The Pleasures of England | Page 4

Free Will, though it brought bishop after bishop into
England to extinguish it, remained an extremely healthy and active
element in the British mind down to the days of John Bunyan and the
guide Great Heart, and the calmly Christian justice and simple human
virtue of Theodoric were the very roots and first burgeons of the
regeneration of Italy.[1] But of the degrees in which it was possible for
any barbarous nation to receive during the first five centuries, either the
spiritual power of Christianity itself, or the instruction in classic art and
science which accompanied it, you cannot rightly judge, without taking
the pains, and they will not, I think, be irksome, of noticing carefully,
and fixing permanently in your minds, the separating characteristics of
the greater races, both in those who learned and those who taught.

[Footnote 1: Gibbon, in his 37th chapter, makes Ulphilas also an Arian,
but might have forborne, with grace, his own definition of
orthodoxy:--and you are to observe generally that at this time the
teachers who admitted the inferiority of Christ to the Father as touching
his Manhood, were often counted among Arians, but quite falsely.
Christ's own words, "My Father is greater than I," end that controversy
at once. Arianism consists not in asserting the subjection of the Son to
the Father, but in denying the subjected Divinity.]
Of the Huns and Vandals we need not speak. They are merely forms of
Punishment and Destruction. Put them out of your minds altogether,
and remember only the names of the immortal nations, which abide on
their native rocks, and plough their unconquered plains, at this hour.
Briefly, in the north,--Briton, Norman, Frank, Saxon, Ostrogoth,
Lombard; briefly, in the south,--Tuscan, Roman, Greek, Syrian,
Egyptian, Arabian.
Now of these races, the British (I avoid the word Celtic, because you
would expect me to say Keltic; and I don't mean to, lest you should be
wanting me next to call the patroness of music St. Kekilia), the British,
including Breton, Cornish, Welsh, Irish, Scot, and Pict, are, I believe,
of all the northern races, the one which has deepest love of external
nature;--and the richest inherent gift of pure music and song, as such;
separated from the intellectual gift which raises song into poetry. They
are naturally also religious, and for some centuries after their own
conversion are one of the chief evangelizing powers in Christendom.
But they are neither apprehensive nor receptive;--they cannot
understand the classic races, and learn scarcely anything from them;
perhaps better so, if the classic races had been more careful to
understand them.
Next, the Norman is scarcely more apprehensive than the Celt, but he is
more constructive, and uses to good advantage what he learns from the
Frank. His main characteristic is an energy, which never exhausts itself
in vain anger, desire, or sorrow, but abides and rules, like a living
rock:--where he wanders, he flows like lava, and congeals like granite.
Next, I take in this first sketch the Saxon and Frank together, both
pre-eminently apprehensive, both docile exceedingly, imaginative in
the highest, but in life active more than pensive, eager in desire, swift
of invention, keenly sensitive to animal beauty, but with difficulty

rational, and rarely, for the future, wise. Under the conclusive name of
Ostrogoth, you may class whatever tribes are native to Central
Germany, and develope themselves, as time goes on, into that power of
the German Cæsars which still asserts itself as an empire against the
licence and insolence of modern republicanism,--of which races,
though this general name, no description can be given in rapid terms.
And lastly, the Lombards, who, at the time we have to deal with, were
sternly indocile, gloomily imaginative,--of almost Norman energy, and
differing from all the other western nations chiefly in this notable
particular, that while the Celt is capable of bright wit and happy play,
and the Norman, Saxon, and Frank all alike delight in caricature, the
Lombards, like the Arabians, never jest.
These, briefly, are the six barbaric nations who are to be taught: and of
whose native arts and faculties, before they receive any tutorship from
the south, I find no well-sifted account in any history:--but thus much
of them, collecting your own thoughts and knowledge, you may easily
discern--they were all, with the exception of the Scots, practical
workers and builders in wood; and those of them who had coasts, first
rate sea-boat builders, with fine mathematical instincts and practice in
that kind far developed, necessarily good sail-weaving, and sound
fur-stitching, with stout iron-work of nail and rivet; rich copper and
some silver work in decoration--the Celts developing peculiar gifts in
linear design, but wholly incapable of drawing animals or figures;--the
Saxons and Franks having enough capacity in that kind, but no thought
of attempting it; the