Part 3

It was the sensational paper of the day, and even the most phlegmatic English scholar was stirred by this defiant bugle-blast from a philosophic French explorer who was not only disturbing the settled convictions of English thinkers, but still worse was running counter to cherished prejudices of the English race. That historic hyphenation of racial appellatives--"Anglo-Saxon"--was a sacred immemorial conjunction of names representing a fusion of racial elements not to be shaken asunder by a blast upon the ram's horn of a wandering Gaul. The assault was not altogether "Pickwickian"; but the Frenchman was a stout antagonist, and found an incidental confirmation of his theory in the occasional flash of Berserker rage which followed his masterly game of parry and thrust. Nor was he ill-equipped for his controversial work. From certain antiquities which he had found during his recent explorations in the North he inferred the existence of commercial relations between the Northmen of that period and the peoples of the Mediterranean Sea, Rome and Greece being at that time in direct communication with these seafaring peoples of the North. The tribes of Germania, on the contrary, were "a shipless people," and according to the Roman writers were still in an uncivilized state. He said there were settlements in Britain by the Northmen during the Roman occupation; that England was always called by the Northmen one of their Northern lands; that the language of the North and of England were similar in the early times; that the early Northern Kings claimed part of England as their own; that the Northmen were bold and enterprising navigators, pushing their explorations wherever a ship could survive the perils of the sea. On the contrary, neither the Saxons nor the Franks were a seafaring people, either at the time of Charlemagne or at any earlier period.

It was this Scandinavian element which had infused a spirit of enterprise into the _English race that they had never lost_, and which had made it in all its branches, wherever they had sailed their fleets or pushed their invading columns, the invincible masters of earth and sea. Its resistless movement across the American continent, he declared, was the most dramatic spectacle in history.

This, in brief, was the Frenchman's startling theory; first broached in England on the borders of that rude North Sea which the Vikings had swept in early days, and upon the banks of the peaceful Tyne, where many a Scandinavian rover had moored his little barque. The discussion of M. Du Chaillu's paper took a wide range, all the distinguished ethnologists present--Dawkins, Taylor, Turner, Evans, Galton, and others--participating in this rattling ethnological debate. Du Chaillu, who had very much the attitude of a French _suspect_ in a German camp, maintained throughout his Gallic _aplomb_, listening with admirable composure and with apparent interest, though his dark skin visibly reddened at times under the critical lash, however courteously applied. Canon Taylor, who evidently was in full sympathy with Du Chaillu's startling views, gave a happy turn to the little imbroglio by a cleverly parodied quotation from Tennyson's Welcome to the Sea-King's Daughter from over the Sea--

"For Saxon or Dane or Norman, Teuton or Celt--or whatever we-- Saxon or Norse--it is nothing to me, We are all of us _one in our welcome of thee_,"

the closing line being given with a politely sympathetic inclination of the head toward the gentleman from France, and with a gracious smile more expressive than his words--the smile interpreting to his hearers the startling disclaimer: "It is nothing to me." The clever ecclesiast read a very learned paper at the same meeting on a similar theme, and the two gentlemen who sat near him, Du Chaillu and Nansen, were ideal representatives of two of his four ethnological types, the Auvergnat type of Central France and the long-headed Scandinavian of the North. Indeed, as a matter for courteous rational discussion the question of "Saxon or Norse" had the profoundest interest for the amiable savant, who seemed to possess in perfection that fine philosophical quality of intellect which the French have happily termed _justesse d'esprit_--a quality of mind in which even the ablest disputant may sometimes be deficient.

But, nothing disconcerted by criticism or compliment, M. Du Chaillu remarked, with cold dignity, as he rose in final response: "Opinions, gentlemen, may differ in England from opinions in France, but the truth on both sides of the Channel is the same"--a sentiment to which all present responded with that fine sympathy and with that perfect courtesy "wherein--to derogate from none--the true heroic English gentleman hath no peer."

III

"Every schoolboy" (to quote Macaulay) is familiar with the salient facts in the history of the Normans; their origin in Scandinavia; the seizure of a fertile province in France (wrung from a _fainéant_ heir of Charlemagne); their extraordinary evolution as the great ethnic force of the period; their absolute mastery of sea and land on every shore, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, and notably their Conquest of England, their perfect fusion with the conquered peoples, and the resulting evolution of the English race. All this is commonplace to every historical reader. But recent investigators, going deeper, have inquired if the laws, institutions, language, and material constructions which mark the pathway of Norman conquest are simply the memorials of an extinct race? Is the Norman still living, still powerful, progressive, and prolific? Or is it an exhausted racial force, pithless, impotent, and effete, with no recognizable evidence of its ancient prepotency in racial struggles for existence in the conflicts of the past? Or, in a word, is it, as Mr. Freeman affirms, a Lost Race? The answer to these questions depends largely upon the answer to other queries, to wit: Was the conquest and sequential settlement of England merely a military invasion? or was it a vast popular migration such as America has witnessed in later times? or was it not in point of fact both--an invasion and a migration, the one following the other?

England was not conquered in a day. The battle of Hastings was decisive, but not conclusive. There was a long and bloody struggle before the invading force. Nearly _four_ years (the duration of our "Civil War") of close, desperate fighting must be encountered before the work of subjugation could be declared complete. Every gap in the ranks of the invader must be filled by the importation of forces from abroad. There was a perpetual draft upon the Continental populations, and a ceaseless "rushing of troops to the front," precisely as in the protracted "War between the States." All Europe had become the recruiting ground of the Conqueror. He was peopling England even in the midst of war; and when the period of "reconstruction" came the stream of migration continued to flow. England was the bourn from which no _immigrant_ returned; and under the military or reconstructive methods of the Conqueror, every _invader_ was permanently planted upon the soil.

Apparently, these considerations furnish a conclusive answer to certain critical objections which shall be cited as we proceed. The facts upon which our conclusions rest are found, chiefly, in the official records of England and in the authentic annals of the Anglo-Norman races.

Here, then, we must infer the existence of an immense multitude of Norman immigrants mingling and eventually fusing with the subjugated race. What has been the result of this intimate commingling of ethnic elements upon English soil? Is it possible that so daring and successful a gamester as the Norman was lost in the shuffle when an auspicious destiny was directing the game? The writer of this paper thinks that he found in the great Library of the British Museum evidence that the Norman people are still a power upon this planet; to be as carefully counted with in the struggles of the future as in the conflicts of the past.

Recent investigation has disclosed the fact that contemporary records in England and Normandy--records of two different countries of seven hundred years' standing, relating to different branches of the same race--are so minutely detailed as to enable the philosophic enquirer "to trace the identity of families and even individuals, in two countries." And this has been done by placing the Great Rolls of the Norman Exchequer in juxtaposition with similar English records of the Twelfth Century. This comparative juxtaposition of contemporary official records of kindred races geographically separate has been made the basis of an alphabetical series of English or Anglo-Norman surnames, which is remarkably full, though necessarily incomplete since the compiler, a very able English scholar, was not in position to enumerate all the families then extant; but it contains five times as many names as the famous Battle Abbey Roll, and conclusively shows that the ancestry of the intellectual aristocracy of England was Norman. The Anglo-Saxon and the Dane were shown to be in a hopeless minority. The enquiry which resulted in the compilation of the alphabetical list was restricted entirely to surnames of a purely Norman origin still existing in England. A third or more of this English population is Norman, directly descended from the Norman migration that preceded, accompanied, or followed the Conquest.

Can evidence be more conclusive that the Norman was neither extinguished nor absorbed by the sluggish Saxon who accepted his yoke?

Mr. Thomas Hardy, in his powerful fiction, "Tess," plainly accepts the conclusiveness of these views. His heroine, though of humble origin, clearly owed her involuntary seductiveness and fatal charm to the transmitted potency of her Norman blood, and it is said that in certain secluded parts of England may be found to-day rural or village populations of the same class gathered about some old Norman castle, donjon, or keep; their Norman descent distinctly visible in their inherited personal traits; a certain characteristic combination of intellect, courage, beauty, and social charm distinguishing them at a glance from the dull, heavy, long-bodied, short-legged, unshapely Saxon of a neighboring town or shire. The same restless blood or the same spirit of adventure which brought the Scandinavian to Normandy and the Norman to English soil, in time drove him to the great settlements beyond the Atlantic Sea--settlements known by the English of to-day as "The States." Their brethren in Ireland followed in great numbers at a later day, and, wherever in recent wars the American flag has been unfurled, "the fighting race" has stood beneath its folds--always in force and always at the front, each with the line of battle beneath his feet and the fire of battle in his eye.

"We fight wheriver a gintleman should," Says Murphy, and Kelly, and Shea; "We fight wheriver the fighting is good; And here's to the good, straight fighting blood!" Says Murphy, and Kelly, and Shea.

Thither, too, came the indomitable Scot, precisely as he came in the Colonial and Revolutionary days. "The Lowland race," says Mackintosh, "Briton and NORMAN and Saxon and Dane, gave the world a new man--the Sea Rover, the Border Soldier, the Pioneer.... The folk speech, from Northumberland to the Clyde and the Forth, is Northern English or Lowland Scotch; and the future man of Bannockburn and KING'S MOUNTAIN is beginning to appear. He is the man with the blood of the Sea Rover mixed with the blood of the Borderer, and the soldier, the scholar and thinker, the statesman and lawyer, the trader and farmer." He is the man that crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains as a pioneer. He is the man that sat in the conventions that organized the State, and stood in an unbroken line in all the pioneer battles of his race. The earliest migration of the Anglo-Norman folk was to the Colony of Virginia, as many of the old Virginian surnames, Bacon, Baskerville, Boys (Bois), Cabell, Clay, etc., clearly attest; and the State of Kentucky deriving a large population of English descent from Virginia, we should naturally find a strong infusion of Anglo-Norman blood in the people of this State--an inference fully sustained by the transcript of Anglo-Norman surnames which the writer made from the list that he found in the great Library in London.

The late Professor Shaler is frequently quoted to the effect that ethnological research discloses the existence in Kentucky of the largest body of nearly pure English folk to be found on the face of the globe--that has been separated for two hundred years from the parent English stock. But the facts do not warrant the assumption that the Kentuckian is of purely "Anglo-Saxon" derivation. In _him_, at least, the blood of the Norman is not wholly lost. He _is_, however, as Professor Shaler says, an "Elizabethan" Englishman.

We print elsewhere a list of names familiar to Kentuckians, which clearly points to the same general conclusion. With more leisure and space this list might be greatly extended.

IV

But what are the characteristic traits of the Norman as we find him in his early habitat in France? We are told by a contemporary observer--Geoffrey Malaterra--that the typical or "composite" Norman of his day was prodigiously astute, a passionate lover of litigation, an eloquent speaker, skilled in diplomacy, sagacious in council, convincing in debate; a son of the Church, but not too deferential to prelates nor too precise in the observance of ecclesiastical forms; a bold and tireless litigant, but not over-scrupulous in his methods of procedure and not always strictly judicial in his construction of the law. "If he was born a soldier," said Edward Freeman, "he was also a born lawyer." In spite of this pronounced legal _penchant_ he was swift (if not restrained) to disregard and override the law; in the phrase of the old chronicler, the _gens_ was _effrenatissima_--recklessly wild, unbridled and dangerous, _nisi jugo justitiæ prematur_; daring, resolute, destructive in mutiny or revolt; seditious, piratical or even revolutionary, unless the reins of government were in strong and competent hands.

We had a notable mid-century exemplification of this "unbridled" quality of temper in the introductory _razzia_ of Lopez at Cardenas. When the Kentuckians, whose unerring rifles had crumpled up the Spanish cavalry and successfully covered the slow retreat of Lopez to the sea, were followed by the pursuing warship _Pizarro_ into the harbor of Key West, nothing daunted they coolly seized the United States fort, took possession of its batteries, and deliberately trained its guns upon the Spanish man-of-war. _Gens effrenatissima_, indeed. The fighting habits of the Liberators were notoriously loose (especially under tropical suns); but what is to be particularly noted in this instance is, that the reins of power in our highly civilized government were unpardonably lax. It is possible, however, that the reckless and "unbridled" conduct of the Kentuckians was due, in part, to the circumstance that the chaplain of the Expedition had been killed.

The subsequent official investigation showed to the entire satisfaction of our Anglo-Norman lawyers that practically everything had been done under "the forms of law."

The word _effrenatus_ was almost overworked by Cicero. It perfectly described the Catilines of old Rome and the banded ruffians that wrought their will. But in his very lawlessness the Norman of Malaterra never forgot the _law_. He scrupulously observed its "forms." Even the Conquest of England was "justified" by a pronunciamento of legal assumptions subtly and elaborately drawn. The Norman was a shrewd and successful trafficker, and this tradition of commercial skill and thrift is current in Normandy to-day. When he settled on English soil or sailed in English ships he did not lose his inherited commercial instincts. He made England the trading nation that she is. An eminent Kentuckian, who bore the distinctive marks of Norman blood, once said to a group of keenly attentive listeners, "The meanest of all aristocracies is a commercial aristocracy." A like disparaging conception of a powerful adversary was implied in the remark attributed to Napoleon, that "the English were a nation of shop-keepers"--_un peuple marchand_. It was this same race of innocuous Anglo-Norman traffickers that crushed Napoleon's iron columns at Waterloo, and forever closed his conquering career. But the Norman, who was a soldier, a lawyer, a diplomatist, orator, hunter, horseman and trader, was also a successful cultivator of the soil, and the Norman agriculturist of to-day who reminds the tourist in his physical traits, hair, eyes, and complexion, and even in the intonations of his voice, of an English farmer of the Anglo-Norman type, bears a more striking resemblance to his English kinsman indeed than to his dark-visaged compatriot, the _vigneron_ of Southern France. We must add, to complete the portraiture left us by Malaterra, that the Norman was a passionate lover of horses, of the breed immortalized by the genius of Bonheur; a bold equestrian, skilled in the use of arms; at home upon the sea, and literally reared in the lap of war. And he was also a brilliant orator, passionately fond of eloquent speech. From his early boyhood, says the chronicler, he assiduously cultivated his natural aptitude for that persuasive art, that power of ready and effective utterance which, though often profane, made him dominant in the councils of war and of peace; in the cabinets of diplomacy, and even in the chamber of the King. _Gens astutissima_ beyond all doubt.

To return to our beginning--what think you was in the mind of Paul Du Chaillu as he stood that memorable evening before an audience of mid-century Kentuckians?--this philosophic thinker who had been for years a critical observer of "the most dramatic spectacle in history"--the sweeping, ceaseless, transcontinental march of the Anglo-Norman race--what did he think of the environing conditions as he stood in that old Courthouse which had resounded with the eloquence of Anglo-Norman orators; which had echoed and re-echoed generation after generation to the "Oyez!" "Oyez!" of Anglo-Norman sheriffs? and which was still standing, an impressive memorial of days when the ground upon which it was built was the camping-ground of the dominant figure in this Westward march--the Anglo-Norman leader Boone or "Bohun"--a name which in its very sound or utterance (_mugitus boum_) was in "dark and bloody" times a challenge to mortal combat--a deep bellowing defiance of "battle to the death"?

What were his thoughts as he looked with wondering eyes upon that charming Southern matron with her fair, delicate features and high-bred air? Was the vision a vivid reminder of blue-eyed "Scandinavian" maidens with faces as white as their native snows and locks with the softened shimmer of the midnight sun? One must acknowledge that the very exquisiteness of form and tint made this a rare type, even in Kentucky, but there were many interesting variations of it to be seen at our great mid-century "Fairs"--from the rich "auburn" of Marie Stuart to the "carroty" tresses of the Virgin Queen--framing lovely faces and crowning tall, willowy figures of queenly mold. But probably the prevailing tint of hair was that ascribed by the wizard romancer to the Lady Rowena--with her dash of Scandinavian blood--something between flaxen and brown; all in clear and brilliant contrast with a type that glowed with the superb brunette finish of Southern and Central France. Had Du Chaillu been with us in earlier days we could have shown him likewise figures of a striking masculine type--tall, soldierly figures that might have graced the "Viking age"--men who, after the fashion of early Norman days, would have been equally at home in camp or court. One of these gallant gentlemen, whom many of us remember, was in some respects a striking counterpart of a Scandinavian sailor that figures in a late romance, "Wolf Larsen"; like him even in the soubriquet prefixed to his Scandinavian name; of gigantic stature and strength; big-brained, passionate, strong-willed, energetic, proud, combative and sagacious, with a deep instinctive love of the sea. But his chronic irascibility of temper, often manifest on trifling provocation in unbridled bursts of Berserker rage, sadly marred the brilliancy of his military career, and engendered deep and implacable enmities which brought his career as a soldier to a speedy and tragical close.

In other respects he radically differed from Norsemen of the Wolf Larsen type. In his relations with his family and friends he was delicate, generous, and kind; the tenderest of sons, the kindest brother, the most devoted and loyal of friends: a lover of literature, music, and the finer pleasures of social life. Strangest of all, he was reverent and devout. He respected the forms of the Church, and every night, even in the rude environment of the camp, he knelt beside his soldier's couch and repeated the Lord's Prayer. But the soubriquet fastened upon him both by resentful enemies and admiring friends recalls his fictitious counterpart--Wolf Larsen. Whenever the name of the Federal commander came up for discussion during our great Civil War--whether in Confederate camp or by Kentucky firesides, or by the campfires of his own loyal division--he was invariably known, by reason of his huge figure, his big bovine head, his flaming black eyes, his fierce, tumultuous energies, his headlong courage and gigantic strength, by the soubriquet "Bull"--BULL NELSON--a sea-trained soldier with a bellowing soubriquet prefixed to an honored racial name--a mid-century Kentuckian, who in mediæval battle might have swung the battle-axe of Front-de-Boeuf.

There were many others--Kentuckians of an ideal Anglo-Norman type--who would have brought to M. Du Chaillu the strongest confirmation of his philosophic views had he visited us during the cyclonic "sixties," or in that halcyon interlude "before the war."

V

Returning now to the discussion of the masterly paper read by M. Du Chaillu at the British Association,[4] we may consider certain aspects of the question more in detail; conceding at the same time full credit to the ability of the disputants who dissented from the views expressed by the foreign savant. M. Du Chaillu was peculiarly fortunate in his critics. If his theory should survive the searching and trenchant criticisms of such men, his scholarship would command respect even if they should decline to accept his conclusions in full.

[4] British Association for the Advancement of Science, Newcastle Meeting, 1889.