The Ancien Régime

For by that time the mighty spiritual struggles and fierce religious animosities of the preceding century had worn themselves out.  And, as always happens, to a period of earnest excitement had succeeded one of weariness, disgust, half-unbelief in the many questions for which so much blood had been shed.  No man had come out of the battle with altogether clean hands; some not without changing sides more than once.  The war had ended as one, not of nations, not even of zealots, but of mercenaries.  The body of Europe had been pulled in pieces between them all; and the poor soul thereof—as was to be expected—had fled out through the gaping wounds.  Life, mere existence, was the most pressing need.  If men could—in the old prophet’s words—find the life of their hand, they were content.  High and low only asked to be let live.  The poor asked it—slaughtered on a hundred battle-fields, burnt out of house and home: vast tracts of the centre of Europe were lying desert; the population was diminished for several generations.  The trading classes, ruined by the long war, only asked to be let live, and make a little money.  The nobility, too, only asked to be let live.  They had lost, in the long struggle, not only often lands and power, but their ablest and bravest men; and a weaker and meaner generation was left behind, to do the governing of the world.  Let them live, and keep what they had.  If signs of vigour still appeared in France, in the wars of Louis XIV. they were feverish, factitious, temporary—soon, as the event proved, to droop into the general exhaustion.  If wars were still to be waged they were to be wars of succession, wars of diplomacy; not wars of principle, waged for the mightiest invisible interests of man.  The exhaustion was general; and to it we must attribute alike the changes and the conservatism of the Ancien Régime.  To it is owing that growth of a centralising despotism, and of arbitrary regal power, which M. de Tocqueville has set forth in a book which I shall have occasion often to quote.  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 mediæval 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 mediæval 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 Régime 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 equal otherwise in years, fortunes, education, and all good affection.  In Germany, except they can prove their gentility by three descents, they scorn to match with them.  A nobleman must marry a noblewoman; a baron, a baron’s daughter; a knight, a knight’s.  As slaters sort their slates, do they degrees and families.”

And doubtless this theory—like all which have held their ground for many centuries—at first represented a fact.  These castes were, at first, actually superior to the peoples over whom they ruled.  I cannot, as long as my eyes are open, yield to the modern theory of the equality—indeed of the non-existence—of races.  Holding, as I do, the primæval unity of the human race, I see in that race the same inclination to sport into fresh varieties, the same competition of species between those varieties, which Mr. Darwin has pointed out among plants and mere animals.  A distinguished man arises; from him a distinguished family; from it a distinguished tribe, stronger, cunninger than those around.  It asserts its supremacy over its neighbours at first exactly as a plant or animal would do, by destroying, and, where possible, eating them; next, having grown more prudent, by enslaving them; next, having gained a little morality in addition to its prudence, by civilising them, raising them more or less toward its own standard.  And thus, in every land, civilisation and national life has arisen out of the patriarchal state; and the Eastern scheik, with his wives, free and slave, and his hundreds of fighting men born in his house, is the type of all primæval rulers.  He is the best man of his horde—in every sense of the word best; and whether he have a right to rule them or not, they consider that he has, and are the better men for his guidance.

Whether this ought to have been the history of primæval civilisation, is a question not to be determined here.  That it is the history thereof, is surely patent to anyone who will imagine to himself what must have been.  In the first place, the strongest and cunningest savage must have had the chance of producing children more strong and cunning than the average; he would have—the strongest savage has still—the power of obtaining a wife, or wives, superior in beauty and in household skill, which involves superiority of intellect; and therefore his children would—some of them at least—be superior to the average, both from the father’s and the mother’s capacities.  They again would marry select wives; and their children again would do the same; till, in a very few generations, a family would have established itself, considerably superior to the rest of the tribe in body and mind, and become assuredly its ruling race.

Again, if one of that race invented a new weapon, a new mode of tillage, or aught else which gave him power, that would add to the superiority of his whole family.  For the invention would be jealously kept among them as a mystery, a hereditary secret.  To this simple cause, surely, is to be referred the system of hereditary caste occupations, whether in Egypt or Hindoostan.  To this, too, the fact that alike in Greek and in Teutonic legend the chief so often appears, not merely as the best warrior and best minstrel, but as the best smith, armourer, and handicraftsman of his tribe.  If, however, the inventor happened to be a low-born genius, its advantages would still accrue to the ruling race.  For nothing could be more natural or more easy—as more than one legend intimates—than that the king should extort the new secret from his subject, and then put him to death to prevent any further publicity.

Two great inventive geniuses we may see dimly through the abysses of the past, both of whom must have become in their time great chiefs, founders of mighty aristocracies—it may be, worshipped after their death as gods.

The first, who seems to have existed after the age in which the black race colonised Australia, must have been surely a man worthy to hold rank with our Brindleys, Watts, and Stephensons.  For he invented (and mind, one man must have invented the thing first, and by the very nature of it, invented it all at once) an instrument so singular, unexpected, unlike anything to be seen in nature, that I wonder it has not been called, like the plough, the olive, or the vine, a gift of the immortal gods: and yet an instrument so simple, so easy, and so perfect, that it spread over all races in Europe and America, and no substitute could be found for it till the latter part of the fifteenth century.  Yes, a great genius was he, and the consequent founder of a great aristocracy and conquering race, who first invented for himself and his children after him a—bow and arrow.

The next—whether before or after the first in time, it suits me to speak of him in second place—was the man who was the potential ancestor of the whole Ritterschaft, Chivalry, and knightly caste of Europe; the man who first, finding a foal upon the steppe, deserted by its dam, brought it home, and reared it; and then bethought him of the happy notion of making it draw—presumably by its tail—a fashion which endured long in Ireland, and had to be forbidden by law, I think as late as the sixteenth century.  A great aristocrat must that man have become.  A greater still he who first substituted the bit for the halter.  A greater still he who first thought of wheels.  A greater still he who conceived the yoke and pole for bearing up his chariot; for that same yoke, and pole, and chariot, became the peculiar instrument of conquerors like him who mightily oppressed the children of Israel, for he had nine hundred chariots of iron.  Egyptians, Syrians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans—none of them improved on the form of the conquering biga, till it was given up by a race who preferred a pair of shafts to their carts, and who had learnt to ride instead of drive.  A great aristocrat, again, must he have been among those latter races who first conceived the notion of getting on his horse’s back, accommodating his motions to the beast’s, and becoming a centaur, half-man, half-horse.  That invention must have tended, in the first instance, as surely toward democracy as did the invention of firearms.  A tribe of riders must have been always, more or less, equal and free.  Equal because a man on a horse would feel himself a man indeed; because the art of riding called out an independence, a self-help, a skill, a consciousness of power, a personal pride and vanity, which would defy slavery.  Free, because a tribe of riders might be defeated, exterminated, but never enchained.  They could never become gleboe adscripti, bound to the soil, as long as they could take horse and saddle, and away.  History gives us more than one glimpse of such tribes—the scourge and terror of the non-riding races with whom they came in contact.  Some, doubtless, remember how in the wars between Alfred and the Danes, “the army” (the Scandinavian invaders) again and again horse themselves, steal away by night from the Saxon infantry, and ride over the land (whether in England or in France), “doing unspeakable evil.”  To that special instinct of horsemanship, which still distinguishes their descendants, we may attribute mainly the Scandinavian settlement of the north and east of England.  Some, too, may recollect the sketch of the primeval Hun, as he first appeared to the astonished and disgusted old Roman soldier Ammianus Marcellinus; the visages “more like cakes than faces;” the “figures like those which are hewn out with an axe on the poles at bridge-ends;” the rat-skin coats, which they wore till they rotted off their limbs; their steaks of meat cooked between the saddle and the thigh; the little horses on which “they eat and drink, buy and sell, and sleep lying forward along his narrow neck, and indulging in every variety of dream.”  And over and above, and more important politically, the common councils “held on horseback, under the authority of no king, but content with the irregular government of nobles, under whose leading they force their way through all obstacles.”  A race—like those Cossacks who are probably their lineal descendants—to be feared, to be hired, to be petted, but not to be conquered.

Instances nearer home of free equestrian races we have in our own English borderers, among whom (as Mr. Froude says) the farmers and their farm-servants had but to snatch their arms and spring into their saddles and they became at once the Northern Horse, famed as the finest light cavalry in the world.  And equal to them—superior even, if we recollect that they preserved their country’s freedom for centuries against the superior force of England—were those troops of Scots who, century after century, swept across the border on their little garrons, their bag of oatmeal hanging by the saddle, with the iron griddle whereon to bake it; careless of weather and of danger; men too swift to be exterminated, too independent to be enslaved.

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