Part 8

Mr. Freeman says that the Normans "lost themselves" among the people whom they conquered. Very clearly, however, the "names" were not lost. The original Norman may be said to have had, in a high degree, that _personnalité absorbante_ which, according to Littré, is characteristic of every great man. It is not remarkable, therefore, that after every Norman invasion the resulting ethnical transmutation was complete. The new element became at once the vitalizing power of the "absorptive" or subjugated race. This gift of racial transformation was so great that the Scandinavians, seizing a Gallic province, became French or Norman; subjugating England, they became English; overflowing Ireland, they fused at once with the native race; actually becoming "_Irisher_ than the Irish" themselves--_Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores_. The Duke of Argyle once said in the English House of Lords that three of the Irish leaders of that day (one of them John Redmond, the present Irish King) were genealogically superior men--men of illustrious descent--leaders of royal or noble Norman blood; confirming the declaration made by the author of the "Peerage" that it is not lands but ancestors that make a nobility. The career of the Norman as a conquering or migratory race has been a perpetual masquerade; in England taking the form of an Irishman and controlling the Parliament; in the same guise leading the armies of England and France; in America, demoniacally possessed, becoming the personal director of a lynching, the boss of a strike, or the leader of a lawless expeditionary force. But everywhere he _leads_! The name of the race disappears, but the original, indestructible, irresistible, invisible and protean force is still _there_. If we reject the existence and operation of this subtle and pervasive influence in the ancestral strains of Kentucky, the evolution of the typical Kentuckian can not easily be explained. The race is "lost," not because the visiting Norman is absorbed by his host, but because the visitor appropriates all that his host may have, even his personality and all that it implies. The Englishman, or the Irishman, or the Scotchman, disappear, and a transmogrified Norman takes his place. It is not English, nor Irish, nor French absorptiveness, but Norman appropriativeness, that has done the work. Precisely thus, to compare great things with small: the English Whigs once went in swimming, and the Norman Tories "stole their clothes." But the Norman's act of appropriation usually goes deeper than the skin. He is not content with a petty theft of "clothes." With an almost satanic subtlety and finesse he appropriates the very soul. It becomes, indeed, his very own. That incomparable illusionist, Benjamin Disraeli, was a past-master in these Norman arts, and in perfect sympathy with those Anglo-Norman Tories who followed his fortunes in victory or defeat. But Norman or Saxon were equally indifferent to him. It was glory enough for Semitic ambition to build success upon the needs of both; and yet, in doing it, this man of alien blood and ancient race repeated the miracle of Lanfranc--the scholar and statesman who, in the old Norman days, had not only cooled the hot blood of the Normanized Scandinavian and conciliated the respect of the proud, implacable Saxon, but, linking their interests in inseparable association, had brightened with a prospect of imperial splendor the destinies of the common race. So, too, the Semitic statesman charmed the rudest elements with his Orphean song. His brilliant successor, Salisbury, added to parts and learning the technical information of a savant. Disraeli had something better. He had that deep, philosophic insight which seems to be bred into the elect of an ancient stock. It is a mystical gift.

"He saw things, now, as though they _were_, And things _To Be_ in things that are."

This (if we may believe Haeckel) was the "inspiration" of the Jewish Law-giver.

How little escaped the thoughtful eyes of our Semitic statesman, as he surveyed from his coign of vantage the shifting currents of our modern world! In depicting Monsignore Berwick, a descendant of an old Scottish family that for generations had mingled Italian blood with its own, the writer looks quite beyond the native environment, and sees only the old Northern blood in the _flaxen hair_ and _light blue eyes_ of the young Italian priest. Describing a nineteenth century function at the beautiful English home of Hugo Bohun, he sees at once in Mr. Gaston Phoebus--the most gifted and attractive of the swells whom fashion has herded in this social jungle of Bohun--not a modern Englishman, but a _Gascon noble of the Sixteenth Century_, clothed with all the attractions of a contemporary courtier of France--the France of Louis le Grand. In "Gaston Phoebus"--says the philosophic statesman--"Nature, as is sometimes her wont, had chosen to reproduce exactly the original type." When the subtle Semitic thinker introduced an American "Colonel" at the swell function of Hugo Bohun, why should he take him from the _South_, and give him a _Norman_ name? Had nature reproduced in Colonel Campian the antique Norman type?

It is a notorious fact, says Herbert Spencer, that the Celtic type disappears altogether in the United States.

Doubtless some vague conception of a potential undercurrent of ancestral blood must have been passing through the mind of that fine old gentleman, Mr. Isaac Shelby of Fayette, when dispensing his stores of bachelor wisdom to his young friends just "after the war." He would say, "Depend on it, young gentlemen, there is no cross like a _Virginian_ cross." The differentiating quality was there. It was observed, but not accurately depicted perhaps, by Disraeli, by Barrett Wendell, and by _Isaac le Bon_. What was it? If a racial quality, what _race_? Two of these acute observers were of Scandinavian stock. The other did not need to say, even to the proudest statesman at Potsdam or St. James, "_Your_ race is of but yesterday compared with my own." One of Disraeli's favorite themes was race. Indeed, a statesman could not be ignorant of the subject in his day. The claims of race were sweeping over diplomatic arrangements and dynastic rights. Bismarck was unifying the German people by removing ancient landmarks, by "appropriating" autonomous territories, and by appropriating or absorbing a large population of the Scandinavian race; and the third (and last) Napoleon undertook to unify the Latin races by placing an Austrian prince upon the Mexican throne. But the Napoleonic prince pushed his reconstructive theories of race to a destructive conclusion when, in freeing Italy, he furnished a formidable partner to the Triple Alliance, that ultimately destroyed France. The sentiment of race, properly directed, has its uses. But the director must not be a despot or a despot's agent. The feeling must be popular in origin and expression--voluntary, spontaneous, normal, autonomous. There was never a better illustration of its power than in the prolonged struggle of Kentucky for existence as an American State. There was never a better illustration of popular capacity in statecraft and of enterprise in war than in the early years of the last century (1800-12). They--the people--discharged the functions of an independent State. Kentucky was in fact a little _nation_. Raising and equipping armies, receiving diplomatic emissaries or agents, defending her frontiers, guarding the Atlantic border, protecting the territories of the Northwest, and in conjunction with the "sea-power" of Commodore Perry actually conducting war upon foreign soil. The very guns on Perry's ships were "sighted" by riflemen from Kentucky; and when the day came to try conclusions with the bold Englishman on his own soil, one of the most efficient aides upon Shelby's staff was Perry himself. Is there nothing in this record to appeal to a sentiment of national pride in the Kentuckian's heart? And does it not inspire a disposition to revive and invigorate those pristine instincts of our common race? Probably the recent manifestation of "home-coming" sentiment was denotive of some such stirring of racial impulse and emotion long dormant in the soul.

XIV

When following the long dim path of Gothic migration we found but little that seemed to be in vivid relation with the ethnology of our own race; and it was not until we were afloat upon the Scandinavian seas, with Rolf Ganger looking out upon the kingdoms of the earth, that we began to feel ourselves (to speak in paradox) firmly planted upon historic ground. Here the conditions of the old parable are reversed. The genius of civilization is offering the kingdoms of the earth to the Devil himself. With the old pirate of the Norwegian coast begins the great movement that frees, elevates, and modernizes man.[8] Henceforth all is plain sailing for the historical inquirer. The reader may take down his map and trace the foot-prints of the Norse freebooters wherever they dropped a Scandinavian name upon our ancestral soil. These ancient "place names" are found everywhere north of the Avon, and may easily be traced along the eastern coast of England, from the Tyne to the Thames; or, proceeding westward and northward, far beyond the line of the Cheviot Hills;--far beyond the waters of the Tweed. The Scandinavian has resolved to stay wherever he has been planted by the fortunes of war. When his Norman kinsman seized the counties of Southern England, the practical result of the invasion was to _reinforce_ the Anglo-Saxon whom he came to rob. The Norman invader was warmly received by those English Normans--the Danes--in his "wintry marches" to the north. From the dragon teeth thus sown sprang the Kentuckian of to-day, two thirds "dragon" and one third "bull." The "half horse, half alligator" was an Anglo-Norman assimilation of a later date.

[8] When Otto, the _Saxon_, a remote kinsman of our race, became a Roman Emperor, he became the CONSERVATOR of Rome and all her works. When William the Norman became King of England and the leader of Gothic races, it was his chosen mission to undo, in part, the work which Rome had done. As a soldier and statesman, the Norman leader had been trained in the "school" of the Saxon King. Read Mr. Freeman's "Western Europe in the Eighth Century." It is an impressive introduction to that "realm of shadows" which forms the background of the Norman Conquest. It was the genetic period of modern civilization. The geographic outlines of great modern States were just beginning to appear.

It is conceivable that by reason of exhausted material resources--coal, iron, etc.--our present splendid civilization, in the course of a few thousand years, will disappear; leaving here and there, perhaps, in some happy isle of the Pacific seas, a prosperous and cultivated population descended from some surviving element of the present American stock. Peering painfully through the mists of tradition, they have vague glimpses of ancestral races fighting for supremacy in a vast continental war--the Yenghees in the North and the Dixees in the South--remote ancestral races in internecine conflict.

It was thus with the Teutonic and Scandinavian races of to-day. In far-off Central Asia, beyond the Caspian Sea and beyond the definite historic boundaries of the past, they see great races in perpetual movement of migration or war; multitudinous peoples; two distinct groups or divisions; but all of one race. As they emerge into the twilight of history--into the savage gloaming betwixt the dog and the wolf--the observer recognizes two races, the Teutones and the Gothones, or Goths. The vast migratory columns of the former take possession of Central Europe. The other column,--the kindred Gothones or Goths,--making its exit from Central Asia, sweeps along the valley of the Vistula, follows the southern shores of the Baltic Sea, and moving to the mouths of the Elbe and the Rhine directs its columns of colonization into Denmark and the Danish Islands, and to the vast Scandinavian peninsula of the north. As the northern column loitered along the shores of the Baltic they gathered great quantities of amber from the sea, which with early instincts of commercial thrift they sold to the Teutones on the south, by whom, with early mechanic aptitude, it was wrought into many exquisite and profitable shapes for the markets of the world. "Made in Germany" is an antique trademark in the history of men, and there is a pleasant, if trivial, significance in the circumstance that the first historic article of traffic between these primitive races--the founders of modern civilization--was the substance which first manifested the property of "electricity" to the eyes of man.

But in pursuing this inquiry we are less concerned in ascertaining the exact relations of the ancestral kinsmen than in studying the ethnic material (in this instance the Scandinavian) which was molded or modified by the geographical _milieu_. What was the moral geography of the race? Why should the Norseman differ from his kindred Teuton in the South? There may have been original differences in the psychology of race which made one, for example, an explorer and trader, and the other an unrivaled artisan and exploiter. But there is something to be considered in the plastic influence of the physical and social conditions. It is no melodramatic assumption, for example, to declare that no slave could live in the free air of Scandinavia. Not because the air is "free," but because the soil is thin. The slave could not subsist himself, much less pay tribute to a lord. If slavery or serfage was impossible, a nobility was equally so. Where subsistence was scant, accumulation was at least slow. Wealth could not exist as a basis of privilege, and class legislation upon primogeniture gave support to this natural law. The "five" and "fifty" acre holdings could not be consolidated into big estates. The rocky ridges, the high levels, the nipping airs, the thin, worn soil, the short seasons, and the fleeting harvests were conditions fatal to the growth of feudalism. Retainers were superfluous where slaves could not make their keep. Fish from the sea, a little pasturage in the glens--that was all. No smiling abundant harvests; no patient laborious thralls, no baronial _bas_ or boss; none of those iron Teutonic laws that not only shaped the conditions of society but wrought changes in the very soul of man. The Scandinavians were not Germans or Saxons or Angles or Celts. This rocky Scandinavian peninsula was cradling the masters of the world. They were literally driven by their wild, arid nurse to follow the furrows of the sea and recast the corrupted civilizations of the earth. Between the sheltering group of islands that fringe the western front of Norway and curtain the main shore, there is a broad passage of the sea where a navy of dragon-prows might float secure from observation or attack. Near the center of this insular barrier, Rolf Ganger--the greatest force of that hyperborean world--had constructed a system of dry-docks, from which, in the idle hours of summer and autumn, he launched those portentous fleets of dragons and serpents that sailed upon every sea and ravaged the most distant shores. From one point of view, it was a nest of Scandinavian free-booters; from another, it was the naval station of a great sea-faring race--a race that, having failed as traders in amber and timber and fish, were now about to try their luck in ravage and loot upon the gravelly loams of the Cheviot Hills and deep in the sunny heart of France.

William the Conqueror was fifth in descent from this great Captain of the northern seas--the potential reconstructor of the modern world.

XV

When the great Gothic column of migration, sweeping past the Caspian and crossing the Asian frontier, followed the river valleys and the shores of the Baltic Sea, making a reconnoissance in force that reached as far as the waters of the northern sea, it pushed its exploring columns through every part of Scandinavia, peopling every shore it passed, and leaving every promontory and peninsula in every nook and hook and cranny and on every continental headland, every island inlet, and in every peaceful arm of the Danish seas strewn with the wrecks of the migrant column, battered by the hardships of a long, unbroken march. Only the strong survived. The weak and unenterprising, as the head of the resistless column bent toward the northern sea, shrank from the toils and terrors of a march in a northern clime. Upon these geographical points of "refuge" the racial weaklings had been gathering for years. Nothing stayed the mighty Goth. The Norman could turn the sharpest corners in the Danish world. Once planted in the footsteps of a pioneer, even a phlegmatic Teuton might pursue his way. But the exhausted weakling dropped in his tracks, and crawled to the shelter of some inviting _angulus_ or nook. Here they were--the drift in the eddy of an archipelagic sea. Jutes from Jutland (in Denmark); _Saxons_ from the shores to the south; Angles, from the Anglen in Sleswick--in all a seething colluvian of ethnic stragglers swarming for an ultimate raid upon British soil. The great Teutonic nation was seemingly planted on the best lands of _Central Europe_; the great Scandinavian people lay far to the north; the Jutes, the Angles, the Saxons, the Frisians, _lay between_;--the Angli, who gave their name to England, lying at the point (_Angulus_) where the coast of the Baltic first bends sharply toward the north. Are these the peoples that gave substance and strength and splendor to the English race? The men who fall out in a forced march (said a great Virginian captain) are not the men to stand up in a long fight.

Toward the close of the Eighth Century the Scandinavians of the North began their work of devastation upon English soil. For at least three centuries the Anglo-Saxons held the Rover's name in dread. Contemporary English abounds with Scandinavian words and forms; numerous traces of Scandinavian occupancy are found on English soil to-day. The men of the Heptarchy were in the main bred upon English soil. At least they were not a broken race of stragglers when they came. They were a vigorous, fighting breed. But if Bismarck were looking for "mixed races" in his carefully calculated career of annexation (no "dreaming" here), he certainly found what he sought at the point where the column of Goths that had marched from Central Asia, turning its head to the German Ocean, took courage from the bracing prospect and--gathering their veterans into one compact, invulnerable mass--debouched boldly toward the vast, inhospitable regions of the North. The Angles and Saxons were cradled among the mixed or mongrel peoples that had been dropped by the great migrant races in the southeastern corner of the northern sea--a population, says Marsh, of "very mixed and diversified blood." These furnished the original "comelings" upon British soil, but it is scarcely credible that the outcome of this mongrel stock was the _Anglo-Saxon Race_,--which in the great Triple Alliance of Norman and Saxon and Dane has for centuries maintained an unbroken front and kept the world in awe.

XVI

The learned author of "British Family Names," speaking of certain lists of ancient Norman names alleged to be authentic, says: "Of this great array of time-honored names, few are now borne by direct representatives. They exist among the old gentry rather than in the peerage. In the majority of cases, the later descendants of illustrious families have sunk into poverty and obscurity, unconscious of their origin." They have not "vanished from the world" (as Mr. Freeman says), but are daily coming to the front in circumstances requiring capacity for leadership in affairs. "Even now," says the observant author of an anonymous treatise,[9] "agricultural laborers and coal miners can not combine for objects which demand the exercise of practical ability without finding themselves led by those who, though in humble stations, bear names of undoubted Norman origin," citing, by way of example, Joseph Arch (_De Arques_, Normandy). These quotations will fitly introduce to the reader the long and suggestive alphabetical series of Norman names which the compiler has made the basis of extended critical remark.

[9] The Norman People.

In examining this series, one naturally inquires: How do we know that the thousands of names, taken from an old English Directory, are Norman? Simply by the circumstance that the same names occur in the records of Normandy in the Eleventh and Twelfth centuries--the references in most cases being to the great Rolls of the Exchequer, 1180-1200. Comparative reference to the English records at an early date--Eleventh, Twelfth, and Thirteenth centuries--raises a strong presumption that names appearing on the Norman Rolls _before the Conquest_, and on English records _after the Conquest_, were derived from Normandy, and that names now accounted _English_ were originally _Norman_ names. A similar correspondence between the names in the records of a Virginian court house and those of official records in Kentucky, to the mind of a contemporary genealogist, would carry decisive weight. It is the weight of concurrent testimony of high character from authentic sources. _Identitas colligitur ex multitudine signorum._ Even one surname in like circumstances is a significant record of individual descent. What shall be said of thousands historically traced--the continuous record of a single race? Thirty years ago it was estimated by an English scholar that the English race proper comprised thirty millions of people--a great composite nation; the Saxon, Dane, and Norman--a trinity of races all derived from the same ancient stock (the Gothic) and each forming about one third of a homogeneous race. The Saxon came immediately from the southeastern shores and islands of the North Sea, and is of Gothic descent; the Dane from Denmark or the Danish Isles, and is of pure Scandinavian stock; the Norman from Normandy, remotely Gothic, is of direct descent from the Scandinavian race. If this statement be correct the conclusion seems to be inevitable, _not_ that "we are Scandinavians"--as the London _Times_ says--but that we are all deeply _Scandinavianized_ and that there is a preponderance of Scandinavian blood in the English race. If there has been a thorough intermixture of the three racial elements during the past eight hundred years, we may assume that every Kentuckian of Anglo-Virginian stock represents a practically definite ethnical product: Saxon, one third; Scandinavian, two thirds--for all controversial purposes a sufficiently conclusive result. The long-commingled blood of this composite race is, in effect, an adamantine cement, and the racial plexus, fusion, or combination is one and inseparable in every sense. If it were possible to _remove_ either of these constituent elements--the _Scandinavian_ or Saxon--the Kentuckian in his present admirable form would disappear and nothing but a restoration of the racial balance by a reconstitution of the original parts would restore him to the position of primacy assigned him by Mr. Bart Kennedy in his recent contribution to the London _Mail_. How true, then, in a deep ethnological sense, the familiar legend of our Commonwealth--"United we stand, divided we fall."