember, there was an _industrial_ colonization of England
by the Frenchmen who were relentlessly expatriated in the days of
the dragonades. What France then lost has never been fully regained.
When she lost the Norman element in its early Scandinavian form, her
capacity for colonial expansion was seriously impaired. When she
colonized England by an indiscriminate exclusion of the Huguenots
from her own soil, her capacity for normal evolution was lost. The
recanting or subjugated element that remained is probably represented
by the prescriptive "free-thinking" anti-clerical element of to-day.
The profane spirit of the English "Bigod" had been imported into the
religion of France, and "bigotry" may discredit the claims of the
noblest faith. The extreme reactionary result in this instance is an
intolerant _unbelief_, passing at times into a ferocious contempt for
country, constitutions, and creeds.