Upon this passage, if brought to me in an undergraduate essay, I should have much to say. The style, with its abstract nouns (“the literal extirpation of a nation is an impossibility”), its padding and periphrasis (“there is every reason to believe” … “as far as the male sex is concerned we may feel sure”) betrays the loose thought. It begins with “in short” and proceeds to be long-winded. It commits what even schoolboys know to be a solecism by inviting us to consider three “alternatives”; and what can I say of “the women doubtless would be largely spared,” save that besides scanning in iambics it says what Freeman never meant and what no-one outside of an Aristophanic comedy could ever suggest? “The women doubtless would be largely spared”! It reminds me of the young lady in Cornwall who, asked by her vicar if she had been confirmed, admitted blushingly that “she had reason to believe, partially so.”
“The women doubtless would be largely spared”!—But I thank the professor for teaching me that phrase, because it tries to convey just what I am driving at. The Jutes, Angles, Saxons, did not extirpate the Britons, whatever you may hold concerning the Romans. For, once again, men do not behave in that way, and certainly will not when a live slave is worth money. Secondly, the very horror with which men spoke, centuries after, of Anderida quite plainly indicates that such a wholesale massacre was exceptional, monstrous. If not exceptional, monstrous, why should this particular slaughter have lingered so ineffaceably in their memories? Finally—and to be as curt as the question deserves—the Celtic Briton in the island was not exterminated and never came near to being exterminated: but on the contrary, remains equipollent with the Saxon in our blood, and perhaps equipollent with that mysterious race we call Iberian, which came before either and endures in this island today, as anyone travelling it with eyes in his head can see. Pict, Dane, Norman, Frisian, Huguenot French—these and others come in. If mixture of blood be a shame, we have purchased at the price of that shame the glory of catholicism; and I know of nothing more false in science or more actively poisonous in politics or in the arts than the assumption that we belong as a race to the Teutonic family.
Dane, Norman, Frisian, French Huguenot—they all come in. And will you refuse a hearing when I claim that the Roman came in too? Bethink you how deeply Rome engraved itself on this island and its features. Bethink you that, as human nature is, no conquering race ever lived or could live—even in garrison—among a tributary one without begetting children on it. Bethink you yet further of Freeman’s admission that in the wholesale (and quite hypothetical) general massacre “the women doubtless would be largely spared”; and you advance nearer to my point. I see a people which for four hundred years was permeated by Rome. If you insist on its being a Teutonic people (which I flatly deny) then you have one which alone of Teutonic peoples has inherited the Roman gift of consolidating conquest, of colonising in the wake of its armies; of driving the road, bridging the ford, bringing the lawless under its sense of law. I see that this nation of ours concurrently, when it seeks back to what alone can inspire and glorify these activities, seeks back, not to any supposed native North, but south to the Middle Sea of our civilisation and steadily to Italy, which we understand far more easily than France—though France has helped us times and again. Putting these things together, I retort upon the ethnologists—for I come from the West of England, where we suffer incredible things from them—“Semper ego auditor tantum?” I hazard that the most important thing in our blood is that purple drop of the imperial murex we derive from Rome.
You must, of course, take this for nothing more than it pretends to be—a conjecture, a suggestion. I will follow it up with two statements of fact, neither doubtful nor disputable.
The first is, that when English poetry awoke, long after the Conquest (or, as I should prefer to put it, after the Crusades) it awoke a new thing; in its vocabulary as much like Anglo-Saxon poetry as ever you will, but in metre, rhythm, lilt—and more, in style, feeling, imaginative play—and yet more again, in knowledge of what it aimed to be, in the essentials, in the qualities that make Poetry Poetry—as different from Anglo-Saxon poetry as cheese is from chalk, and as much more nutritious. Listen to this—
Bytuene Mershe ant Averil
When spray biginnith to spring,
The lutel foul hath hire wyl
On hire lud to synge:
Ich libbe in love-longinge
For semlokest of alle thynge,
He may me blisse bringe,
Icham in hire bandoun.
An hendy hap ichabbe y-hent,
Ichot from hevene it is me sent,
From alle wymmen my love is lent,
And lyht on Alisoun.
Here you have alliteration in plenty; you even have what some hold to be the pattern of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse (though in practice disregarded, may be, as often as not), the chosen initial used twice in the first line and once at least in the second:
From alle wymmen my love is lent,
And lyht on Alisoun.
But if a man cannot see a difference infinitely deeper than any similarity between this song of Alison and the old Anglo-Saxon verse—a difference of nature—I must despair of his literary sense.
What has happened? Well, in Normandy, too, and in another tongue, men are singing much the same thing in the same way:
A la fontenelle
Qui sort seur l’araine,
Trouvai pastorella
Qui n’iert pas vilaine …
Merci, merci, douce Marote,
N’oçiez pas vostre ami doux,
and this Norman
