A Blind Democrat

395

a people-these are the dangers of which it warns us, and to which the majority of Englishmen are subject now as then. But Mr. Freeman, like the Bourbons, never learnt, and never forgot. A democrat first, an historian afterwards, History was for him, unhappily, ever "past

politics." If he worshipped Harold with a blind enthusiasm, it was chiefly because he was a novus homo, "who reigned purely by the will of the people." He insisted that the English, on the hill of battle, were beaten through lack of discipline, through lack of obedience to their king; but he could not see that the system in which he gloried, a system which made the people "a co-ordinate authority with their king, was the worst of all trainings for the hour of battle; he could not see that, like Poland, England fell, in large measure, from the want of a strong rule, and from excess of liberty. To him the voice of "a sovereign people" was "the most spirit-stirring of earthly sounds"; but it availed about as much to check the Norman Conquest as the fetish of an African savage, or the yells of Asiatic hordes. We trace in his history of Sicily the same blindness to fact. Dionysius was for him, as he was for Dante, merely,

Dionisio fero

Che fe' Cicilia aver dolorosi anni.

But, in truth, the same excess of liberty that left England a prey to the Normans had left Sicily, in her day, a prey to Carthage: the same internal jealousies paralysed her strength. And yet he could not forgive Dionysius, the man who gave Sicily what she lacked, the rule of "a strong man armed," because, in a democrat's eyes, Dionysius was a. "tyrant." That I am strictly just in my criticism of Mr. Freeman's attitude at the Conquest, is, I think, abundantly manifest, when even so ardent a democrat as Mr. Grant Allen admits that

a people so helpless, so utterly anarchic, so incapable of united action, deserved to undergo a severe training from the hard task

masters of Romance civilization. The nation remained, but it remained as a conquered race, to be drilled in the stern school of the conquerors. 159

Such were the bitter fruits of Old-English freedom. And, in the teeth of this awful lesson, Mr. Freeman could still look back with longing to "a free and pure Teutonic England," 160 could still exult in the thought that a democratic age is bringing England ever nearer to her state "before the Norman fet foot upon her shores."

But the school of which he was a champion has long seen its day. A reactionary movement, as has been pointed out by scholars in America, as in Russia 161 has invaded the study of history, has assailed the supremacy of the Liberal school, and has begun to preach, as the teaching of the past, the dangers of unfettered freedom.

Politics are not statesmanship. Mr. Freeman confused the two. There rang from his successor a truer note when, as he traversed the seas that bind the links of the Empire, he penned those words that appeal to the sons of an imperial race, sunk in the strife of parties or the politics of a parish pump, to rise to the level of their high inheritance among the nations of the earth. What was the Empire, what was India-we all remember that historic phraseto one whose ideal, it would seem, of statesmanship was that of an orator in Hyde Park? Godwine, the ambitious, the unscrupulous agitator, is always for him "the great deliverer." Whether in the Sicily of the "tyrants," or the England of Edward the Confessor, we are presented, under the guise of history, with a glorification of demagogy.

No man ever deserved a higher or a more lasting place in national gratitude than the first man who, being neither King nor Priest, stands forth in English history as endowed with all the highest attributes of

the statesman.

Demagogy Glorified

397

In him, in those distant times, we can revere the great minister, the unrivalled parliamentary leader, the man who could sway councils and assemblies at his will, etc., etc. 162

We know of whom the writer was thinking, when he praised that "irresistible tongue "; 163 he had surely before him a living model, who, if not a statesman, was, no doubt, an "unrivalled parliamentary leader." Do we not recog

nise the portrait ?—

The mighty voice, the speaking look and gesture of that old man eloquent, could again sway assemblies of Englishmen at his will. 164

The voice which had so often swayed assemblies of Englishmen, was heard once more in all the fulness of its eloquence.1

165

But it was not an "irresistible tongue," nor "the harangue of a practised orator," of which England stood in need. Forts and soldiers, not tongues, are England's want now as then. But to the late Regius Professor, if there was one thing more hateful than "castles," more hateful even than hereditary rule, it was a standing army. When the Franco-German war had made us look to our harness, he set himself at once, with superb blindness, to sneer at what he termed "the panic," to suggest the application of democracy to the army, and to express his characteristic aversion to the thought of "an officer and a gentleman." 166 How could such a writer teach the lesson of the Norman Conquest?

"The long, long canker of peace" had done its work"vivebatur enim tunc pene ubique in Angliâ perditis moribus, et pro pacis affluentia deliciarum fervebat luxus." 167 The land was ripe for the invader, and a saviour of Society

162 Norm. Cong., ii. 352.

164 lbid., 326.

163 Ibid., 327.

185 Ibid., 332.

166 "We shall get rid of the talk about 'an officer and a gentleman." (Macmillan's, xxiv. 10).

107 Vita Wistani.

was at hand. While our fathers were playing at democracy, watching the strife of rival houses, as men might now watch the contest of rival parties, the terrible Duke of the Normans was girding himself for war.

fabula narratur.

De nobis

The Disputed Passage

399

MASTER WACE.

MR. FREEMAN.

Of the array of the shield-wall we have often heard already as at Maldon, but it is at Senlac that we get the fullest descriptions of it, all the better for coming in the mouths of enemies. Wace gives his description, 12941: (Norm. Conq., iii. 763).

IN

MR. ARCHER.

Now, there are six distinct objections to translating this passage [of Wace] as if it referred to a shield-wall. These objections are, of course, of unequal value; but some of them would, by themselves, suffice to overthrow such a theory (Cont. Rev., 349).

N discussing Mr. Freeman's treatment of the great battle, we saw that the only passage he vouched for the existence of a palisade,1 consisted of certain lines from Wace's Roman de Rou, which he ultimately declared to be, on the contrary, a description of "the array of the shieldwall." The question, therefore, as to their meaning-on which my critics have throughout endeavoured to represent the controversy as turning-did not even arise so far as Mr. Freeman was concerned. Still less had I occasion to discuss the authority of Wace, Mr. Freeman's explicit verdict on the lines (iii. 763-4) having removed them, as concerns his own narrative, from the sphere of controversy. The case, however, is at once altered when Mr. Archer

1 Dismissing ut supra the "fosse" passage, which neither mentions nor implies it, together with the passage from Henry of Huntingdon.

2 N.C., iii. 763-4. I have shown in the E.H.R. (ix. 225) that he meant here by the shield-wall "exactly what he meant by it elsewhere," a shieldwall and nothing else.