Part 3 (1/2)

The wild rose is indigenous. There is no nook nor cranny, no bank nor brae, which is not, in the time of roses, ablaze with their exuberant loveliness. In gardens, the cultured rose is so prolific that it spreads literally like a weed. But it is worth suggestion that the word may be of the same stock as the Hebrew _rosh_ (translated ros by the Septuagint), meaning _chief_, _princ.i.p.al_, while it is also the name of _some_ flower; but of _which_ flower is now unknown.

Affinities of _rosh_ are not far to seek; Sanskrit, _Raj_(a), _Ra_(ja)_ni_; Latin, _Rex_, _Reg_(ina).”

I leave it to Professor Max Muller to certify or correct for you the details of Mr. c.o.c.kburn's research,[11]--this main head of it I can positively confirm, that in old Scotch,--that of Bishop Douglas,--the word 'Rois' stands alike for King, and Rose.

[Footnote 11: I had not time to quote it fully in the lecture; and in my ignorance, alike of Keltic and Hebrew, can only submit it here to the reader's examination. ”The ancient Cognizance of the town confirms this etymology beyond doubt, with customary heraldic precision. The s.h.i.+eld bears a _Rose_; with a _Maul_, as the exact phonetic equivalent for the expletive. If the herald had needed to express 'bare promontory,' quite certainly he would have managed it somehow.

Not only this, the Earls of Haddington were first created Earls of _Melrose_ (1619); and their s.h.i.+eld, quarterly, is charged, for Melrose, in 2nd and 3rd (fesse wavy between) three _Roses_ gu.

”Beyond this ground of certainty, we may indulge in a little excursus into lingual affinities of wide range. The root _mol_ is clear enough.

It is of the same stock as the Greek _mala_, Latin _mul_(_tum_), and Hebrew _m'la_. But, _Rose_? We call her Queen of Flowers, and since before the Persian poets made much of her, she was everywhere _Regina Florum_. Why should not the name mean simply the Queen, the Chief?

Now, so few who know Keltic know also Hebrew, and so few who know Hebrew know also Keltic, that few know the surprising extent of the affinity that exists--clear as day--between the Keltic and the Hebrew vocabularies. That the word _Rose_ may be a case in point is not hazardously speculative.”]

Summing now the features I have too shortly specified in the Saxon character,--its imagination, its docility, its love of knowledge, and its love of beauty, you will be prepared to accept my conclusive statement, that they gave rise to a form of Christian faith which appears to me, in the present state of my knowledge, one of the purest and most intellectual ever attained in Christendom;--never yet understood, partly because of the extreme rudeness of its expression in the art of ma.n.u.scripts, and partly because, on account of its very purity, it sought no expression in architecture, being a religion of daily life, and humble lodging. For these two practical reasons, first;--and for this more weighty third, that the intellectual character of it is at the same time most truly, as Dean Stanley told you, childlike; showing itself in swiftness of imaginative apprehension, and in the fearlessly candid application of great principles to small things. Its character in this kind may be instantly felt by any sympathetic and gentle person who will read carefully the book I have already quoted to you, the Venerable Bede's life of St. Cuthbert; and the intensity and sincerity of it in the highest orders of the laity, by simply counting the members of Saxon Royal families who ended their lives in monasteries.

Now, at the very moment when this faith, innocence, and ingenuity were on the point of springing up into their fruitage, comes the Northern invasion; of the real character of which you can gain a far truer estimate by studying Alfred's former resolute contest with and victory over the native Norman in his paganism, than by your utmost endeavours to conceive the character of the afterwards invading Norman, disguised, but not changed, by Christianity. The Norman could not, in the nature of him, become a _Christian_ at all; and he never did;--he only became, at his best, the enemy of the Saracen. What he was, and what alone he was capable of being, I will try to-day to explain.

And here I must advise you that in all points of history relating to the period between 800 and 1200, you will find M. Viollet le Duc, incidentally throughout his 'Dictionary of Architecture,' the best-informed, most intelligent, and most thoughtful of guides.

His knowledge of architecture, carried down into the most minutely practical details,--(which are often the most significant), and embracing, over the entire surface of France, the buildings even of the most secluded villages; his artistic enthusiasm, balanced by the acutest sagacity, and his patriotism, by the frankest candour, render his a.n.a.lysis of history during that active and constructive period the most valuable known to me, and certainly, in its field, exhaustive.

Of the later nationality his account is imperfect, owing to his professional interest in the mere _science_ of architecture, and comparative insensibility to the power of sculpture;--but of the time with which we are now concerned, whatever he tells you must be regarded with grateful attention.

I introduce, therefore, the Normans to you, on their first entering France, under his descriptive terms of them.[12]

[Footnote 12: Article ”Architecture,” vol. i., p. 138.]

”As soon as they were established on the soil, these barbarians became the most hardy and active builders. Within the s.p.a.ce of a century and a half, they had covered the country on which they had definitely landed, with religious, monastic, and civil edifices, of an extent and richness then little common. It is difficult to suppose that they had brought from Norway the elements of art,[13] but they were possessed by a persisting and penetrating spirit; their brutal force did not want for grandeur. Conquerors, they raised castles to a.s.sure their domination; they soon recognized the Moral force of the clergy, and endowed it richly. Eager always to attain their end, when once they saw it, they _never left one of their enterprises unfinished_, and in that they differed completely from the Southern inhabitants of Gaul. Tenacious extremely, they were perhaps the only ones among the barbarians established in France who had ideas of order; the only ones who knew how to preserve their conquests, and compose a state. They found the remains of the Carthaginian arts on the territory where they planted themselves, they mingled with those their national genius, positive, grand, and yet supple.”

[Footnote 13: They _had_ brought some, of a variously Charybdic, Serpentine, and Diabolic character.--J.R.]

Supple, 'Delie,'--capable of change and play of the mental muscle, in the way that savages are not. I do not, myself, grant this suppleness to the Norman, the less because another sentence of M. le Duc's, occurring incidentally in his account of the archivolt, is of extreme counter-significance, and wide application. ”The Norman arch,” he says, ”is _never derived from traditional cla.s.sic forms_, but only from mathematical arrangement of line.” Yes; that is true: the Norman arch is never derived from cla.s.sic forms. The cathedral,[14] whose aisles you saw or might have seen, yesterday, interpenetrated with light, whose vaults you might have heard prolonging the sweet divisions of majestic sound, would have been built in that stately symmetry by Norman law, though never an arch at Rome had risen round her field of blood,--though never her Sublician bridge had been petrified by her Augustan pontifices. But the _decoration_, though not the structure of those arches, they owed to another race,[15] whose words they stole without understanding, though three centuries before, the Saxon understood, and used, to express the most solemn majesty of his Kinghood,--

”EGO, EDGAR, TOTIVS ALBIONIS”--

not Rex, that would have meant the King of Kent or Mercia, not of England,--no, nor Imperator; that would have meant only the profane power of Rome, but _BASILEVS_, meaning a King who reigned with sacred authority given by Heaven and Christ.

[Footnote 14: Of Oxford, during the afternoon service.]

[Footnote 15: See the concluding section of the lecture.]

With far meaner thoughts, both of themselves and their powers, the Normans set themselves to build impregnable military walls, and sublime religious ones, in the best possible practical ways; but they no more made books of their church fronts than of their bastion flanks; and cared, in the religion they accepted, neither for its sentiments nor its promises, but only for its immediate results on national order.

As I read them, they were men wholly of this world, bent on doing the most in it, and making the best of it that they could;--men, to their death, of _Deed_, never pausing, changing, repenting, or antic.i.p.ating, more than the completed square, ??e? ?????, of their battle, their keep, and their cloister. Soldiers before and after everything, they learned the lockings and bracings of their stones primarily in defence against the battering-ram and the projectile, and esteemed the pure circular arch for its distributed and equal strength more than for its beauty. ”I believe again,” says M. le Duc,[16] ”that the feudal castle never arrived at its perfectness till after the Norman invasion, and that this race of the North was the first to apply a defensive system under unquestionable laws, soon followed by the n.o.bles of the Continent, after they had, at their own expense, learned their superiority.”

[Footnote 16: Article ”Chateau,” vol. iii, p. 65.]

The next sentence is a curious one. I pray your attention to it. ”The defensive system of the Norman is born of a profound sentiment of _distrust_ and _cunning, foreign to the character of the Frank_.”

You will find in all my previous notices of the French, continual insistance upon their natural Franchise, and also, if you take the least pains in a.n.a.lysis of their literature down to this day, that the idea of falseness is to them indeed more hateful than to any other European nation. To take a quite cardinal instance. If you compare Lucian's and Shakespeare's Timon with Moliere's Alceste, you will find the Greek and English misanthropes dwell only on men's _ingrat.i.tude_ to _themselves_, but Alceste, on their _falsehood to each other_.

Now hear M. le Duc farther: