[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 sunshine 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!
28. So that, accurately thought of, the quality of Frankness glances only with the flat side of it into any meaning of "Libre," but with all its cutting edge, determinedly, and to all time, it signifies Brave, strong, and honest, above other men.[15] The old woodland race were never in any wolfish sense "free," but in a most human sense Frank, outspoken, meaning what they had said, and standing to it, when they had got it out. Quick and clear in word and act, fearless utterly and restless always;--but idly lawless, or weakly lavish, neither in deed nor word. Their frankness, if you read it as a scholar and a Christian, and not like a modern half-bred, half-brained infidel, knowing no tongue of all the world but in the slang of it, is really opposed, not to Servitude,--but to Shyness![16] It is to this day the note of the sweetest and Frenchiest of French character, that it makes simply perfect _Servants_. Unwearied in protective friendship, in meekly dextrous omnificence, in latent tutorship; the lovingly availablest of valets,--the mentally and personally bonniest of bonnes. But in no capacity shy of you! Though you be the Duke or d.u.c.h.ess of Montaltissimo, you will not find them abashed at your alt.i.tude. They will speak "up" to you, when they have a mind.
[Footnote 15: Gibbon touches the facts more closely in a sentence of his 22nd chapter. "The independent warriors of Germany, _who considered truth as the n.o.blest of their virtues_, and freedom as the most valuable of their possessions." He is speaking especially of the Frankish tribe of the Attuarii, against whom the Emperor Julian had to re-fortify the Rhine from Cleves to Basle: but the first letters of the Emperor Jovian, after Julian"s death, "delegated the military command of _Gaul_ and Illyrium (what a vast one it was, we shall see hereafter), to Malarich, a _brave and faithful_ officer of the nation of the Franks;" and they remain the loyal allies of Rome in her last struggle with Alaric. Apparently for the sake only of an interesting variety of language,--and at all events without intimation of any causes of so great a change in the national character,--we find Mr.
Gibbon in his next volume suddenly adopting the abusive epithets of Procopius, and calling the Franks "a light and perfidious nation"
(vii. 251). The only traceable grounds for this unexpected description of them are that they refuse to be bribed either into friendship or activity, by Rome or Ravenna; and that in his invasion of Italy, the grandson of Clovis did not previously send exact warning of his proposed route, nor even entirely signify his intentions till he had secured the bridge of the Po at Pavia; afterwards declaring his mind with sufficient distinctness by "a.s.saulting, almost at the same instant, the hostile camps of the Goths and Romans, who, instead of uniting their arms, fled with equal precipitation."]
[Footnote 16: For detailed ill.u.s.tration of the word, see "Val d"Arno,"
Lecture VIII.; "Fors Clavigera," Letters XLVI. 231, LXXVII. 137; and Chaucer, "Romaunt of Rose," 1212--"Next _him_" (the knight sibbe to Arthur) "daunced dame Franchise;"--the English lines are quoted and commented on in the first lecture of "Ariadne Florentina"; I give the French here:--
"Apres tous ceulx estoit Franchise Que ne fut ne brune ne bise.
Ains fut comme la neige blanche _Courtoyse_ estoit, _joyeuse_, et _franche_.
Le nez avoit long et tretis, Yeulx vers, riants; sourcilz faitis; Les cheveulx eut tres-blons et longs Simple fut comme les coulons Le coeur eut doulx et debonnaire.
_Elle n"osait dire ne faire Nulle riens que faire ne deust._"
And I hope my girl readers will never more confuse Franchise with "Liberty."]
29. Best of servants: best of _subjects_, also, when they have an equally frank King, or Count, or Captal, to lead them; of which we shall see proof enough in due time;--but, instantly, note this farther, that, whatever side-gleam of the thing they afterwards called Liberty may be meant by the Frank name, you must at once now, and always in future, guard yourself from confusing their Liberties with their Activities. What the temper of the army may be towards its chief, is _one_ question--whether either chief or army can be kept six months quiet,--another, and a totally different one. That they must either be fighting somebody or going somewhere, else, their life isn"t worth living to them; the activity and mercurial flashing and flickering hither and thither, which in the soul of it is set neither on war nor rapine, but only on change of place, mood--tense, and tension;--which never needs to see its spurs in the dish, but has them always bright, and on, and would ever choose rather to ride fasting than sit feasting,--this childlike dread of being put in a corner, and continual want of something to do, is to be watched by us with wondering sympathy in all its sometimes splendid, but too often unlucky or disastrous consequences to the nation itself as well as to its neighbours.
30. And this activity, which we stolid beef-eaters, before we had been taught by modern science that we were no better than baboons ourselves, were wont discourteously to liken to that of the livelier tribes of Monkey, did in fact so much impress the Hollanders, when first the irriguous Franks gave motion and current to their marshes, that the earliest heraldry in which we find the Frank power blazoned seems to be founded on a Dutch endeavour to give some distantly satirical presentment of it. "For," says a most ingenious historian, Mons. Andre Favine,--"Parisian, and Advocate in the High Court of the French Parliament in the year 1620"--"those people who bordered on the river Sala, called "Salts," by the Allemaignes, were on their descent into Dutch lands called by the Romans "Franci Salici"" (whence "Salique" law to come, you observe) "and by abridgment "Salii," as if of the verb "salire," that is to say "saulter," to leap"--(and in future therefore--duly also to dance--in an incomparable manner) "to be quicke and nimble of foot, to leap and mount well, a quality most notably requisite for such as dwell in watrie and marshy places; So that while such of the French as dwelt on the great course of the river" (Rhine) "were called "Nageurs," Swimmers, they of the marshes were called "Saulteurs," Leapers, so that it was a nickname given to the French in regard both of their natural disposition and of their dwelling; as, yet to this day, their enemies call them French Toades, (or Frogs, more properly) from whence grew the fable that their ancient Kings carried such creatures in their Armes."
31. Without entering at present into debate whether fable or not, you will easily remember the epithet "Salian" of these fosse-leaping and river-swimming folk (so that, as aforesaid, all the length of Rhine must be refortified against them)--epithet however, it appears, in its origin delicately Saline, so that we may with good discretion, as we call our seasoned Mariners, "_old_ Salts," think of these more brightly sparkling Franks as "Young Salts,"--but this equivocated presently by the Romans, with natural respect to their martial fire and "elan," into "Salii"--exsultantes,[17]--such as their own armed priests of war: and by us now with some little farther, but slight equivocation, into useful meaning, to be thought of as here first Salient, as a beaked promontory, towards the France we know of; and evermore, in brilliant elasticities of temper, a salient or out-sallying nation; lending to us English presently--for this much of heraldry we may at once glance on to--their "Leopard," not as a spotted or blotted creature, but as an inevitably springing and pouncing one, for our own kingly and princely shields.
[Footnote 17: Their first mischievous exsultation into Alsace being invited by the Romans themselves, (or at least by Constantius in his jealousy of Julian,)--with "presents and promises,--the hopes of spoil, and a perpetual grant of all the territories they were able to subdue." Gibbon, chap. xix. (3, 208.) By any other historian than Gibbon, who has really no fixed opinion on any character, or question, but, safe in the general truism that the worst men sometimes do right, and the best often do wrong, praises when he wants to round a sentence, and blames when he cannot otherwise edge one--it might have startled us to be here told of the nation which "deserved, a.s.sumed, and maintained the _honourable_ name of freemen," that "_these undisciplined robbers_ treated as their natural enemies all the subjects of the empire who possessed any property which they were desirous of acquiring." The first campaign of Julian, which throws both Franks and Alemanni back across the Rhine, but grants the Salian Franks, under solemn oath, their established territory in the Netherlands, must be traced at another time.]
Thus much, of their "Salian" epithet may be enough; but from the interpretation of the Frankish one we are still as far as ever, and must be content, in the meantime, to stay so, noting however two ideas afterwards entangled with the name, which are of much descriptive importance to us.
32. "The French poet in the first book of his Franciades" (says Mons.
Favine; but what poet I know not, nor can enquire) "encounters" (in the sense of en-quarters, or depicts as a herald) certain fables on the name of the French by the adoption and composure of two _Gaulish_ words joyned together, Phere-Encos which signifieth "Beare-_Launce_,"
(--Shake-Lance, we might perhaps venture to translate,) a lighter weapon than the Spear beginning here to quiver in the hand of its chivalry--and Fere-encos then pa.s.sing swiftly on the tongue into Francos;"--a derivation not to be adopted, but the idea of the weapon most carefully,--together with this following--that "among the arms of the ancient French, over and beside the Launce, was the Battaile-Axe, which they called _Anchon_, and moreover, yet to this day, in many Provinces of France, it is termed an _Achon_, wherewith they served themselves in warre, by throwing it a farre off at joyning with the enemy, onely to discover the man and to cleave his shield. Because this _Achon_ was darted with such violence, as it would cleave the Shield, and compell the Maister thereof to hold down his arm, and being so discovered, as naked or unarmed; it made way for the sooner surprizing of him. It seemeth, that this weapon was proper and particuler to the French Souldior, as well him on foote, as on horsebacke. For this cause they called it _Franciscus_. Francisca, _securis oblonga, quam Franci librabant in Hostes_. For the Horseman, beside his shield and Francisca (Armes common, as wee have said, to the Footman), had also the Lance, which being broken, and serving to no further effect, he laid hand on his Francisca, as we learn the use of that weapon in the Archbishop of Tours, his second book, and twenty-seventh chapter."
33. It is satisfactory to find how respectfully these lessons of the Archbishop of Tours were received by the French knights; and curious to see the preferred use of the Francisca by all the best of them--down, not only to Coeur de Lion"s time, but even to the day of Poitiers. In the last wrestle of the battle at Poitiers gate, "La, fit le Roy Jehan de sa main, merveilles d"armes, et tenoit une hache de guerre dont bien se deffendoit et combattoit,--si la quartre partie de ses gens luy eussent ressemble, la journee eust ete pour eux." Still more notably, in the episode of fight which Froissart stops to tell just before, between the Sire de Verclef, (on Severn) and the Picard squire Jean de Helennes: the Englishman, losing his sword, dismounts to recover it, on which Helennes _casts_ his own at him with such aim and force "qu"il acconsuit l"Anglois es cuisses, tellement que l"espee entra dedans et le cousit tout parmi, jusqu"au hans."
On this the knight rendering himself, the squire binds his wound, and nurses him, staying fifteen days "pour l"amour de lui" at Chasteleraut, while his life was in danger; and afterwards carrying him in a litter all the way to his own chastel in Picardy. His ransom however is 6000 n.o.bles--I suppose about 25,000 pounds, of our present estimate; and you may set down for one of the fatallest signs that the days of chivalry are near their darkening, how "devint celuy Escuyer, Chevalier, pour le grand profit qu"il eut du Seigneur de Verclef."
I return gladly to the dawn of chivalry, when, every hour and year, men were becoming more gentle and more wise; while, even through their worst cruelty and error, native qualities of n.o.blest cast may be seen a.s.serting themselves for primal motive, and submitting themselves for future training.
34. We have hitherto got no farther in our notion of a Salian Frank than a glimpse of his two princ.i.p.al weapons,--the shadow of him, however, begins to shape itself to us on the mist of the Brocken, bearing the lance light, pa.s.sing into the javelin,--but the axe, his woodman"s weapon, heavy;--for economical reasons, in scarcity of iron, preferablest of all weapons, giving the fullest swing and weight of blow with least quant.i.ty of actual metal, and roughest forging. Gibbon gives them also a "weighty" sword, suspended from a "broad" belt: but Gibbon"s epithets are always gratis, and the belted sword, whatever its measure, was probably for the leaders only; the belt, itself of gold, the distinction of the Roman Counts, and doubtless adopted from them by the allied Frank leaders, afterwards taking the Pauline mythic meaning of the girdle of Truth--and so finally; the chief mark of Belted Knighthood.
35. The Shield, for all, was round, wielded like a Highlander"s target:--armour, presumably, nothing but hard-tanned leather, or patiently close knitted hemp; "Their close apparel," says Mr. Gibbon, "accurately expressed the figure of their limbs," but "apparel" is only Miltonic-Gibbonian for "n.o.body knows what." He is more intelligible of their persons. "The lofty stature of the Franks, and their blue eyes, denoted a Germanic origin; the warlike barbarians were trained from their earliest youth to run, to leap, to swim, to dart the javelin and battle-axe with unerring aim, to advance without hesitation against a superior enemy, and to maintain either in life or death, the invincible reputation of their ancestors" (vi. 95). For the first time, in 358, appalled by the Emperor Julian"s victory at Strasburg, and besieged by him upon the Meuse, a body of six hundred Franks "dispensed with the ancient law which commanded them to conquer or die." "Although they were strongly actuated by the allurements of rapine, they professed a disinterested love of war, which they considered as the supreme honour and felicity of human nature; and their minds and bodies were so hardened by perpetual action that, according to the lively expression of an orator, the snows of winter were as pleasant to them as the flowers of spring" (iii. 220).
36. These mental and bodily virtues, or indurations, were probably universal in the military rank of the nation: but we learn presently, with surprise, of so remarkably "free" a people, that n.o.body but the King and royal family might wear their hair to their own liking. The kings wore theirs in flowing ringlets on the back and shoulders,--the Queens, in tresses rippling to their feet,--but all the rest of the nation "were obliged, either by law or custom, to shave the hinder part of their head, to comb their short hair over their forehead, and to content themselves with the ornament of two small whiskers."
37. Moustaches,--Mr. Gibbon means, I imagine: and I take leave also to suppose that the n.o.bles, and n.o.ble ladies, might wear such tress and ringlet as became them. But again, we receive unexpectedly embarra.s.sing light on the democratic inst.i.tutions of the Franks, in being told that "the various trades, the labours of agriculture, and the arts of hunting and fishing, were _exercised by servile_ hands for the _emolument_ of the Sovereign."
"Servile" and "Emolument," however, though at first they sound very dreadful and very wrong, are only Miltonic-Gibbonian expressions of the general fact that the Frankish Kings had ploughmen in their fields, employed weavers and smiths to make their robes and swords, hunted with huntsmen, hawked with falconers, and were in other respects tyrannical to the ordinary extent that an English Master of Hounds may be. "The mansion of the long-haired Kings was surrounded with convenient yards and stables for poultry and cattle; the garden was planted with useful vegetables; the magazines filled with corn and wine either for sale or consumption; and the whole administration conducted by the strictest rules of private economy."