The Ancien Regime | Page 9

To it is owing, too, that longing, which seems to us childish,
after ancient forms, etiquettes, dignities, court costumes, formalities
diplomatic, legal, ecclesiastical. Men clung to them as to keepsakes of
the past--revered relics of more intelligible and better-ordered times. If
the spirit had been beaten out of them in a century of battle, that was all
the more reason for keeping up the letter. They had had a meaning once,
a life once; perhaps there was a little life left in them still; perhaps the
dry bones would clothe themselves with flesh once more, and stand
upon their feet. At least it was useful that the common people should so
believe. There was good hope that the simple masses, seeing the old
dignities and formalities still parading the streets, should suppose that
they still contained men, and were not mere wooden figures, dressed
artistically in official costume. And, on the whole, that hope was not
deceived. More than a century of bitter experience was needed ere the
masses discovered that their ancient rulers were like the suits of armour
in the Tower of London--empty iron astride of wooden steeds, and
armed with lances which every ploughboy could wrest out of their
hands, and use in his own behalf.

The mistake of the masses was pardonable. For those suits of armour
had once held living men; strong, brave, wise; men of an admirable
temper; doing their work according to their light, not altogether
well--what man does that on earth?--but well enough to make
themselves necessary to, and loyally followed by, the masses whom
they ruled. No one can read fairly the "Gesta Dei per Francos in
Oriente," or the deeds of the French Nobility in their wars with England,
or those tales--however legendary--of the mediaeval knights, which
form so noble an element in German literature, without seeing, that
however black were these men's occasional crimes, they were a truly
noble race, the old Nobility of the Continent; a race which ruled simply
because, without them, there would have been naught but anarchy and
barbarism. To their chivalrous ideal they were too often, perhaps for the
most part, untrue: but, partial and defective as it is, it is an ideal such as
never entered into the mind of Celt or Gaul, Hun or Sclav; one which
seems continuous with the spread of the Teutonic conquerors. They
ruled because they did practically raise the ideal of humanity in the
countries which they conquered, a whole stage higher. They ceased to
rule when they were, through their own sins, caught up and surpassed
in the race of progress by the classes below them.
But, even when at its best, their system of government had in it-- like
all human invention--original sin; an unnatural and unrighteous element,
which was certain, sooner or later, to produce decay and ruin. The old
Nobility of Europe was not a mere aristocracy. It was a caste: a race not
intermarrying with the races below it. It was not a mere aristocracy. For
that, for the supremacy of the best men, all societies strive, or profess to
strive. And such a true aristocracy may exist independent of caste, or
the hereditary principle at all. We may conceive an Utopia, governed
by an aristocracy which should be really democratic; which should use,
under developed forms, that method which made the mediaeval
priesthood the one great democratic institution of old Christendom;
bringing to the surface and utilising the talents and virtues of all classes,
even to the lowest. We may conceive an aristocracy choosing out, and
gladly receiving into its own ranks as equals, every youth, every
maiden, who was distinguished by intellect, virtue, valour, beauty,
without respect to rank or birth; and rejecting in turn, from its own

ranks, each of its own children who fell below some lofty standard, and
showed by weakliness, dulness, or baseness, incapacity for the post of
guiding and elevating their fellow-citizens. Thus would arise a true
aristocracy; a governing body of the really most worthy--the most
highly organised in body and in mind--perpetually recruited from
below: from which, or from any other ideal, we are yet a few thousand
years distant.
But the old Ancien Regime would have shuddered, did shudder, at such
a notion. The supreme class was to keep itself pure, and avoid all taint
of darker blood, shutting its eyes to the fact that some of its most
famous heroes had been born of such left-handed marriages as that of
Robert of Normandy with the tanner's daughter of Falaise. "Some are
so curious in this behalf," says quaint old Burton, writing about 1650,
"as these old Romans, our modern Venetians, Dutch, and French, that if
two parties dearly love, the one noble, the other ignoble, they may not,
by their laws, match, though