Part 4 (1/2)

[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 Graeco-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 pa.s.sage 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 Princ.i.p.ality 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 Princ.i.p.ality 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 s.p.a.ce.

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 lat.i.tude.

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-gla.s.s 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 mediaeval 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 princ.i.p.ality 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 Ca.s.sel, 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 Ca.s.sel 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 G.o.d 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 wa.s.ser, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce between Weser and the mouths of Rhine, pa.s.sing 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 pa.s.sion of these Germans. They deserved, they a.s.sumed, 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 t.i.tle 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 c.o.c.kney form of it, 'Mossoo,'

wholly understood as a republican term!