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S. lr\ . U^^ 3
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THE ROMANES LECTURE
1904
(Montesquieu
BY
SIR COURTENAY ILBERT
K.C.S.I., CLE.
DBLtVERXO
IN THE SHELDONIAN THEATRE, OXFORD
JUNE 4, 1904
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1904
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HENRY FROWDE, M.A.
PUBLISHBR TO THB UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
LONDON, EDINBURGH
NEW YORK
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MONTESQUIEU
When Sainte-Beuve sat down, in the year 1852, to
write a causerie about Montesquieu, he gave as a reason
for not having dealt with the subject before that
Montesquieu belonged to the class of men whom one
approaches with apprehension on account of the respect
which they inspire, and of the kind of religious halo
which has gathered round their names.
This was written more than fifty years ago, and the
language reflects the glamour which still attached to
Montesquieu's name during the first half of the nine-
teenth century. That glamour has now passed away.
Not that Montesquieu has died, or is likely to die. But
he is no longer the oracle of statesmen ; his Spirit of
Laws is no longer treated by framers of constitutions
as a Bible of political philosophy, bearing with it the
same kind of authority as that which Aristotle bore
among the schoolmen. That authority ended when
the greater part of the civilized world had been endowed
with parliamentary and representative institutions
framed more or less on the model which Montesquieu
had described and had held up for imitation. The
interest which attaches to him now is of a different
order. It is literary and historical. He lives as one
of the greatest of French writers, and his Considerations
on the Greatness and Decay of the Romans are still
read as a school classic by French boys and girls,
much as the masterpieces of Burke are, or ought to be,
A2
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4 Montesquieu.
read in English schools. To the student of political
history he is known as the source of ideas which
exercised an influence of incomparable importance in
the framing of constitutions both for the old and for
the new continent. And for the student of political
science, his work marks a new departure in methods of
observation and treatment. The Spirit of Laws has
been called the greatest book of the eighteenth century:
its publication was certainly one of the greatest events
of that century.
If it were necessary for me to offer an apology
for taking Montesquieu as my subject to-day I might
plead, first, that no . student of history or of political
or legal science can afford to disregard one who has
been claimed, on strong grounds, as a founder of the
comparative method in its application to the study of
Politics and of Law; next, that some recent pubhca-
tions^ have thrown new and interesting light both on
his character and on his methods of work ; and lastly
that one cannot return too often to the consideration of
a really great man. Moreover, it may be suspected
that, in this country at least, and at the present day,
Montesquieu belongs to the numerous class of authors
whom everybody is supposed to know but whom very
few have read. It will, of course, be impossible for me
to do more than touch on a few of the aspects of such
a many-sided man.
Let me begin by reminding you of the leading dates
and facts in Montesquieu's life, so far only as is
necessary for the purpose of ' placing ' him historically *.
* The Collection Bordelaise referred to in note 2.
■ The fullest life of Montesquieu is that by L. Vian, Histoire de
Montesquieu^ Paris, 1878. But it is inaccurate and uncritical, and
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Montesquieu. 5
Charles Louis de Secondat was born in 1689, ^ Y^^r
after the Revolution which ended the Stuart dynasty,
five years before the birth of Voltaire, 100 years before
the outbreak of the French Revolution. He died in
1755, four years after the publication of the first volume
of the French Encyclopedia^ the year before the Seven
Years' War, five years before George III came to the
throne, and seven years before Rousseau preached to
the world, in the first chapter of his Social Contract,
that man is bom free and is everywhere in chains.
His birth-place was the Chateau of La Br6de, a
thirteenth-century castle some ten miles from Bor-
deaux^. Thus he was a countryman of Montaigne,
has been severely criticized by M. Bruneti^re {Revue des deux
MondeSf 1879). The best contemporary appreciation of Montes-
quieu is by the Marquis d'Argenson (M^moires, p. 428, edition ot
1825). The standard edition of Montesquieu is that by Laboulaye
in 7 vols., Paris, 1873-9. This must now be supplemented by
the 'Collection Bordelaise,' which contains further materials
supplied by the Montesquieu family, and which includes Deux
opuscules de Montesquieu, 1891 : Melanges in^its de Montesquieu,
1892: Voyages de Montesquieu, 2 vols., 1894: Pens^es et fragments
inedits, 2 vols., 1899, 1901. The literature on Montesquieu is
very extensive. A list of books, articles, and ^loges relating to
him will be found in an appendix to Vian's Histoire, Among
subsequent works the first place is taken by M. Sorel's Montesquieu
in the series called Les grands ^crivains fran^ais, a little book
of which I can only speak with the most respectful admiration.
J. Reference may also be made to Oncken, Zeitalter Friedrichs des
Grossen^ i. 80, 457 : Taine, Ancien Regime, pp. 264, 278, 339 : Japet,
Histoire de la science politique, vol. ii : Faguet, Dix-huitieme siicle :
Faguet, La politique compart de Montesquieu, Rousseau et Voltaire :
Bruneti^re, Etudes critiques sur P histoire de la litt&ature frangaise,
4me s^rie : Flint, The Philosophy of History, 262-79 ; Sir Leslie
Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i. 186 : Henry
Sidgwick, The Development of European Polity : Sir F. Pollock,
History oj the Science of Politics,
^ Sixteen and a half miles by railway.
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6 Montesquieu.
with whom he had many affinities. His family was
noble, and belonged to that more modem branch of the
nobility which had acquired its fortunes from the
exercise of judicial or financial functions, and which
was known as the noblesse de la robe. Therefore he was
a member of one of the two privileged classes which
under the old regime owned between them some two-
fifths of the soil of France, and were practically exempt
from all the burdens of the state.
On his mother's death he was sent as a boy of seven
to the Oratorian College at Juilly near Meaux, and
remained there eleven years. He then studied law,
and in 1714, at the age of twenty-five, was made coun-
sellor of the Parlement of Bordeaux, that is to say
member of the Supreme Court of the province of
Guienne. In the next year he married a Protestant
lady. The following year, 1716, made a great difference
in his fortunes. His uncle died, and he succeeded to
the barony of Montesquieu, to a considerable landed
property, and, above all, to the dignified and lucrative
post of President a Mortier^ or Vice-President, of the
Parlement of Bordeaux, a post which the uncle had
acquired by purchase, and which the nephew retained
until he parted with it to another purchaser in 1726.
His judicial duties were such as to leave him a good
deal of leisure. After the fashion of his time he
dabbled in physical science. The papers which he read
before the newly established Academy of Bordeaux
were of no scientific value, but they influenced his sub-
sequent political speculations, and supplied a sufficient
excuse for his election during his English visit to a
fellowship in our Royal Society^. His real interests
^ He was elected February 12, 1729 (old style). Proposed by
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Montesquieu. 7
lay neither in law nor in physics, but in the study of
human nature. His first book, the Persian Letters,
appeared in 1721. He resigned his judicial office in
1726, and became a member of the Academie franfaise
at the beginning of 1728. The next three years were
spent in travel, and his travels ended with a stay of
nearly two years in England. The Grandeur et
decadence des Remains appeared in 1734, and the
Esprit des lots in 1748. He died, as I have said, in
1755-
His personal appearance is known to us from the
excellent medallion portrait by Dassier, executed in
1752. Aquiline features, an expression, subtle, kindly,
humorous. He was always short-sighted, and towards
the end of his life became almost entirely blind. 'You
tell me that you are blind,* he writes to his old friend
Madame du DeflFand, in 1752 : ' Don't you see we were
both once upon a time, you and I, rebellious spirits,
now condemned to darkness? Let us console our-
Dr. Teissier and recommended by M. Ste-Hyacynthe and the
President (Sir Hans Sloane). He refers to his reception in
a letter to P6re Cerati, dated London, March i, 1730 (new style).
Among the documents of the Royal Society is the copy of a letter
from Montesquieu to Sir Hans Sloane, dated Paris, August 4, 1734,
and enclosing copies of his book on the Grandeur et decadence des
Romains. The M. Ste-Hyacynthe, who figures as Montesquieu's
backer, must have been the *Th6miseul de Ste-Hyacinthe, the
half-starved author of the Chef-doeuvre dun inconnuy who, after
having served, if we may believe Voltaire, as a dragoon during
the persecution of the French Protestants, had crossed over to
England, there had been converted, had translated Robinson Crusoe^
and, though always a destitute wanderer, had been nominated
a member of the Royal Society of London ' (Texte, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature, translated by
J. W. Matthews, p. 18). The English translation of this book
embodies additions to, and corrections of, the original work.
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8 Moniesquteu.
selves by the thought that those who see clearly are
not for that reason luminous^/
The three books to which Montesquieu owes his
fame are the Persian Letters, the Considerations on the
Greatness and Decay of the Romans, and the Spirit of
Laws. Of these the first appeared during the Regency,
that period of mad revel which followed the gloomy
close of Louis XIV's reign. The second was published
under the ministry of that aged and suspicious despot,
Cardinal Fleury, when it was safer to speculate about
ancient history than about contemporary politics or
society. The last appeared under the rule of Madame
de Pompadour, when the Encyclopaedists had begun
that solvent work of theirs which prepared the way
for the French Revolution. It should be added that
all the three books were published anonymously, and
printed in foreign countries, the first two at Amsterdam,
the last at Geneva.
In order to trace the origin and development of
Montesquieu's conceptions, and the course and ten-
dency of his thoughts, the three books must be read
consecutively, and must be supplemented by what we
know of his studies and experiences during their
preparation. For this knowledge very interesting
additional materials have been supplied by the recent
* The Earl of Charlemont, who, as a young man, made a tour
through the South of France, either in 1755, or in the latter part of
1754 (the dates are not quite clear), has left a delightful description
of a visit which he and a friend paid to Montesquieu at La Br^de.
He found, instead of a * grave, austere philosopher,* a * gay, polite,
sprightly Frenchman,' who took his visitors for a walk through his
grounds, and being unable to find the key of a padlocked three-
foot bar, solved the difficulty by taking a run and jumping over
it. — Hardy, Memoirs of Earl of Charlemont, i. 60-73.
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Montesquieu. 9
publication of the manuscripts which had for many
years been preserved in the family archives of the
Montesquieu family. They include the journals of travel
which Sainte-Beuve said he would sooner have than
the Spirit of LawSy and the three quarto volumes of
Pensees in which Montesquieu stored materials for his
published works.
The Persian Letters supply a clue to the plan of the
Spirit of Laws, and contain the germs of many of the
ideas which were subsequently developed in that book.
They are the work of a young man. They profess to
be written, and were probably composed or sketched, at
different dates between 171 1 and 1720^, that is to say,
^ The view that the composition of the Letters extended over
several years is confirmed by internal evidence. The correspon-
dence changes in character as it goes on. Compare for instance
the apologue of the Troglodjrtes in Letters xii to xiv with the
speculations as to the origin of republics in Letter cxxxi, or with
the comparative view of the political development and character-
istic features of different European states in Letters cxxxiii to
cxxxvii. The Troglodytes are a community that perished through
disregard of the rules of equity, but was restored to prosperity by
two wise survivors who preached that justice to others is charity
to ourselves. After the lapse of some generations their descen-
dants, finding the yoke of republican virtue too hard, ask for a king,
and are reproved for doing so. The apologue is interesting because
it contains phrases which recur and ideas which are developed in
the Spirit of Lams. But it is very youthful and abstract Between
the date of the Troglodyte letters and that of the later letters the
writer had read much, observed much, and reflected much. Or
compare again the story of the travellers and the rabbit with the
later observations on the advantage of having more than one
religion in a state and on the duty of respecting and tolerating
each. The lively personal sketches become more rare: more
space is devoted to the discussion of serious problems such as
the causes and effects of the decrease of population in Europe
since the flourishing days of the Roman Empire. The writer
is no longer content with noting and criticizing : he begins to draw
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lo Montesquieu.
during the last four years of Louis XIV's reign, and the
first five years of the Regency, and they describe the
impressions of three Persians who are supposed to be
travelling in Europe at that time. There is an elder,
Usbek, who is grave and sedate, a younger, Rica,
who is gay and frivolous, and a third, Rh6di, who
does not appear to have got further westward than
Venice.
The device was not new, but it had never been
employed with such brilliancy of style, with such fine
irony, with such audacity, with such fertility of sugges-
tion, with such subtlety of observation, with such
profundity of thought. And it was admirably adapted
for a writer who wished to let his mind play freely on
men and manners, to compare and contrast the
religious, political and social codes of different coun-
tries, to look at his manifold subject from different
points of view, to suggest inferences and reflections,
and to do all this without committing himself to or
making himself responsible for any definite proposition.
Any dangerous comment could be easily qualified by
a note which explained that it merely represented the
Mahommedan or the Persian point of view.
There were a great many dangerous passages.
There was the famous letter about the Two Magicians,
conclusions. In short, the feuilletonist is ripening into the philo-
sophical historian and the political philosopher. But at this stage
his political philosophy has perhaps not advanced beyond the
point indicated by a passage in Letter IxxsA * I have often set
myself to think which of all the different forms of government
is the most conformable to reason, and it seems to me that the
most perfect government is that which guides men in the manner
most in accordance with their own natural tendencies and
inclinations.*
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Montesquieu. ii
which nearly cost Montesquieu his election to the
Academy.
* The king of France is the most powerful prince in
Europe. He has no gold mines, like his neighbour the
king of Spain, but he has greater riches because he
draws them from an inexhaustible mine— the vanity of
his subjects. He has undertaken and carried on great
wars without funds except titles of honour to sell, and,
through a prodigy of human pride, his troops have
found themselves feared, his fortresses built, his fleets
equipped. Moreover he is a great magician. His
empire extends to the minds of his subjects : he makes
them think as he wishes. If he has only one million
crowns in his treasure chest and he wants two, he has
merely to tell them that one crown is equal to two, and
they believe it. If he has a difficult war to carry on
and has no money, he has merely to put it into their
heads that a piece of paper is money, and they are con-
vinced at once. But this is no such marvel, for there is
another still greater magician, who is called the Pope,
and the things which he makes people believe are even
more extraordinary.*
Then there was the description of the old king, with
his minister of eighteen, and his mistress of eighty \
surrounded by a swarm of invisible enemies, whom, in
spite of his confidential dervishes, he could never
discover. . There were many references to religion,
mostly irreverent, though not with the fierce and bitter
irreverence of Voltaire. Usbek finds imperfect and
tentative approximations to Mahommedanism in many
of the Christian dogmas and rites, and ascribes to the
* The references, of course exaggerated, were to Barb^zieux and
Mme de Maintenon.
fie^/**: _: JL^-
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12 Montesquieu.
finger of Providence the way in which the world is
being thus prepared for general conversion to the creed
of Islam. About diversities of ceremonial belief he has
naturally much to say. 'The other day I was eating
a rabbit at an inn. Three men who were near me made
me tremble, for they all declared that I had committed
a grievous sin, one because the animal was impure, and
the second because it had been strangled, and the third
because it was not a fish. I appealed to a Brahmin,
who happened to be there and he said, * They are all
wrong, for doubtless you did not kill the animal your-
self.' ' But I did.' ' Then your action is damnable and
unpardonable. How did you know that your father's
soul has not passed into that poor beast?'
Neither the burning question of the Bull Unigenitus ^,
nor Law and his scheme, is left untouched.
He pursues a somewhat less dangerous path, though
still a path paved with treacherous cinders, when he
sketches, after La Bruyfere's manner, contemporary
social t3^es, the 'grand seigneur' with his offensive
manner of taking snuff and caressing his lap-dog, the
man ' of good fortunes,' the dogmatist, the director of
consciences who distinguishes between grades of sin,
and whose clients are not ambitious of front seats in
Paradise, but wish to know how just to squeeze in.
There are also national t3^es, such as the Spaniard,
whose gravity of character is manifested by his
spectacles and his moustache, and who has little forms
of politeness which would appear out of place in
France. The captain never beats a soldier without
^ Horace Walpole complained once that he found life in England
so dull that he must go to Paris and tiy and amuse himself with
the Bull Unigenitus.
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Montesquieu. 13
asking his permission ; the inquisitor makes his apology
before burning a Jew. In a more serious vein is the
description, so often quoted, of the ruin and desolation
caused by the trampling of the Ottoman hoof. No law,
no security of life or property : arts, learning, naviga-
tion, commerce, all in decay. ' In all this vast extent of
territory which I have traversed,' says the Persian after
his journey through Asia Minor, ' I have found but one
city which has any wealth, and it is to the presence of
Europeans that the wealth of Smyrna is due.'
The success of the Persian Letters was brilliant and
instantaneous* and Montesquieu at once became a
leading personage in Parisian society. He took lodg-
ings in the most fashionable quarter^, paid his devotions
to Mile de Clermont at Chantilly, was a favourite
guest at the salon of the Marquise de Lambert, and
through these influences obtained, though not without
a struggle, a seat in the Academy. But he was dis-
satisfied with his reception there, and made up his mind
to travel.
In the year 1728, when Montesquieu set out on his
travels, the international politics of Europe were in
a singularly confused and tangled position. Congress
after congress, treaty after treaty, succeeded each other
with bewildering rapidity and with little permanent
effect. In Germany, Charles VI, the last male
^ 'Les Leitres Persanes eurent d'abord un d^bit si prodigieux
que les libraires de Hollande mirent tout en usage pour en avoir
des suites. lis alloient tirer par la manche tous ceux qu*ils rencon-
troient ; Monsieur, disoient-ils, faites-moi des Lettres Persanes' —
Pens^es, Collection Bordelaise, L 46.
* Vian talks about his having joined the well-known Entresol
Club. But d'Argenson's list of its members (Memoires, p. 248,
edition of 1825 ; i. 93, edition of 1859) does not contain his name.
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14 Montesquieu.
descendant of the Hapsburgs, had recently published
his Pragmatic Sanction, was straining every nerve to
secure the succession for his daughter Maria Theresa,
and was wrangling with the ' Termagant of Spain ' for
the reversion of the Duchies of Modena and Parma.
Frederick William of Prussia was recruiting his
grenadiers, holding his tobacco parliaments, and nego-
tiating his double marriage project. In Italy, the
commercial republics of Venice and Genoa were sinking
into decay, Piedmont was emerging as a military power,
Florence was under the last of the Medici Grand
Dukes. In England, Walpole had secured the con-
fidence of the new king through the influence of his
capable queen, and was doing his best, with the help of
Cardinal Fleury, to maintain the peace of Europe.
Montesquieu started from Paris in April in the
company of Lord Waldegrave, Marshal Berwick's
nephew, who had recently been appointed ambassador
to the imperial court at Vienna. He travelled through
Austria and Hungary, thence went to Venice \ visited
in turn all the petty states into which Italy was then
divided, spent several months at Florence, where he
devoted himself mainly to art, and made even a longer
stay at Rome, to which he returned after Naples. Of
his last interview with the Pope a story is told, for
* The well-known story, repeated by Vian, of the trick played
by Lord Chesterfield on Montesquieu at Venice seems to be a fable
(see the remarks in the preface to Montesquieu's Voyages in the
Collection Bordelaise, i. p. xxiv). It may perhaps be traced to a
gossipy letter written by Diderot to Mile Voland on Sept. 5, 176a
(Diderot, (Euvres, xix. p. 127). We know from the Chesterfield
Letters that when Montesquieu was at Venice (Aug. i6-Sep. 14, 1728)
Chesterfield was writing to Mrs. Howard and Lord Townshend
from the Hague.
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Montesquieu. 15
which one could wish there were better evidence^.
The Pope expressed a wish to do something for his
distinguished visitor, and at last offered him for himself
and his family a perpetual dispensation from fasting.
The next day a papal official called with a bull of dis-
pensation made out in due form, and an account of the
customary fees. But the thrifty Gascon waved away
the parchment. ' The Pope is an honest man,' he said ;
'his word is enough for me, and I hope it will be
enough for my Maker/
After leaving Italy he visited Munich and Augsburg,
travelled by Wtirtemberg and the Rhine countries to
Bonn, the residence of the Elector and Archbishop of
Cologne, had an interview with our king George II at
Hanover, explored the Hartz country (on whose mines
he wrote a paper), and thence went to the Low Countries.
At the Hague he met Lord Chesterfield, who was then
British Ambassador, and was on the point of taking
leave for England, where he hoped to be made Secretary
of State. Montesquieu sailed with him in his yacht on
the last day of October 1729, and remained in England
until some time in 1731.
A distinguished German historian ^ who takes a
rather depreciatory view of Montesquieu, says that
he travelled rather as a tourist than as a student.
The journals of travels and copious notes which have
been recently given to the world by the Montesquieu
family do not bear out this statement. Probably no
* The story is told by Vian, but is doubted by the Editors of the
Voyages (Pref. p.xxviii). Vian is responsible for much apocrypha.
But apocryphal stories are of historical value . as illustrating
Montesquieu's reputation jamong his contemporaries.
* Oncken, Zeitalter Friedrichs des Grossm, i. 463.
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i6 Montesquieu.
man ever started on his travels better equipped by
reading and observation, or with a more definite notion
of what he wanted to see, hear, and know, or had
better opportunities for finding out what was most
worth knowing.
Montesquieu had already travelled in imagination
through the countries which he was to visit in the
flesh. In one of the earlier Persian Letters, written
long before Montesquieu left France, Rh6di describes
his sojourn at Venice. * My mind is forming itself
every day. I am instructing myself about the secrets
of commerce, the interests of princes, the forms of
government. I do not neglect even European supersti-
tions. I apply myself to medicine, physics, astronomy.
I am stud5dng the arts. In fact I am emerging from
the clouds that covered my eyes in the country of my
birth.^
That was the programme sketched out in advance,
and he had excellent opportunities for carrying it out
At Vienna he spent 'delightful moments^* with that
great captain, Prince Eugene of Savoy. At Venice he
had long conversations with two famous adventurers,
the Comte de Bonneval, and the Scotchman, Law. At
Rome he made the acquaintance of Cardinal Alberoni
and the exiled Stuarts. At Modena he conversed with
the great antiquarian, Muratori. In England Lord
Chesterfield's introduction brought him at once into
the best political and social circles. His English jour-
nals, if they ever existed, are lost, and for our knowledge
of his English experiences we are mainly dependent on
the scanty but witty Notes on England^ which were
first published in 1818, and on the numerous references
* Letter to Abb6 de Guasco of Oct. 4, 1752.
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Montesquieu. 17
to English books, persons and things which are scattered
up and down his recently published Pens^es. But we
know that he attended some exciting debates in Par-
liament, and we know also how profoundly his study
of English institutions influenced the Spirit of Laws.
On the preparation for that great work Montesquieu
was engaged for the next seventeen years of his life.
In 1734 appeared the Considerations on the Greatness
and Decay of the Romans^ which might be treated as
a first instalment of its contents. Machiavelli had
treated Roman history from the point of view of a
practical statesman, and had used it as a storehouse
of warnings and examples for the guidance of an Italian
prince. ' Chance,* he said, ' leaves great room for pru-
dence in shaping the course of events.' Bossuet wrote
as a theologian, and sought for evidence of ' the secret
judgements of God on the Roman empire.' Montesquieu
wrote as a political philosopher, and tried to find in the
history of a particular state the application of certain
broad general principles. ' It is not fortune that rules
the world. There are general causes, moral or physical,
on which the rise, the stability, the fall of governments
depend. If a state is ruined by the chance of a single
battle, that is to say by a particular event, the possibility
of its being so ruined arises from some general cause,
and it is for these causes that the historian should seek.'
In this short treatise Montesquieu's style perhaps reaches
its highest level. He is not distracted by a multiplicity
of topics ; the greatness, dignity and unity of his subject
give force, character, and continuity to his style. His
sentences march like a Roman legion.
'The work of twenty years.' So Montesquieu de-
scribes the Spirit of Laws^ counting in his three years
B
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of travel. And he describes also how the scheme of
the book originated, and how it was developed. ' I began
by observing men, and I believed that in their infinite
diversity of laws and manners they were not exclusively
led by their fancies. I laid down general principles,
and I saw particular cases yield to them naturally.
I saw the histories of all nations appear as the con-
sequence of these principles, and each particular law
bound with another law, or proceed from one more
general. ... I often began and often dropped the work :
I followed my object without forming a plan. I was
conscious of neither rule nor exceptions : but when
I had discovered my principles, ever3rthing that I sought
came to me. In the course of twenty years I saw my
work begin, grow, advance, and finish.'
What, then, are the principles which after so long
and painful a search, Montesquieu ultimately found?
In brief, they are these. The world is governed, not
by chance, nor by blind fate, but by reason. Of this
reason, the laws and institutions of different countries
are the particular expressions. Each law, each institu-
tion, is conditioned by the form of government under
which it exists, and which it helps to constitute, and by
its relations to such facts as the physical peculiarities of
the country, its climate, its soil, its situation, its size ;
the occupations and mode of life of the inhabitants, and
the degreeof liberty which the constitution can endure;
the religion of the people, their inclinations, number,
wealth, trade, manners and customs ; and finally by its
relations to other laws and institutions, to theX)bject of
the legislator, to the order of things in which it is
established. It is the sum total of these relations that
constitutes the spirit of a law. The relativity of laws-
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that is Montesquieu's central doctrine. There is no
one best form of state or constitution : no law is good
or bad in the abstract. Every law, civil and political,
must be considered in its relations to the environment,
and by the adaptation to that environment its excellence
must be judged. If you wish to know and understand
the spirit of a law, its essence, its true and inner mean-
ing, that on which its vitality and efficiency depend, you
must examine it in its relations to all its antecedents
and to all its surroundings. This is the theme which
Montesquieu tries to develop and illustrate in the course
of his book.
He begins with the relations of laws to different
forms of government. There are three kinds of govern-
ment — republics, with their two varieties of democracy
and aristocracy, monarchies, and despotisms. The
threefold division is, of course, as old as Plato and
Aristotle, but the mode of distribution is new, and is
not easily to be defended on scientific grounds. But
the historical explanation of the distribution is quite
simple. Montesquieu was thinking of the three main
types of government with which he was familiar through
'study or observation. By a republic he meant the city
states of the Greek and Roman world, and also such
modem city states as Venice and Genoa. Monarchy
was the limited monarchy of the West, which still
preserved traditions of constitutional checks, but which
was, in most countries, tending to become absolute.
Despotism was the unbridled, capricious rule of the
eastern world.
Each form of government has its peculiar principle
or mainspring. The principle or mainspring of de-
mocracy is virtue (by which he practically meant 'public
B2
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20 Montesquieu.
spirit Of of aristocracy moderation, of monarchy honour,
of despotism fear. These are the principles which
must be borne in mind in framing laws for each state.
Having exhausted this branch of the subject, he goes
on to consider laws in their relation to the military
force, political liberty, taxation, church, soil, manners
and customs, commerce, finance, religion. It is under
the heading of political liberty that are to be found the
first of the two famous chapters on the English constitu-
tion, and the famous arguments on the necessity for
separating the three powers, legislative, executive and
judicial.
Nothing is further from my purpose than to enter on
a detailed analysis of the Spirit of Laws. Indeed, there
are few books which it is less profitable to analyse.
The spirit evaporates in the process. The value of the
book consists, not in the general scheme of arrangement
and argument, which is open to much criticism, but in
the subtle observations and suggestions, the profound
and brilliant reflections, with which it abounds. And
the questions which are of most interest to us are, first.
What was the cause of the rapid and enormous influence
which the book exercised on political thought in all
parts of the civilized world? and, secondly. What
was the nature and what were the main effects of that
influence?
But before passing to these questions I should like
to touch on one or two points which must be borne in
mind by all who read Montesquieu.
In the first place he was an aristocrat, a member of
a privileged, exclusive, and fastidious class. He was
no upstart of genius like Voltaire, who could be insulted
with impunity by a sprig of nobility. He belonged
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Montesquieu. 21
to a good family and moved habitually in the best
society.
His milieu and his point of view were different from
those of typical bourgeois, such as Marais and Barbien
He was a country gentleman, and was fond of strolling
about his vineyards, and talking to his tenants and
labourers. ' I like talking to peasants,' he said ; ' they
are not learned enough to reason perversely.* But his
attitude towards them was that of a great Whig noble-
man or squire. Of their feelings and points of view he
could know nothing. The third estate, which was
nothing and was to be ever3^hing, was to him, for most
purposes, an unknown worlds But, though he was
not wholly free from the faults of his class and his time,
he was a great gentleman, with a genuine public spirit,
a genuine love of liberty, a genuine hatred of oppression,
cruelty, intolerance, and injustice. Among the three
great political thinkers of the day, Montesquieu stands
for liberty, as Voltaire stands for efficiency, and Rousseau
for equality^. If Lord Acton's projected History of
Liberty had ever seen the light, Montesquieu would
doubtless have been among its greatest heroes.
In the next place Montesquieu belonged to a
hereditary caste — the caste which supplied the staff of
* * On turning from Montesquieu to Rousseau we may fancy that
we have been present at some Parisian salon, where an elegant
philosopher has been presenting to fashionable hearers conclusions
daintily arranged in sparkling epigrams and suited for embodiment
in a thousand brilliant essays. Suddenly, there has entered a man
stained with the filth of the streets, his utterance choked with
passion, a savage menace lurking in every phrase, and announcing
himself as the herald of a furious multitude, ready to tear to pieces
all the beautiful theories and formulas which stand between them
and their wants.'— Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth
Century^ p. 191.
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22 Montesquieu^
judges and magistrates for France. Not that he wrote
as a lawyer. For some fourteen years he was a
member of the judicial bench known as the Parlement
of Guienne, and in that capacity administered Roman
law, such of the Royal Ordinances as extended to his
province, and no less than ten different local customs.
But he did not take much interest in the technical side
of his professional work, and it may be doubted
whether his judgements, if reported, would have carried
more weight with his professional brethren than those
of his distinguished predecessor on the same bench —
Montaigne. Nor did he take any active part in the
scientific work in which the great French lawyers of
the eighteenth century were engaged. That work was
digesting, expressing, and systematically arranging the
principles of the customary law and the modernized
Roman law, and thus collecting the materials and
preparing the framework for the codes of the revolu-
tionary and Napoleonic eras. The leaders in this work
were the great Chancellor d'Aguesseau and Pothier.
But Montesquieu does not, so far as I am aware, make
any reference to Pothier or his school at Orleans, and
his relations to d'Aguesseau were scanty and formal.
Indeed, between the lively President and the grave
Chancellor ^ there was little in common. If Montesquieu
had lived in the latter half of the nineteenth century, he
would not, we may feel sure, have got on with Lord
Cairns. It was Voltaire, and not Montesquieu, that
preached the duty of unifjdng French law, and Montes-
quieu's personal preference would probably have been
for diversity rather than for uniformity. But Montesquieu
* See d'Argenson's sketch of d'Aguesseau : M^moires (edition of
1825), p. 152.
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Montesquieu. 23
was a great ' Parliamentarian ' in the French sense of
the word. He attached great political importance to
the existence of a 'd6p6t of law/ entrusted to the
custody of an organized independent body, and he
scandalized Voltaire by defending the systeoi of pur-
chasing judicial offices as the best practical security for
judicial independence.
And lastly Montesquieu wrote with the Censor and
the Index always before his eyes. Hence the allusive
and h3^othetical style, which in some of his imitators
became a mannerism. This characteristic is nowhere
better illustrated than in the chapter on the English
constitution. It is headed 'Of the constitution of
England,' but the text of the chapter consists of a
number of 'ifs* and 'oughts.' Such and such an
arrangement ought to exist. If such an arrangement
were made it would lead to political liberty. It is not
until the concluding paragraphs that the English are
specifically mentioned, and then only in a guarded
manner, 'It is not for me to examine whether the
English actually enjoy this liberty or not. It is sufficient
to say that it is established by their laws, and I seek no
more.' In Montesquieu's time it was not always safe
to dot your 'I's.' And that his nervousness was not
unfounded is shown by the fact that, notwithstanding
his precautions, his book found its way on to the Index,
and remained for two years under the ban of the civil
censor.
And now to come back to the main problem. How
was it that a book with such obvious and glaring defects
exercised an influence so enormous? The leading
definitions are loose and vague ; the treatment is un-
methodical and uncritical; half the statements of fact
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24 Montesquieu.
are inaccurate ; half the inferences are mere guesses.
And yet it changed the thought of the world. What is
the explanation of this paradox ?
Much, no doubt, was due to charm of style. If you
want to be read, still more if you want to be widely
read, you must be readable. In Montesquieu's time,
books on political and legal science were, as a rule,
unreadable. But the Spirit of Laws was, and still is,
an eminently readable book. No one before Montes-
quieu had dealt in so lively and brilliant a manner with
the dry subject of laws and political institutions. The
book reflects the personality of the writer. His per-
sonality is not obtruded in the foreground, like that of
Montaigne, but it is always present in the background,
and its presence gives a human interest to an abstract
topic. You see the two sides of the author ; the favour-
ite guest of Parisian salons^ and the solitary student,
the desultory and omnivorous reader. He lived, we
must remember, in an age when conversation was
cultivated as a fine art. That untranslatable word
' esprit,' which was in the mouth of every eighteenth-
century Frenchman, meant, in its narrowest and most
special sense, the essence of good conversation ^. Mon-
tesquieu had, like other Frenchmen of his time, thought
much about the art of conversation, and had practised
it in the best salons — where, however, he had the reputa-
tion of being more of a listener than a talker — and the
1 * L'esprit de conversation est ce qu'on appelle de Pesprit parmi
les Fran9ais. II consiste k (sic) un dialogue ordinairement gai,
dans lequel chacun, sans s*6couter beaucoup, parte et repond, et
oti tout se traite d'une manifere coup6e, prompte et vive. . . . Ce
qu'on appelle esprit chez les Fran9ais n'est done pas de Pesprit,
mais un genre particulier de Pesprit'— Montesquieu, Pens^es (Col-
lection Bordelaise), ii. 302, 303.
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Montesquieu. 25
rules that he laid down for good writing are practically
the rules for good conversation. 'To write well/ he
says somewhere, ' you must skip the connecting links,
enough not to be a bore, not so much as to be
unintelligible^/ Hence his book is not so miich a
dissertation as a causerte. It rambles pleasantly and
unmethodically from point to point, welcomes digressions,
and often goes off at a tangent. You feel yourself in
the presence of a learned, witty, and urbane talker, who
does not wish to monopolize the talk, but desires to
elicit that free, responsive play of thought which is
essential to good conversation. ' I don't want to ex-
haust the subject,' he says, ' for who can say ever3^hing
without being a deadly bore *.' And again, ' My object
is not to make you read ; but to make you think V
But Montesquieu is also a man of the closet, a man
who spent long, solitary hours in his library at La
Brfede*, filling note-books with copious extracts, and
condensing his thoughts in maxims and reflections.
And he is too often unable to resist the temptation of
utilizing the contents of his note-books without con-
sidering sufficiently whether they are relevant to or
assist the progress of his argument. Indeed, he is
essentially a ' fragmentary ' thinker, sententious rather
than continuous, and constitutionally reluctant, perhaps
unable, to follow out persistently long trains of thought.
But these peculiarities, though they detract from the
scientific merit of his book, make it more readable. So
' Pens^esy ii. 14.
" Esprit des iois, Preface.
• Ibid., book xi, ch. xx.
* A description of the contents of Montesquieu's library is given
by Brunet in the Collection Migne : Troisieme encyclop^die theo*
logique, tome 24, col. 344.
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26 Montesquieu.
also do the little asides by which he takes his readers
into his confidence, as when he reminds himself that if
he dwells too much on the absence of any need for
virtue in a monarchy, he may be suspected of irony, or
when he gives expression to the feelings of lassitude
and discouragement which overtake him towards the
end of his task.
Charm of style, then, counts for much in explaining
Montesquieu's influence. But freshness and originality
count for much more. The orthodox way of dealing
with a subject of political or legal science was to start
from general propositions laid down authoritatively, and
derived either from Aristotle, or, more often, from the
Roman jurists, and to deduce from them certain general
conclusions, Bodin*s great treatise on the Republic, to
which Montesquieu was much indebted, especially for
his theory on the influence of climate, was framed on
these lines. But Montesquieu broke away from the old
lines. His starting-point was different. He began at
the other end. He started from the particular institu-
tions, not from the general principles.
I have dwelt at length, perhaps at undue length, on
the Persian Letters^ not because, as has been inac-
curately said, the Spirit of Laws is merely a continuation
of the earlier work, but because the Montesquieu of
the Spirit of Laws is still the Montesquieu of the
Persian Letters, matured and ripened by twenty-seven
years of study and experience, but in essentials still the
same.
He began his literary career with no preoccupied
theory or object, but as a detached and irresponsible
critic and observer of man in his infinite diversity, the
man ondoyant et divers of Montaigne. And he retained
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Montesquieu. ' 27
much of this irresponsibility and detachment to the last.
It is true that after much search he found, or believed
that he found, certain general laws, or principles, to
which his observations could be attached, under which
they could be grouped. But one often feels, in reading
his opening chapters, that they are a sham fa9ade,
giving a deceptive appearance of unity to a complicated
and irregular set of buildings, richly stored with mis-
cellaneous objects of interest. His doctrine of the
relativity of laws, which is the foundation of enlightened
conservatism, and has been used in defence of much
conservatism which is not enlightened, is not a sufficient
foundation for a constructive system, but was an
admirable starting-point for a man whose primary
interest lay in observing and comparing different
institutions and drawing inferences from their similari-
ties and diversities. ' Any one who has eyes to see,' he
wrote in his subsequent Defence of the Spirit of Laws,
' must see at a glance that the object of the work was the
different laws, customs and usages of the peoples of
the world.' A vast, an overwhelming subject, which
the author failed to succeed in mastering and con-
trolling, or bringing within a synthetic grasp. And
owing to this failure the Spirit of Laws has been not
unfairly described as being, not a great book, but the
fragments of a great book \ What he did succeed in
* Bninetifere, Etudes critiques, 4™® s6ne, p. 258. The Marquis
d'Argenson, one of the most sagacious and prescient observers
that the eighteenth century produced, was shown some portions
of the Esprit des lots before the book was published, and his fore-
cast of its character proved to be singularly accurate : — ' On pretend
qu'il (Montesquieu) se prepare enfin k publier son grand ouvrage
sur les lois. J'en connais d6}k quelques morceauz, qui, soutenus
par la reputation de Tauteur, ne peuvent que Taugmenter. Mais
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28 Montesquieu.
doing was in indicating the path by which alone
effective and fruitful progress could be made either in
jurisprudence or in the science of politics, the path
through diversity to uniformity, through facts to prin-
ciples. He refashioned political science and made it
a science of observation, and by so doing he made the
same new departure in political and legal science as
Bacon had made before him in physical science. He
closed the period of the schoolmen. He was not
content to mumble the dry bones of Roman law. He
turned men away from abstract and barren speculations
to the study and comparison of concrete institutions.
And it is in this sense that he may be claimed as one of
je crains bien que Tensemble n'y manque, et qu'il n'y ait plus de
chapitres agr^ables i lire, plus d'id^es ing^nieuses et s6duisantes,
que de v6ritables et utiles instructions sur la fagon dont on devrait
r^diger les lois et les entendre. C'est pourtant 1^ le livre qu*il nous
faudrait, et qui nous manque^ encore, quoiqu'on ait d6j^ tant ^crit sur
cette matifere*
' Nous avons de bons instituts de droit civil romain, nous en avons
de passables de droit fran9ais ; mais nous n*en avons absolument
point de droit public g6n6ral et universel. Nous n'avons point
Vesprit des lots, et je doute fort que mon ami, le president de
Montesquieu, nous en donne un qui puisse servir de guide et
de boussole k tous les l^gislateurs du monde. Je lui connais tout
Tesprit possible. II a acquis les connaissances les plus vastes,
tant dans ses voyages que dans ses retraites k la campagne. Mais
je pr^dis encore une fois qu*il ne nous donnera pas le livre qui nous
manque, quoique Ton doive trouver dans celui qu*il prepare beau-
coup d*id6es profondes, de pens6es neuves, d'images frappantes,
de saillies d'esprit et de g^nie, et une multitude de faits curieux,
dont I'application suppose encore plus de goftt que d*6tude.' —
M^cdres du Marquis d'Argenson (ed. 1825), pp. 430, 431. It is to
be hoped that this passage has not, like others in the edition of
1825, been recast by the editor. As to the defects of this edition,
see Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundt) vol. xii. And as to the
later editions of d'Argenson, see Aubertin, L'esprif public au xviii^
siicle, p. 194.
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Montesquieu. 29
the founders of the comparative method as applied to
the moral and political sciences.
He began at the other end. This may seem a little
thing. In reality it was a very great thing. The human
mind is intensely conservative. For generations men
go on working at the old subjects in the old ways.
Then comes a man who, by some new thought, it may
be by some new phrase, which becomes a catchword,
like ' evolution,' takes his fellow men out of the old ruts,
and opens up to them new regions of speculation and
discovery. These are the men that change the world
And Montesquieu was one of these men.
He has been claimed on high authority ^ but with
less accuracy, as the founder of the historical method,
which is at least as old as Thucydides. That he appre-
ciated the importance of this method is true. ' I could
wish,' he says in one of his fragments', ' that there were
better works on the laws of each country. To know
modem times, one must know antiquity : each law must
be followed in the spirit of all the ages.' But for its
application he had neither the requisite knowledge nor
the requisite capacity. Like his predecessors, he
speculated about the state of nature. But for any
knowledge of savage or uncivilized man, without
which all speculations and theories as to the origin of
society are idle, he was dependent on books of travel
and accounts of missionaries, with no means of checking
their accuracy. Of the Iroquois, who stood for the
typical savage in the early eighteenth century, he had
doubtless read in Lahortan and in The Relations of the
Jesuits^ but one is sometimes tempted to think that he
^ By Sir Henry Maine, Sir Leslie Stephen, and others.
* Pens^es, 1 195.
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30 Montesquieu.
knows^ no more about him than might have been
picked up fpom some stray Bordeaux mariner who had
navigated Canadian waters. In his account of early
Roman history he follows implicitly Livy and Florus,
and of Beaufort's critical investigation he does not
seem to have heard. Nor is there any evidence of
his having read or having been influenced by Vico,
that solitary, mystical, suggestive Neapolitan thinker,
who seemed to live out of due time, and whose signifi-
cance was not appreciated until the following century.
He had heard of the Scienza nuova at Venice, where
the first edition was much in demand, and made a note
of it as a book to be purchased at Naples, but there is
nothing to show that the purchase was made ^. And in
the main his method of procedure is unhistorical. He
takes more account of the surroundings of laws than of
their antecedents. He sees laws of different periods all
in the same plane. He conceives of the state as
a condition of equilibrium which is to be maintained.
He realizes the possibility of its decay, but the notions
of progress and development, which are to figure so
largely in Turgot and Condorcet, are foreign to his
mind. i
On the influence exercised by Montesquieu's great
book, a substantial volume could be written. It was far-
* See Voyages de Montesquieu^ L 65. The first edition of the
Scienza nuova was published in 1725, Vico tells us in his auto-
biography that the Venetian ambassador at Naples had orders
to buy up all available copies from the Neapolitan publisher, Felice
Mosca. See * Vita di G. B. Vico ' in Opere di Vtco, iv. p. 456 (ed.
by G. Ferrari, Milan, 1876). It may be that when Montesquieu
reached Naples he found that the edition had been sold out.
The relations of Vico to Montesquieu are discussed by Prof. Flint
in his little book on Vico.
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Montesquieu. 31
reaching and profound. It was felt in the course of
political thought ; it was felt in the methods of political
science. It is almost true that Montesquieu invented
the theory of the British constitution. At all events he
was the chief contributor to what may be called the
authorized version of the British constitution, 'the
version to which currency was given by Blackstone ^
and Delolme, which was used by the framers of consti-
tutions on the continent of America and on the
continent of Europe, and which held the field until it
was displaced by the Cabinet theory of Walter Bagehot.
The question has often been asked how far Montesquieu
really knew and understood the institutions which he
described ^. On this there are two things to be said.
In the first place the British constitution which grew
up out of the Revolution of 1688 was, when Montes-
quieu wrote, still in the making. The lines on which
it was developed were not yet fixed ; whether it would
give preponderance to the King or to Parliament was
still uncertain. In the next place Montesquieu wrote
with a purpose. England was to him what Germany
^ M. Sorel goes too far in saying that Blackstone * procfede de '
Montesquieu. But the Spirit of Laws is expressly quoted in ch. ii,
book i of the Commentaries^ and its influence is clearly apparent
throughout that chapter.
' How much was known in France of English institutions when
Montesquieu published his Esprit des loisl Rapin's History of
England, published at the Hague in 1724, was probably the prin-
cipal available authority. 'No book did more to make Europe
acquainted with Great Britain ' (Texte, /.-/. Rousseau, &c. (trans,
by J. W. Matthews), p. 21). Much knowledge was disseminated
by Ht^enot refugees in England, and much could have been learnt
from English political refugees, like Bolingbroke, in France. But
the amount of information available in a literary form for French
readers w^s probably not great. Voltaire's Lettres angiaises, based
on his visit of 1726-9, were published in France in 1734.
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32 Montesquieu.
had been to Tacitus. It was a neighbouring country in
which he found, or thought that he found, principles
of liberty which had vanished from his own country,
and for the restoration of which he hoped. And he
sketched those principles like a great artist, with a bold
and free sweep of the brush. He sought to render the
spirit and characteristic features : for minute accuracies
of topographical detail he cared as little as Turner cared
in painting a landscape.
That, a book thus conceived should be read with
delight and admiration hy Englishmen was not sur-
prising \ Its practical influence was first exercised in
* Nugent's English translation of the Spirit of Laws appears
to have been published in 1750. See Montesquieu's letter to the
translator of Oct 18, 1750. A second edition, of which there is
a copy in the British Museum, appeared in 1752, and several other
editions followed.
'My delight,' says Gibbon io his autobiography, *was in the
frequent perusal of Montesquieu, whose energy of style and bold-
ness of hypothesis were powerful to awaken and stimulate the
genius of the age.'
There is a curious and characteristic rhapsody on Montesquieu
in Bentham's Commonplace Book (Works by Bowring, x. p. 143).
'When the truths in a man's book, though many and important,
are fewer than the errors ; when his ideas, though the means of
producing clear ones in other men, are found to be themselves
not clear, that book must die: Montesquieu must therefore
die : he must die, as his great countryman, Descartes, had died
before him : he must wither as the blade withers, when the corn
is ripe : he must die, but let tears of gratitude and admiration bedew
his grave. . O Montesquieu ! the British constitution, whose death
thou prophesiedst, will live longer than thy work, yet not longer
than thy fame. Not even the incense of [the illustrious Catherine]
can preserve thee.
* Locke— dry, cold, languid, wearisome, will live for ever. Montes-
quieu—rapid, brilliant, glorious, enchanting— will not outlive his
century.
* I know— I feel— I pity— and blush at the enjoyment of a liberty
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Montesquieu. 33
English lands, not indeed in Old England, but in the
New England which was growing up beyond the seas.
When Washington talked about the Lycian republic
we may be sure he was quoting directly, or indirectly,
from the Spirit of Laws. From the same book Hamilton
and Madison in the Federalist drew arguments for
federation and for the division between legislative,
executive, and judicial powers ^ And later on, Thomas
Jefferson, a statesman bred in a widely different school
of thought, had a curious commentary on the Spirit of
Laws prepared for him by a peer of France, who was
a member of the French Institute and of the Phibso-
phical Society of Philadelphia*.
In England the spirit of Montesquieu found its fullest
and most glorious expression in Burke, both when in
his earlier years he was protesting against monarchical
infringements of the British constitution, and when in
his later years he W^ denouncing the tyranny of the
French ConvenfiSn.
From the language used by Sir Henry Maine in the
famous fourth chapter of his Ancient Law one might
infer that in his own country Montesquieu's influence
was at once eclipsed by that of Rousseau. But such
an inference would be erroneous. Montesquieu, Vol-
taire, and Rousseau, different as were their methods
which the birthplace of that great writer (great with all his faults)
[forbade him to enjoy].
* I could make an immense book upon the defects of Montes*
quieu— I could make not a small one upon his excellences. It
might be worth while to make both, if Montesquieu could live.'
^ See Letters 9 (A. Hamilton) and 47 (Madison), and Bryce's
American Commonwealih, part i, ch. xxv.
* Destutt de Tracy. His curious commentary is really an
attempt to rewrite the Spirit of Laws from the commentator's
point of view.
C
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34 Montesquieu.
and their aims, were all factors of the first importancTe
in the French Revolution. ' Every enlightened French*-
man/ says M, Sorel, ' had in his library at the end of
the eighteenth century a Montesquieu, a Voltaire, a
Rousseau, and a Buffon ^/ The Spirit of Laws was
a storehouse of argument for the publicists of 1789, and
French writers of repute have maintained that the
influence of Montesquieu counted for as much in the
Declaration of Rights as the influence of Rousseau.
It must be remembered that, though Montesquieu wrote
as a monarchist, his heart was in the little republics of
the Graeco-Roman world, and he is responsible for much
of the pseudo-classicism which characterized political
thought at the end of the eighteenth century. It is
true that during the interval between 1789 and 1793 the
influence of Montesquieu waned as that of Rousseau
waxed. He was identified with the aristocrats and
Anglophiles*; the Girondists were charged with
studying him overmuch, and if Robespierre quoted
him for his purpose, he quoted him with a significant
difference. ' Jn times of revolution,' said Robespierre,
* the principle of popular government is both virtue and
terror : virtue without which terror is fatal ; terror with-
out which virtue is powerless ^.' J»Iapoleon had studied
the Spirit of Laws, but a system which aimed at the
* Sorel, Montesquieu, p. 149.
' Under the Terror Montesquieu's son was thrown into prison
as a suspect, and his property was sequestrated. He died in 1795.
Montesquieu's grandson, who had served under Washington in
the United States, became an ^inigr^, married an Irish lady,
and settled down in Kent, where he died without issue in 1825.
He left his MSS. and his French property to a cousin, descended
from a daughter of the great Montesquieu.
• Sorel, p. 155.
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Montesquieu. 35
preservation of political liberty by the separation of
political powers did not commend itself to his mind ^.
Dormant under the Consulate and the Empire, the
influence of Montesquieu arose to renewed and more
powerful life at the Restoration, and was, during the
first half of the nineteenth century, the inspiration of
all constitutional monarchists, both in France and in
other European countries.
The influence of Montesquieu on methods of study
was as important, though not as immediate ^ as his
influence on the course of political thought. Of the
historical and comparative method, in their application
to Law and Politics, he was, as has been justly re*
marked S rather a precursor than a founder. His ap-
preciation of the historical method was imperfect, and
his application of it defective. It was not until the
expiration of a century after his death that the importance
and significance of either the historical or the com-
parative method was fully realized. But in the mean-
time his central doctrine, that the true spirit and meaning
* See the interesting letter of Sept. 19, 1797, written by Napoleon
from Italy to Talleyrand, with a request that it might be shown to
Sieyds. Napoleon, Correspondance, vol. iii. p. 313 (No. 2223).
• *Un seul ^crivain, Montesquieu, le mieux instruit, le plus
sagace et le plus ^quilibr^ de tous les esprits du sidcle, d^mdlait
ces v6rit6s, parce qu'il 6tait k la fois 6rudit, observateur, historien
et jurisconsulte. Mais il parlait comme un oracle, par sentences
et en ^nigmes : il courait, comme sur des charbons ardents, toutes
les fois qu'il touchait aux choses de son pays et de son temps.
Cest pourquoi il demeurait respects, mais isok, et sa c6l6brit6
n'^tait point influence.' — Taine, Ancien Regime, p. 278. This state-
ment of Taine must be read as applying to Montesquieu's influence
on method, not to his influence on political thought.
^ By Sir F. Pollock in his farewell lecture on the * History of
Comparative Jurisprudence ' {Journal of the Sociefy of Comparative
Legislation, August, 1903).
C2
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36 Montesquieu.
of a law or constitution cannot be grasped without
careful study of all its surroundings and all its ante*
cedents, had sunk deeply into the minds of students, and
prepared the way for and gave an enormous stimulus
to those methods of study which are now recognized
as indispensable to any scientific treatment either of
Law or of Politics.
Within the last half-century societies for the study of
Comparative Law and Comparative Legislation- have
come into existence in France, England, Genriany and
elsewhere ^ and have done, and are doing, work of the
greatest interest and utility. Some of them approach
their subject mainly from the point of view of the lawyer
or the jurist, and devote their attention primarily to
those branches and aspects of the subject which fall
within the domain either of private or of criminal law*
Others look primarily at the constitutional and adminis^
trative experiments which are being tried by the legis-
latures of different countries, and thus deal with their
subject as a branch of political science. Their areas of
study overlap each other, and the point of view is not
quite the same. Within each area they have collected and
compared a vast quantity of facts which form an indis-
pensable preliminary to, and constitute the raw material
for, a scientific treatment of the studies with which they
are concerned. The task that remains for the scientific
jurist and for the political philosopher is to elicit, in the
spirit of Montesquieu, but with fuller knowledge, and
' Soci^t^ de Legislation Compar6e» founded 1869 ; Gesellschaft
ftr vergleichende Rechts- und Staatswissenschaft, founded 1893 ;
Internationale Vereinigung ft)r vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft
und Volkswirthschaft, founded 1894 ; (English) Socie^ of Com-*
parative Legislation, founded 1894;
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Montesquieu. 37
with better critical methods, the inner meaning of the
laws and institutions of different countries, and to trace
the general lines on which they have developed in the
past, and may be expected to develop in the future.
One might amuse oneself by speculating on the
differences which Montesquieu would have observed,
and on the general reflections which he might have
made, if he had been called upon to pass in review the
governments and legislation of the present day. He
would have found in almost every -part of the civilized
world governments with representative legislatures and
parliamentary institutions, all more or less on the English
lines which he had admired and described, and all
recognizing, though in greater or less degree, and in
different forms, his principle of the separation between
the three functions of government, legislative, executive,
and judicial. And he would have found all these legis^
latures actively and continuously engaged in the work
of legislation, and producing new laws with prodigious
fertility and in bewildering variety.
Besides the legislatures of European and South
American States, there are within the British Empire
between sixty and seventy different legislatures, and in
the United States forty-eight local legislatures, in addition
to the central legislature consisting of Senate and Con-
gress. And in the year 1901 these forty-eight United
States legislatures enacted no less than 14,190 new laws.
When Montesquieu wrote, the British Parliament was
practically the only representative legislature in the
world, and the only legislature which was continuously
at work. And its output of legislation was comparatively
modest. Let us take the record of the session of 1730,
when Montesquieu was attending debates at St.
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38 Montesquieu.
Stephen's. There was no reference to legislation in
the King's Speech. The Acts of the session were
forty-eight, and of these twenty were local and four
fiscal. There was an Act, which gave rise to some
debate, for placing restrictions on loans by British
subjects to foreign states, a measure which, as Sir
Robert Walpole explained, arose out of a projected
loan for the assistance of the Emperor Charles VI,
whose diplomatic relations with George the Second
were strained. The care of Parliament for trade and
industry was minutely paternal. There was an Act for
regulating the methods of burning bricks, and another
for better regulating the coal trade. There was an Act
for granting liberty to carry rice from His Majesty's
Province of Carolina in America directly to any part of
Europe southward of Cape Finisterre in ships built in
and belonging to Great Britain and navigated according
to law, and another Act for the importing of salt from
Europe into the colony of New York with the view to
the better curing of fish, 'whereby the trade of Great
Britain and the inhabitants of the said colony would
reap considerable benefit which would enable the said
inhabitants to purchase more of the British manufacturers
for their use than at present they are able.' And there
was one of the numerous ' omnibus ' Acts then allowed
by Parliamentary procedure, dealing, within its four
corners, with the price of bread, the relief of bankrupts,
deeds and wills executed by Papists, and the settlement
of paupers. And this is nearly all. The eighteenth-
century statutes, except so far as they are purely local,
consist chiefly of detailed regulations made by land-
owners sitting at Westminster for their own guidance
as justices of the peace in the country. And the
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Montesquieu. 39
executive functions of the central government were
at that time very limited. 'The Prince/ says Montes-
quieu, 'in his exercise of executive functions, makes
peace or war, sends or receives embassies, keeps the
peace, prevents invasions/ It was in fact to the main-
tenance of the internal peace that, apart from foreign
relations and war, the duties of the central government
were mainly confined. There was no Local Govern-
ment Board, no Board of Education, no Board of
Agriculture, and the duties of the Board of Trade were
almost nominal. Nor, oa the other hand, were there
county councils, district councils, or parish councils.
The municipalities were close, corrupt, irresponsible
corporations, existing for the benefit of their members
and not of the local public. There were no railways,
and no limited companies. Gas and electricity had not
been utilized. Parliament did not concern itself with
educational or sanitary questions, and factory legisla-
tion was a thing of the distant future ^ Thus almost
all the materials for modem Parliamentary legislation
were absent
This then would have been one of the differences
that Montesquieu would have noted— the prodigious
increase in the extent and variety of legislation.
And on investigating the causes of the difference he
would have found the main cause to be this— that
the world has been since his time absolutely trans-
formed by the operation of physical science. What
has physical science done for the world? It has
done three things. It has increased the ease and speed
of production. It has increased the ease and speed of
' I have ventured to repeat some expressions used in chapter x
of my book on Legislative Methods and Forms.
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40 Montesquieu.
locomotion. It has increased the ease and speed of
communicating information and opinion ^ And by so
doing it has made for * democracy, it has made for
plutocracy, it has made for great states. It has made
for democracy, both by enabling the popular will to act
more speedily and eflFectively, and by the creation of
wealth which levels distinctions based on social posi-
tion. But it has also increased, to an extent un-
imaginable even in the days of Law's system and
the South Sea Bubble, that power of great finance,
which manufactures through its press what is called
public opinion, pulls the strings of political puppets,
and is the most subtle, ubiquitous, and potent of
modem political forces. ^
Physical science has made great democratic states
possible, and great states, or agglomerations of states,
necessary. For Montesquieu, as for Aristotle, a
democracy meant a body of citizens who could meet
together in one place for political discussion. The
body must not be too large, for as Aristotle says, if it
were, what herald could address them, unless he were
a Stentor. But the modem statesman, to say nothing
of the modern reporter who heralds a cricket match,
can, without being a Stentor, speak to the Antipodes.
And science has made great states necessary by in-
creasing both the effectiveness and the cost of munitions
of war. States agglomerate both for economy and for
self-defence, and small isolated states exist only by
sufferance.
Since Montesquieu's time both the area and the
population of the civilized world have enormously in-
* See Faguet's interesting essay, Que sera le x^ siede^ in
Questions poUtiques (Paris, 1899).
^ Digitized by Google ,.
Montesquieu. 41
creased. And yet for political purposes it has become
a much smaller world, smaller, more compact, more
accessible. And this has tended to greater uniformity
of legislation and institutions.
The greater uniformity has been brought about
mainly in three ways. First, by direct imitation. Man,
as.M. Tarde has reminded us, is an imitative animal.
He imitates his forefathers : that is custom. He imitates
his neighbours: that is fashion. He imitates himself:
that is habit And direct imitation plays a large part
in institutions and legislation. English Parliamentary
procedure has made the tour of the world. Guizot
reminded a Committee of the House of Commons in
1848 that Mirabeau had based the rules of the National
Assembly on a sketch of the proceedings of the House
of Commons furnished to him by £tienne Dumont^,
and that when the Charter was granted by Louis XVHI
in 1814, the same rules were adopted with some changes.
Thomas Jefferson, when President of the United States,
drew up for the use of Congress a manual consisting
largely of extracts from English Parliamentary pre-
cedents, and Jefferson's Manual is still an authoritative
work. Every colonial legislature conforms to the rules,
forms, usages, and practices of the Commons House of
Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland, except so far
^ Evidence before Select Committee on Public Business, Q. 309.
Dumonfs own account {Souvenirs sur Mirabeau^ p. 164) does not
quite bear out Guizot's statement. According to Dumont, Romilly
had made a sketch of English Parliamentary procedure, which
Dumont translated for Mirabeau. Mirabeau laid this translation
on the table by way of a proposal, but the Assembly declined
to consider it : * Nous ne sommes pas Anglais, et nous n'avons pas
besoin des Anglais.* Romilly's own account of his sketch, and
of. its fate, is to the same effect. Memoirs^ i. loi.
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42 Montesquieu.
as they have been locally modified. A very large pro-
portion of Colonial enactments are directly copied from
the English Statute-book, with minor local variations.
And the practice of looking for and copying precedents
supplied by other legislatures is steadily on the increase,
not only within the British Empire, but in all parts
of the civilized world. This, then, is one cause of
uniformity.
In the next place the facility of intercourse, and
especially the closeness of commercial relations be-
tween different countries, tends to a general assimila-
tion of commercial usages. The diversity of laws which
was found intolerable in France at the end of the
eighteenth century, and in Germany at the end of the
nineteenth century, has long made itself felt as a serious
and as a remediable nuisance in matters of commerce
throughout the world, and in many parts of the domain
of commercial law we have either attained to or are
within measurable distance of that common code of
laws which is the dream of comparative jurists.
And lastly, in a world compacted and refashioned by
science, those causes of difference to which Montesquieu
attached importance, and in some cases exaggerated
importance, causes such as climate, race, geographical
conditions, difference in forms and degrees of civiliza-
tion, tend to become of less importance. Not that they
have disappeared, or can be left out of account. Montes-
quieu took much interest in questions of political
economy, and he would certainly have pointed out
that fiscal arrangements which are well adapted to
a state whose territories are continuous, are presumably
less well adapted to a state whose component parts are
sundered by oceans. The question of race is always
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1 \
■Si
Montesquieu. 43
with us, and the jealousies and antipathies of white,
brown, yellow and black races present an insoluble
problem to the legislator in almost every part of the
globe. Nor are the legislative problems which, apart
from race, arise from the contrast between different
degrees and stages of civilization, less numerous, less
difficult, or less interesting. Within the British Em-
pire we have to legislate for the hill-tribes of India, for
the fetish-worshippers of Western Africa, and for the
savages of New Guinea, and a museum full of instruc-
tion and suggestions to the statesman and the jurist is
to be found in the Regulations made by the Government
of British India for its less advanced regions and in the
Ordinances which have been passed for the West
African Protectorates. Thus the causes of difference
remain and are of importance. But on the whole the
importance of the causes which make for difference
tends to decrease, and the importance of the causes
which make for uniformity tends to increase. Take up
one of the annual summaries of the world's legislation
which are published by the French and English Societies
of Comparative Legislation. Your first impression will
be one of bewilderment at the multiplicity and variety
of the subjects dealt with. But if you read on, and still
more if you extend your studies over a series of years,
you will be struck with the large number of important
subjects which recur with unfailing regularity in the
legislation of each state in each year. Education, factory
laws, mining laws, liquor traffic, — everywhere you will
find the same problems being dealt with on lines of
increasing similarity, though with a due recognition of
the differences arising from diversities of race, character
and local conditions. In the year 1902 the legislature
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44 Montesquieu.
of the Straits Settlements was imposing on little Malay
children the duty of compulsory attendance at school,
and the legislature of Sierra Leone was regulating
Mohammedan education on Western lines, whatever
that may mean. It is perhaps in the field of industrial
legislation that this similarity of treatment and of trend
is most remarkable. A quarter of a century ago the
liability of employers for injuries to their workmen was
in every civilized country regulated by rules derived
directly or indirectly from the old Roman law. Since
that time almost every legislature has been altering those
rules, and has been altering them in the same direction.
It has been recognized everywhere that the principle of
basing liability on personal negligence is inadequate to
meet the modem conditions of corporate employment,
of employment by great companies, and the universal
tendency has been towards placing the employer in the
position of an insurer against accidents to his workmen,
and of thus imposing on him a risk which he again meets
by modem methods of insurance. Similar tendencies
may be observed in other departments of industrial
legislation, such as the further recognition of the right of
workmen to combine, the regulation of the conditions of
employment, especially in such organized employments
as mines and factories, the restrictions on the employment
of women and children, the requiremelit of precautions
against risk to health and life, the formation of Govern-
ment pension funds against sickness and old age, and
the provisions for the settlement of labour disputes.
In all these branches of legislation there is a general
move in the same direction, though with differences
of detail and at different rates of progress. In short,
the whole civilized world appears to be advancing
:i4giti2eaDy.
Geegk-
Montesquieu. 45
towards a common industrial code, as it is advancing
towards a common commercial code.
Some hundred years after Montesquieu's death
another brilliant book was written on the Spirit of
Law^. Savigny had laid down the dogma that the
law of each nation is the natural and necessary out-
growth of the national consciousness. Ihering re-
minded his readers that Rome had thrice conquered
the world, first by arms, secondly by religion, and
lastly by law; and that the general reception of
Roman law, of which Savigny was the historian, was
inconsistent with the dogma of the exclusively national
character of law, of which Savigny was the prophet.
As nations live commercially by the free interchange of
commodities, so they live intellectually by the free
interchange of ideas, and they are not the worse, but
the better, for borrowing from each other such laws
and institutions as are suitable to their needs. It is true,
as Savigny taught, and as Montesquieu had indicated
before him, that the laws of a nation can only be under-
stood if they are studied as part of the national life and
character. But it is also true that the object of the
jurist is to discover the general principles which
underlie different systems of law. Only he has now
realized that those principles cannot be discovered
exQept by a profound and scientific study of the legal
institutions and the legal history of different nations, and
by comparing with each other the laws of different
countries and the different stages of legal development.
It was in order to discover the true meaning of the
legal rules derived from ancient Rome, as the main
^ The first edition of Ihering's Geist des rOmischen Rechts beg^
to appear in 1852.
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46 Montesquieu.
factor of European law, that Ihering undertook his
inquiry into the Spirit of Roman Law. He who would
measure the advance in the breadth and depth of com- \
parative jurisprudence between the middle of the eigh-
teenth and the middle of the nineteenth century could
not do better than compare Montesquieu's Spirit of
Laws with Ihering's Spirit of Roman Law.
Montesquieu left two great legacies to the world*
He formulated the theory of the British constitution
which held the field for a century, and was the founda-
tion of every constitutional government established
during that period ; and he gave a new direction to the
study of legal and political science.
Montesquieu was one of the greatest of the apostles
of liberty in modem times. Socially and politically, he
belongs to the old regime, to the regime which in
France passed away in 1789, which in England, where
changes are less catastrophic, began to pass away in
1832. Scientifically also he belongs to a bygone age.
His new ideas, his new methods, once so fresh, so
attractive, so stimulating, have passed into and been
merged in the common heritage of Western thought.
But in his generation he succeeded, with a success
beyond his most sanguine hopes, in doing what he
tried to do— he made men think.
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OXFORD
PRINTED AT THB CLARENDON PRESS
BY HOSACB HART, UJU
PSINTBR TO THE UNIVBRSITY
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THE ROMANES LECTURE
1906
Sturla the Historian
BY
WILLIAM PATON KER, M.A.
FELLOW OF ALL SOULS
DELIVERED
IN THE SCHOOLS, OXFORD
NOVEMBER 24, 1906
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1906
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HENRY FROWDB, M.A.
PUBLI8HBK TO THB UMIYBSSITT OF OXFORD
LONDON, EDINBURGH
NEW YORK AND TORONTO
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STURLA THE HISTORIAN
It is natural, when the task one has to perform carries
along with it so much honour and so much responsi-
bility, to begin with a sentence of apology and depre-
cation. Words of that sort are not always insincere, but
there is seldom much good in them. I have been
asked by the University of Oxford to give the Romanes
Lecture, and in acknowledgement I will take and apply
to my own case the words of Dr. Johnson : * It was
not for me to bandy civilities with my sovereign \
You will allow me to speak of Lord Curzon, who had
promised to give the Romanes Lecture for this year ;
and you will readily understand that I wish to say only
what may be of good omen : to remember some of the
associations of Balliol and All Souls, and to look forward
to the time when Lord Curzon will come to Oxford and
fulfil his undertaking. There is no place in the world,
I believe, that sends him more sincere good wishes,
or takes a deeper interest in his success and in his fame.
I have no need to defend my choice of a subject ;
it is already authorized ; the University has published
the Sturlunga Saga^ edited by Gudbrand Vigfiisson,
with the help, as he tells us in his preface, of hi$ friend
York Powell of Christ Church. This book contains
among other things the Icelandic memoirs of Sturla the
historian ; Sturla's Norwegian history, the life of King
Hacon, with the same editor, has been printed by the
Master of the Rolls. The study of Icelandic began
long ago in Oxford ; an Icelandic grammar was printed
A2
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4 The Romanes Lecture 1906
here in 1689 for Dr. George Hickes, and afterwards
included in his magnificent Thesaurus.
The history of Iceland often reads like a contradiction
and refutation of a number of historical prejudices.
It would require only a very slight touch of fancy or
of travesty to make it into a kind of Utopian romance,
with ideas something like those of William Godwin,
or of Shelley. The Norwegian gentry who went out
arid settled in Iceland were driven there by their love of
freedom, their objection to the new monarchy of Harald
Fairhair, They did not want any government ; they
took an entirely new land and made their homes there,
and a commonwealth of their own. No man had lived
before in Iceland except the few Irish hermits who had
wandered there after the fashion of St. Brandan ; they
soon disappeared, and their presence does nothing to
impair the solitude, the utterly natural condition of Ice-
land when the Norwegians first took it. The colony of
Iceland, further, was almost as free from institutions
and constraint, in its early days, as any revolutionary
philosopher could desire. The king had been left
behind in the old country ; there was no tribal system,
no priestly order, nothing to complicate the business of
life. No abstract thinking, no political platforms, no
very troublesome religion interfered with the plain
positive facts. The Icelanders at first had little to think
about except their houses and families ; they were not
afraid of their gods, and had no exacting ceremonies.
It is one kind of an ideal. It is true that this Godwinian
republic began rather early to fall away from simplicity ;
perfect pure anarchy is too good for this world, and
is soon corrupted. The Icelanders, before long, began
to play the social contract, first of all by the voluntary
agreement of neighbours under the presidency of the
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Sturla the Historian 5
chief man of their country-side, then by an assembly
of the whole island and the introduction of law. The
paradoxes of the Icelandic constitution have been ex-
plained by Mr. Bryce in one of his lectures ; they might
be summed up very roughly, as * all law and no govern-
ment/ Apud illos non est rex nisi tantum lex} Their
very careful law took them a long way from pure anarchy;
but there never was any political power to enforce the
law. The local courts and the national assembly deter*
mined what was right, but there was no compulsion
in the country, except public opinion and private re-
venge.
This commonwealth, founded in the days of Harald
Fairhair and of Alfred the Great, is a kind of embodi-
ment of the Gertnania of Tacitus, with the Germanic
essence, so to speak, still further refined ; the independ-
ence, the spirit of honour, the positive, worldly, un-
mystical character, which seems to be capable of all
heroism, except that of the visionary martyr.
When the Cardinal William came to Norway in the
reign of King Hacon and got to know about the Ice-
landers, he was scandalized at their freedom, and sent
a message to them to ask why they could not come
in and be governed by a king, like the rest of the world.
It is true enough that their ideas and ways were not
those of the thirteenth century, and that they have the
example of all Christendom against them.
Nevertheless, the Icelandic State in its pride, its
seclusion, its opposition to the common way of the
world, is a creation as miraculous as the contemporary
achievements of the Northern race at the other end
of the scale — I mean the political work of the Normans
in the new-fashioned kingdom of England.
^ Quoted by Maurer, Island, from a gloss in Adam ot Bremen.
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6 The Romanes Lecture 1906
The intellectual fortunes of Iceland are as strange as
its social history. There is the same mixture of very
old Teutonic ideas with others that seem to have escaped
the Middle Ages altogether, or at any rate to be
more at home in the eighteenth or nineteenth century.
Nowhere is this more manifest than in the histories of
Iceland, the prose narrative literature of the republic,
in which Stuiia, son of Thord, is one of the last and one
af the most eminent names. Icelandic prose of the
great age is in contradiction to a number of things that
are commonly believed and reported about medieval
literature : such as, that it is quaint, absurd, superstitious,
childish, without perspective. For example : the Edda
of Snorri Sturluson is a thirteenth-century prose book
that has very little to learn from any renaissance or
revival of learning. The tone of it, in its treatment
of the stories of the gods, is not what is generally sup-
posed to be medieval ; it is more like what one expects
from the eighteenth century, amused, ironical, humorous.
At the same time Snorri is generous to the old gods
and thoroughly interested in their adventures. Peacock,
in his dealing with Welsh antiquities, is the modern
author who is most hke Snorri in this respect, in this
curious combination of levity and romance, so unlike the
medieval earnestness on the one hand, the medieval
farce on the other.
The great work of the Icelanders is to be found in
their family histories ; those to which the name Saga is
commonly given as if by some special right ; the stories
of Njal, of Egil Skallagrimsson and other fapious men
of the early days. These books leave the ordinary
critical formulas fluttering helplessly about them. They
seem to accomplish what for several generations, in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was one of the
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Sturla the Historian 7
ideals of literary men, the heroic narrative in prose,
the prose epic. For this was once a favourite ambition,
one of the abstract ideas that tempted many writers,
along with the perfect form of Tragedy and the pattern
of an Epic Poem. Cervantes in Don Quixote has given
one of the best descriptions of this ideal by the mouth
of the Canon of Toledo, explaining what might be made
of prose romances if they were taken up by the right
kind of author. The prose story, says the Canon, offers
a large free field for all kinds of adventures, descriptions,
and characters, for the craft of Ulysses, the valour of
Achilles, the misfortunes of Hector, and so on. A web
woven of many various strands— that shall be the new
kind of romance ; a story written without exaggeration
of style, and drawn truly ; using the freedom of prose
narrative so as to include among other things both
tragedy and comedy, 'with all those parts that are
included in the most delightful and pleasant sciences of
poetry and oratory ; for the epic may be written not less
in prose than in verse '. Something of what is here
outlined had been accomplished long before in the
Icelandic Sagas— the wisdom of Njal, the valour of
Gunnar and Skarphedin, the misfortunes of Grettir the
Strong. Those Northern books are written some-
times with a spirit like that of Cervantes himself, with
dialogue unmatched except in the great novelists.
This rich imaginative history had its source in real
life. Njal and Egil and their adventures were kept
in traditional memory, their stories were the property
of no one in particular, handed down from one age
to another till the time came for them to be put into
shape and written out in their present form. Icelandic
prose is very near to the spoken language ; it is rich in
idiom and in conversation, and the artistic form given
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9 The Romanes Lecture 1906
to it by writing men seems to foUoW easily from the
natural growth of the spoken traditional tale.
By the early part of the thirteenth century most
of the old stories had been written ; and not only the
Icelandic Sagas of the heroic age, but also the lives
of the kings of Norway, which are best known in the
work of Snorri, commonly called Heimskringla. In
these Kings' Lives the largest space had been given to
the two Olafs, Tryggvason and Haraldsson (St. Olaf) ;
so that both for Iceland and Norway the tenth and
early eleventh century— two hundred years before the
time of Snorri— were better represented in literature
than the later periods. But something had been done
to bring down the memoirs of Iceland and the history of
Norway to living memory, and it is here that Sturla the
historian comes in, to complete the task.
He belonged to one of the great families of Iceland
in the thirteenth century, the house of the Sturlungs,
named from his grandfather, Sturla, of Hvamm. This
family was one of the most ambitious, and did as much
as any to spoil the old balance of the Commonwealth by
' struggling for life ' in a reckless, arrogant, lawless way.
The strange thing about them is that, with all their
dangerous, showy qualities, they produced some of the
finest literature : ' out of the eater came forth meat *.
Snorri, son of Sturla, was for a long time one of the
most persevering and successful capitalists of that time,
making his fortune, greedily, by all available means ; he
is also great in Icelandic prose literature on account
of his Edda and his Kings* Lives. His brother, Thord,
had two sons, who were distinguished literary men : our
Sturla the historian, who was also a poet, and Olaf the
poet, who was also a philologist. Even the fighting men
of the family might be fond of books : Sturla notes a fact
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Sturla the Historian 9
of this sort about his cousin and namesake, Sturla
Sighvatsson,^ who was in practical life the perfection of
that unscrupulous, light-hearted vanity which made all
the sorrows of Iceland in those years.
' The Sturlung Age ' is a name commonly given to the
period described in the Sturlunga Sa^a— roughly, the
first half of the thirteenth century, the time of the great
faction fights in which the liberties of Iceland went
under. The Sturlunga Saga, as we have it, is a compo-
site work ; only part of it (and scholars are not agreed
how much of it) is the work of Sturla, son of Thord.
But he, the grandson of the founder of the house,
wrote at any rate a large part of the history ; there is
no doubt of that, so that for this time there exists not
only a contemporary chronicle, but the memoirs of one
who was most intimately concerned, himself one of the
persons in the drama.
And his work is the completion of Icelandic prose.
It is hardly a metaphor to say that it is the mind of
Iceland, expressing itself in the best way at the end of
the old Icelandic life. Sturla*s work is the Icelandic
habit of thought and vision applied to the writer's own
experience, whereas in the heroic Sagas it had dealt with
things of a former age.
The beauty of it in both cases is its impartiality. But
this is naturally more remarkable and surprising in the
later than the earlier history. Sturla had been in the
thick of it all himself, in many moss-trooping raids and
forays ; he had seen his kinsmen cut down ; he had been
driven to make terms with their chief enemy; it was his
own daughter who was snatched out of the fire of
^ * He (Sturla Sighvatsson) was much at Reykholt with Snorri,
and made it his business to have copies written of the histories
which Snorri composed ' (Sturlunga Saga, vol. i, p. a^).
A3
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lo The Romanes Lecture 1906
Flugum^, where her young bridegroom lost his life.
But there is nothing in his story to show that he takes
a side. He follows the custom of the old Sagas, which
is, to let the characters alone and never allow the show-
man to come forward with his explanations and opinions.
This Icelandic habit is not dullness or want of sense.
It is a kind of imagination, and it is shown in their way
of narrating things so as to get the most vivid effect
You see a boat putting out from an island, or a party of
men riding along the shore ; you do not know whether
they are friends or enemies until you go to find out.
Two people of importance are talking business; a
messenger comes to one of them and speaks with
him apart; then he turns to his business again and
you find that there is a change of some sort; the
messenger has told him something of interest, and you
see this in his face and his conduct before you get it
explained. The vague fact growing clearer, that is the
Icelandic rule of story-telling, the invariable plan; it
would be a mannerism, if it were not so much alive.
Mannerisms are lazy things, dodges for getting along
easily without thought ; but this Icelandic form is exact-
ing and not easy; the right use of it means that the
author is awake and interested.
It is impossible here to give any proper account of
Sturla^s Icelandic memoirs, and I shall not quote from
his chronicle of slaughter and house-burnings. But
there are other passages in his work besides those
' high facinorous things \ as the Elizabethan poet might
have called them ; there are intervals of comedy.
There is a scene between Sighvat and his son, Sturla,
which is very pleasant to think about ; the father reading
the son's character, playing on his vanity, and drawing
him on gradually to a comic trap. The young man had
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Sturla the Historian ii
just come back in high spirits from a successful expedi-
tion, where he had beaten the other side. His father
says to him : ' You have had a light, I hear*. ' So we
made out*, says the son. ' It was a short squall', says
Sighvat. ' Not so short, either *. ' You will be wanting
to set up a new house somewhere *, says Sighvat, ' and
I have been thinking what will be good enough for you *.
And then he goes on scheming great things for his son,
who doesn't see the danger, but takes it all as his due,
as if his father were showing a very proper appreciation
of his merits. Sighvat plans out the household for him :
' You will want a bailiff and a housekeeper ; a shepherd ;
a man to attend to the horses ; another for the boats and
for trading '. In each case he makes suggestions of the
proper people to take office ; the mischief being that he
names people rather too good for the situation, beginning
fairly low down and gradually rising to more and more
dignified names, till it dawns upon his son that he is
being chaffed. At last Sighvat proposes for his son's
servants two of the greatest personages in the island ;
and the glorious young man flings out of the room in
a passion. His father stays behind, well content.
All this was repeated and gave great amusement. The
story was told to Lopt, the Bishop's son, who was im-
mensely pleased with Sighvat's wit, and particularly
with the way in which he had allotted the parts in his
imaginary housekeeping ; till he found that he himself
had been put down for the charge of the horses. Then
his language was strong : ' Devil take their fleering and
jeering! They will find soon that people have other
things to do besides cunying their favour ! '
It is in this sort of domestic comedy that the Icelandic
stories are most different from other medieval l^oks.
In the year 1262 came the submission of Iceland %q
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t2 The Romanes Lecture 1906
Norway, ' the end of an auld sang '. In 11263 Sturla was
ruined, to all appearances. He had been dragged into
trouble by an ill-conditioned son of his, and was beaten
by his adversary, Hrafn Oddsson, and had to leave
Iceland. He resolved to go to Norway to try for the
favour of the king. Hacon by this time had set out on his
great expedition to Scotland, but the young King Magnus,
who had been already crowned, was at home with his
queen, the Danish lady Ingiborg. This was the be-
ginning of Sturla's Norwegian historical work, and this
is the story of his visit to King Magnus : —
Sturla and King Magnus.
Sturla sailed for Norway from Eyre [in the South 01
Iceland] ; he had scarcely any supplies with him. They
had a good V03^e and took the land at Bergen ;
Magnus the king was there ; as also was Gaut of Mel.
Sturla went at once to find Gaut. Gaut was pleased
and said : ' Art thou Sturla the Icelander ? ' ' That is so ',
said Sturla. Gaut said, ' You are welcome at my table
like the other Sturlungs '. ' No house would be better
for me, as far as I can see *, said Sturla. So he went to
stay with Gaut and told him clearly the whole story of
his coming to Norway ; and Gaut, on the other hand,
told him how he had been evil spoken of with Magnus
the king, and still more with Hacon. A little after Gaut
and Sturla went to King Magnus. Gaut paid his respects
to the king, and he took it well ; Sturla did the same,
but he made no answer. He said : ' Tell me, Gaut, who
is this man that goes along with you?' Gaut said:
'This man is Sturla, Thord's son, the poet, and he is
come to throw himself on your grace ; and I think him.
Sir, to be a wise man '. The king said : ' We think of
him that he would not have come here of his own accbrd ;
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Sturla the Historian 13
he must put it to the proof when he meets my father'.
Gaut said : ' Even so, for I think he has poems to oflfer
to you and your father '. ' It is not likely that I will
have him put to death ', said King Magnus, ' but he shall
not come into my service '. Then they went away, and
when they came to their lodging Gaut said to Sturla :
' The king seemed very slow to take you up, but he has
put you out of danger ; there must have been much evil-
speaking against you '. Sturla says : ' I have no doubt
of that, nay, I seem to make out clearly that Hrafn has
been spreading slanders ; all kinds of things were
mixed up together in Iceland, small and great, truth
and lies'.
The next day Gaut went down to the king's house.
When he came back and met Sturla he said : ' Now you
are provided for, since the king wishes you to come
with him when he sails for the South '. Sturla answered :
' Shall not the king decide ? But I have no great mind
to go from here '.
Then he got ready to sail away with the king, and his
name was put on the list. He went on board before
many men had come; he had a sleeping bag and
a travelling chest, and took his place on the fore-deck.
A little later the king came on to the quay, and a company
of men with him. Sturla rose and bowed, and bade the
king ' hail ', but the king answered nothing, and went aft
along the ship to the quarter-deck. They sailed that
day to go south along the coast. But in the evening
when men unpacked their provisions Sturla sat still,
and no one invited him to mess. Then a servant of the
king's came and asked Sturla if he had any meat and
drink. Sturla said ' No '. Then the king's servant went
to the king and spoke with him, out of hearing : and
then went forward to Sturla and said : ' You shall go to
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14 The Romanes Lecture 1906
mess with Thprir Mouth and Erlend Maw \ They took
him into their mess, but rather stiffly. When men wer^
turning in to sleep, a sailor of the king's asked who
should tell them stories. There was little answer.
Then said he: 'Sturla the Icelander, will you tell
stories ? ' 'As you will \ said Sturla. So he told them
the story of Huld, better and fuller than any one there
had ever heard it told before. Then many men pushed
forward to the fore-deck, wanting to hear as clearly as
might be, and there was a great crowd. The queen
asked: 'What is that crowd on deck there?' A man
answered : ' The men are listening to the story that the
Icelander tells '. ' What story is that ? ' said she. He
answers : ' It is about a great troll-wife, and it is a good
story and well told '. The king bade her pay no heed to
that, and go to sleep. She says, ' I think this Icelander
must be a good fellow, and less to blame than he is
reported '. The king was silent.
So the night passed, and the next morning there was
no wind for them, and the king's ship lay in the same
place. Later in the day, when men sat at their drink,
the king sent dishes from his table to Sturla. Sturla's
messmates were pleased with this : ' You bring better
luck than we thought, if this sort of thing goes on '.
After dinner the queen sent for Sturla and asked him
to come to her and bring the troll-wife story along with
him. So Sturla went aft to the quarter-deck, and greeted
the king and queen. The king answered little, the
queen well and cheerfully. She asked him to tell the
same story he had told overnight. He did so, for
a great part of the day. When he had finished the
queen thanked him, and many others besides, and made
him out in their minds to be a learned man and sensible.
But the king said nothing ; only he smiled a little.
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Sturla the Historian 15
Sturla thought he saw that the king's whole frame of
mind was brighter than the day before. So he said to
the king that he had made a poem about him, and
another about his father : ' I would gladly get a hearing
for them '. The queen said : ' Let him recite his poem ;
I am told that he is the best of poets, and his poem will
be excellent '. The king bade him say on, if he would,
and repeat the poem he professed to have made about
him. Sturla chanted it to the end. The queen said:
* To my mind that is a good poem '. The king said to
her: 'Can you follow the poem clearly?' 'I would be
fain to have you think so. Sir', said the queen. The
king said : ' I have learned that Sturla is good at verses '.
Sturla took his leave of the king and queen and went
to his place. There was no sailing for the king all that
day. In the evening before he went to bed he sent for
Sturla. And when he came he greeted the king and
said: 'What will you have me to do, Sir?' The king
called for a silver goblet full of wine, and drank some
and gave it to Sturla and said : ' A health to a friend in
wine!' {Vin skal til vinar drekka). Sturla said: 'God
be praised for it ! ' ' Even so ', says the king; ' and now
I wish you to say the poem you have made about my
father'. Sturla repeated it: and when it was finished
men praised it much, and most of all the queen. The
king said: 'To my thinking, you are a better reciter
than the Pope '. — Sturlunga Saga, vol. ii, p. 269 sqq.
King Hacon never came back from his Scottish
voyage; Sturla the Icelander wrote his life. The
history of the former kings of Norway had by this time
come into shape ; they were read to King Hacon as he
lay on his sick bed in the Orkneys, when he was too
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i6 The Romanes Lecture 1906
tired to follow the Latin Bible. Sturla had many
good models before him, and he was already practised
in historical writing. The task, however, was a new one,
and Hdkonar Saga is in many respects very different from
Sturlunga ; chiefly owing to difference in the subject
Norway and Iceland, in the thirteenth century, are
in contrast almost as if they had been intended for
a logical example, to illustrate the method of Agreement
and Difference ; or for an historical demonstration, to
explain the nature and functions of monarchy in the
Middle Ages. The original emigration to Iceland did
not drain away all the freedom out of Norway; the
Norwegians who stayed behind were not slavish and
obedient people; it was a long time before the ideas
of Harald Fairhair got the better of the old modes of
life. The original Germania still throve in Norway
in spite of the great kings, and anarchy kept return-
ing, in ways that were quite well understood by the
Norwegians themselves. Their name for it was nes-
konungar—* ness-kings *— as we speak of the Heptarchy ;
in Norway in the old days there had been a number of
little independent kings each on his own headland,
ruling his own stretch of a fiord. By the year 1200
a new monarchical experiment had succeeded under
Sverre, one of the most remarkable adventurers who
have ever come forward as Saviours of Society. He
had a ragged regiment, the Birkibeinar, or Birchlegs,
as they were nicknamed from their birch-bark gaiters —
a company like that of David — every one that was in
distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one
that was discontented. These Birkibeinar for a long
time were a terror to the country ; a bad report of them
was brought to England in the reign of Henry II by the
Norwegian Archbishop Eystein, and their nickname is
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Sturla the Historian 17
found in English history and even in English popular
poetry (Havelok the Dane). But their leader Sverre
was not merely a captain of bandits. He had ideas
and he carried them out. He was one of Carlyle's
heroes, though unfortunately Carlyle was old and tired
before he came to him in his notes on the kings of
Norway, and could not tell the history of Sverre in full.
He was a good talker, and used to speak straight to his
Birkibeinar about their faults, and give them the whole
duty of man in simple moral tales. He drilled his own
army, and with them he drilled the country, ' making
the peace * there effectively, so that a time came when
the Birkibeinar were received as benefactors, and the
power of King Sverre was established and made
legitimate.
The difficulty about Carlyle's heroes is to know what
is going to happen when the hero dies. After Sverre's
death in 1202 the old games began again — faction fights
as ruinous as those of Iceland. The difference between
the two countries was that in Norway there was always
a semblance of a principle to fight about ; which did
not make things any more comfortable for Norway.
As a specimen, there is the fight in Trondhjem, at the
end of April, 1206.
Ingi, the Birkibein king (Sverre's nephew), was in
Trondhjem at his sister's wedding. The other faction,
the Crosiers (Baglar) — ' bloated Aristocracy ', as Carlyle
called them— had been sailing for three weeks from
Tunsberg in the south, round the Ness and up the west
coast, meaning to attack ; news of this was sent to the
king from Bergen, but it did not interrupt the feast.
Orders were given to the king's guard to set a proper
watch round the hall at night, but when the time came
the bridegroom said it would be a pity to spoil the
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i8 The Romanes Lecture 1906
entertainment for the king's men. He, the bridegroom,
would send some of his own people to the shore, at the
mouth of the river, to keep a look out; and that would
do well enough. The king assented, and the drinking
went on far into the night. The bridegroom kept his
promise and sent out his men, but they talked it over
among themselves and said they would not keep watch
for the king's men and the country squires ; they would
go to bed.
It was a dark sleety morning when the enemy came
to Trondhjem; they rowed up to the land and held
their oars and listened, and found everjrthing quiet in
the town : they put some men ashore to go scouting up
to the king's house, who came back and reported that
no one was stirring anywhere. Then they blew their
trumpets and fell on the town.
The king slept hard, and was very slow to waken
when the alarm came, and asked what the matter was.
However, he got up and climbed from the balcony
to the roof and lay there till the Crosiers had gone past
along the street. Then he went down Chapman Street
to the river, and jumped in and swam to a merchant
ship that was lying moored there, and caught hold of
the cable and tried to climb on board. A man came
to the bow and told him to let go the rope and remove
himself. The king hung on and said nothing. Then
the man took a boat-hook and pushed him off, and the
king had to swim across the river, and a number of his
men also. On the other side he fell down numb with
cold ; it was sleeting hard. One of his men, Ivar, came
out of the river, and the king called on him to help him ;
but he said, ' I must help myself first '. Shortly after
another came, Reidulf, and said : ' Are you here, my
lord ? ' {eru per her^ herra). The king said : ' So you
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Sturla the Historian 19
called me yesterday '. Reidulf said : * So art thou still,
and so shalt thou be, while we are alive, the two of us '.
Then he took off his mantle and packed the king in
it on his back, and brought him safe away.
A story is told here in one of the versions of this
which is significant, whether it is true or not.
A ^Bagling' — one of the Crosier party — chased a
Birkibein along the street ; the Birkibein tried to get to
the church for safety. At the church comer he was cut
down, and then the pursuer saw that he had killed his
brother.
It reminds one of the formal scene in Henry VI —
* enter, a Son who has killed his Father', 'enter, a
Father who has killed his Son '—where the moral of
the faction fights is expounded by King Henry as a sort
of chorus.
Reading this story and others like it from the early
part of the thirteenth century,^ one thinks of the country
as fallen back into helpless misgovemment— gluttony,
sloth, and selfishness, with flashes of energy through it,
but all too undisciplined to do any good. What actually
happened was better than expectation, to use an Ice-
landic way of speaking. The ideas of King Sverre and
the results of his drill lived on, and that is what the life
of Hacon has to show. The child Hacon was taken up
by the Birkibeinar, the Old Guard of King Sverre, men
with one idea, who would do an3rthing for their cause,
i. e. the right line of the kings of Norway, which Sverre
had taught them to recognize as being the same thing
as the Law of St. Olaf. In Sverre's contest with the
Bishops and their allies he had made the Law of
St. Olaf into a sort of watchword and emblem for his
men, and Hacon, Sverre's grandson, was the king for
them, the king whom the Law of St Olaf required.
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20 The Romanes Lecture X906
Sverre had taken much trouble over the rights of the
question. Against the new law which the Bishops had
tried to establish in 1164, which would have made the
king vassal of the Church, Sverre had drawn up a full
statement, one of the clearest and most interesting of
political arguments, which asserts the Divine Right
of Kings apart from any ecclesiastical interference, and
proves it against the Churchmen by citations from the
Canon Law. The old Birkibeins did not trouble them-
selves much about the science of politics, but their
watchword, the Law of St. Olaf, meant in practice what
Sverre had meant both in practice and in theory. The
good fortune of the young Hacon was that he grew up
among the veterans into a full comprehension of the
ideas of Sverre. So that in this case, at any rate, the
Carlylean ideal is not refuted by the death of the cham-
pion, or by the collapse of all his work under some
foolish Ishbosheth of a successor. It looked like that,
it is true, for some years after the death of Sverre —
it looked as if the deluge had come back. But this was
prevented by the fixed idea of the old partisans, and by
the education of Hacon; all which is clearly brought
out in Sturla's biog^phy.
There are two Norwegian essays on Monarchy which
may very fairly be contrasted with Sturla's Icelandic
portrait of a king of Norway. They are both didactic :
one is Sverre's treatise, already mentioned ; the other
is the Speculum Regale^ or King's Mirror {Konungs
Skuggsjd)y written in the ordinary conventional form of
a dialogue between a father and son, but very original
and lively in its matter. The father is a king's man, as
he calls himself, and among many other things he tells
his views about the nature of a king and the manners
of a Court: how one should demean himself in the
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Sturla the Historian jji
presence of the king. For instance, if the king is sitting
at table when you are admitted, you must stand at the
proper distance and leave room for the waiters. You
should hold your left wrist in your right hand, and be
careful to listen to what the king says. If it happens
that you don't catch his words exactly, you must not
say * Ha ! * or ' What 1 * but ' Sir! * or, if you wish to put
it more fully: *Let it not be displeasing. Sir, if I ask
what you spoke to me, for I understood not clearly '.
The difference between the Icelandic biography and
the more abstract Norwegian works is, in a way, charac-
teristic of the two countries, though we need not make
too much of it.
Sturla's Life of Hacon will bear comparison with other
historians of the time— with Matthew Paris, for example,
who was a friend of King Hacon. It has been blamed
as too courtly, but other witnesses (Matthew Paris
among them) take a similar view of the king ; Hacon's
energy and success can be proved independently of
the Icelandic historian. Naturally, the book is not as
lively as the family memoirs of Sturla ; he had not lived
through it in the same way. But he had plenty of in-
formation from old Birkibein traditions, and he was a
practised sifter of evidence. There is not the same
room for comedy as in the Icelandic books, but there are
* humours and observations ' — e. g. in the account of the
coronation ceremony and the emotion of the Scottish
knight, Mitchell, who was so overcome by the splendour
that he sobbed aloud — or, again, in the notes of Cardinal
William's journey in 1247, and his uncertainty whether
there would be anything in Norway fit for a gentleman
to drink. It is pleasant to compare this with Matthew
Paris on the same subject. He had made a special
study of Papal legates and their ways, and describes
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aa The Rotnanes Lecture 1906
with gusto the expensive fittiiig-out of the CardinaFs
ship, with all its store-rooms and cabins, richly famished,
* like another Ark of Noah *.
Sturla luckily came to Norway in time to collect the
reminiscences of the veterans. He does not tell us
what Froissart would have told about the people and the
places where he got his information ; by the rules of
Icelandic history the author is not allowed to talk about
himself except where he comes definitely into the action.
But Sturla makes as good use as Froissart could have
made of the memories of older men, and the Life of Hacon
contains a number of good stories. The childhood and
the youth of Hacon are well told, from the time when
the Birkibeinar took the infant and carried him across
Norway over the snow. They were very fond of him
and remembered his wise sayings : as when once, in
winter time, the butter was frozen so hard that it could
not be spread; the bread, on the other hand, was
elastic, so the little Hacon (four years old) folded it
round the butter, saying, ' Let us bind the butter, Birki-
beinar*. At which they laughed enormously and went
about repeating it. It is not quite as good as some of
the early wisdom of King James VI (' There is a hole
in this Parliament *), but the history is all the better for
this and other like things. The Icelandic author himself
does not care too precisely for the dignity of history, and
the oral tradition preserved some things that a mere
Court-historian might have left out: a rude speech of
King Hacon to his trumpeter was remembered. The*
trumpeter's blowing was feeble, and the King spoke
to him like one of Marryat's boatswains, and said : * Why
can't you blow ? You blew better when you were play-
ing for money on the quay at Bergen '.
Again, the critical talent of the Icelanders did not
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Sturla the Historian 2j
prevent them from putting miraculous things into their
histories ; the Sturlung memoirs are full of dreams and
portents, including a dream of Sturla himself, about
a mighty stone shoot, a rushing ' scree ', in the valley
of Hvamm, just before the great defeat of the Stur-
lungs. There are some stories of that sort also in the
Life of Hacon— best of all, the vision that appeared
to King Alexander of Scotland as he lay at anchor in
the Sound of Kerrera, when St Olaf, St. Magnus, and
St. Columba appeared and warned him. This, again,
is told in the Icelandic way ; the three men are described-
first, before their names are given, and then- names are
given as conjectures. A thick-set figure wearing the
dress of a king— who could this be but St. Olaf? The
third figure, who was much the tallest of the three, is
described as 'bald on the forehead' {mjdk framsnoHnn),
which must mean the Irish tonsure of St. Columba —
the frontal tonsure — a curiously accurate piece of detail.
The Icelandic method is like that of a novelist : their
best books are the history of families and neighbour-
hoods, ' annals of the parish '. The interests are those
of private Ufe. Hence Sturla had to change his manner
somewhat in dealing with the larger political affairs of
Norway. There is a different scale and other motives.
Sturla does something to bring out his conception of
the kingly office ; as in the chapter which he gives to
a well-filled day of King Hacon's life, in the Christmas
time of his most anxious year, when the king had to
attend the funeral of one of his lords, and also to look
after the launch of a warship, besides hearing cases and
holding a coiut. No time was lost ; the mast of the
warship was stepped while the funeral service was being
sung; * the king was busy that day '.
And further, while he thus exhibits the practical genius
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24 The Romanes Lecture 1906
of the king, Sturla does not neglect the more showy
part of his government— as in the coronation that so
impressed the Scottish knight. The correspondence
with the Emperor Frederick and King Lewis of France,
with King James of Aragon, the Conqueror, and King
Alfonso of Castile, the Wise, not to speak of the Sultan
of Tunis — all this takes one far from the dales of Iceland.
The King of Norway belonged to the great world, and
to the new fashions. There was some vanity in his
ambition ; — in his Icelandic policy, in his annexation of
all Greenland, * North to the loadstar*, and in his last
enterprise, the voyage to Scotland. But we may still
believe that Sturla was right in his view of the king, as
a hard-working man and a successful peace-maker.
Far beyond all the separate notable things in the book
is the conduct of that story which Ibsen has taken for
his drama Kongsemneme. It is in the relation of Hacon
to his father-in-law Duke Skuli that the two different prin-
ciples — the monarchy and the oligarchy— are dramatized ;
and Sturla fully understands this, the tragic opposition
of two sorts of good intentions ; with the pathos, also,
brought out in one memorable chapter, of the queen
Margaret in her choice between her father, Skuli, and her
husband the king. But it is impossible to say more of
this here, except that the grace and dignity of it, in
Sturla's history, the honours paid to the beaten side,
make us understand the character of Sturla himself, better
than anything else in his writings. He is described by
the anonymous first editor of Siurlunga (about the year
130O1 probably) as * a man to our knowledge mo$t wise
and fair-minded*. His writings are proof that this
friendly opinion is to be trusted; and with that we
may leave him.
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THE ROMANES LECTURE
1 92 1
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OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
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HUMPHREY MILFORD
PUBLI8HXR TO THB UNIYBRSITY
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The ROMANES LECTURE
I92I
Roland d Roncevaux
BY
JOSEPH B^DIER
DB L'aCAD£mIB FRAM^AISB
PROFB8SBUR AU COLL^GB DB FRANCB
DELIVERED
IN THE SHELDON IAN THEATRE
4 JUNE, 1921
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1921
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I.
' t
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ROLAND A RONCEVAUX
CuLTivANT la science, nous ne sommes pas, nous
Fran^ais, de ceux qui disent * notre science \^ Et vous
non plus, les savants d'Angleterre, vous n'6tes pas de
ceux-1^. Mais, pour avoir multipli6 entre ndus, au
cours des sifecles, les liens spirituels, nous savons, vous
et nous, qu'il est bon et salutaire de nous faire tour a
tour, au grand sens oil Tentendait Rabelais, pr^teurs et
emprunteurs. *Tous soient debteurs, disait-il, tous
soient presteurs ! Croyez que chose divine est prester ;
debvoir est vertu h^roYque/ ^ En cet esprit vous m'avez
appel6, quoique indigne; et, comme un pfelerin qui
chemine vers une basilique lointaine, lumineuse et
chere, je suis venu, non pour donner, mais pour rece-
voir. En cet esprit, Thumaniste que je suis rend tres
pieusement hommage, au nom du College de France,
la maison de Bude, k TUniversite d'Oxford, la maison
de Bentley. En cet esprit, le m6di6viste que je suis
v6n6re cette bibliothfeque bodldenne ou, tout jeune, jadis,
il a travaille, le sanctuaire des Douce et des Digby.
Et le Fran^ais que je suis, p6re de de ux soldats de la
R^publique et maitre de tant de jeunes Fran^ais qui
dans la grande guerre ont oflfert ou donn6 leur vie, salue
avec respect les 6tudiants d'Oxford, tant de jeunes
Anglais qui, comme eux, ont oflfert ou donn6 leur vie
et qui m^ritent qu'^ jamais on redise d*eux ce que
M. Lloyd George disait des combattants de Verdun,
* Voir E. Renan, Lettre a un ami d^Allemagne, 1879.
* Rabelais, Panfagntelf chapitre V.
A 2
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6 Roland a Roncevaux
qu' * ils ont sauve non seulement la France, mais notre
grande cause commune et Thumanite tout entifere '}
Pour rdpondre k Thonneur de votre appel, que peut
un 6rudit vieilli dans Tetude du moyen age ? Ah ! je me
souviendrai que je suis au pays de Richard Coeur de
Lion et du Prince Noir, de Chaucer et de Malory, au
pays qui entre tous a cel6br6 la chevalerie,
the chivalry
That dares the right, and disregards alike
The yea and nay of the world ;
et, tout inegal que je me sache k mon entreprise, mon
sujet du moins ne sera pas indigne de votre audience, si
je vous transporte durant cette heure dans la vieille
France, aux jours oil se developpferent chez elle les
formes classiques de la chevalerie. C'est aux alentours
de Tan iioo, au moment de la premiere croisade.
Je ne crois pas qu'il y ait, dans le pass6 fran^ais, une
date plus radieuse. Le grand fait d'histoire, a jamais
honorable, c'est qu'alors, dans la courte p6riode qui va
de Tan 1080 environ k Tan 1130 environ, se devoilerent
en France, contemporains les uns des autres ou presque,
plusieurs grands pontes, un Thibaut de Vernon et la
Chanson de saint Alexis^ un Aubri de Besangon et le
Roman d Alexandre, un Richard le Pfelerin et la Chanson
dAntioche^ un Guillaume^ IX de Poitiers et Tart des
troubadours, et, bientOt aprfes, Tauteur, qui doit tant a
M. Paul Studer, du drame d'Adam, et Wace, et Benoit
de Sainte-Maure, c^est-^-dire, en ce court laps d'un
demi-sifecle, les formes principales du roman, la po6sie
religieuse et la po6sie amoureuse, et Thistoriographie, et
* Discours prononc^ dans la citadelle de Verdun.
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Roland a Roncevaux i
le theatre, une litterature, en un mot, presque aussi
diversement organisee que celle des Latins et des Grecs,
a peu prds tous les genres litteraires qu'avaient connus
les anciens, mais renaissant sous des aspects nouveaux,
les aspects Chretiens, et tous ces genres representes
d'emblee par des chefs-d'oeuvre. Le grand fait est que,
dans le m^me temps ou la fondation des ordres nou-
veaux, Fontevrault, Citeaux, Pr6montre, temoignait
de Tardeur religieuse de la France, dans le meme temps
ou les maitres des ecoles parisiennes et chartraines, un
Roscelin, un Ab^lard, un Guillaume de Champeaux,
Teveillaient a la haute culture philosophique, elle sut
aussi, la France des premieres croisades, par-dessus la
diversite de ses dialectes et de ses patois, constituer
cette belle chose, une langue litteraire, et une litterature
nationale assez particuliere des Torigine pour que nous
y reconnaissions, qualites et defauts, les traits distinctifs
de son genie, assez generalement humaine pourtant pour
que les nations cultivees, et TAngleterre entre toutes,
s'en soient eprises et inspirees. Oui, durant cette courte
p6riode de cinquante annees, 'la France capetienne,
comme TAthenes de Pericles, a cre6 pour tous les
peuples ', et, pour le faire voir, une seule phrase suffira,
si j'y rassemble les eblouissants synchronismes que
voici: c'est alors, aux alen tours de Tan iioo, qu'appa-
raissent, comme tumultuairement, la premiere croisade —
et encore le premier arc d'ogive — et encore le premier
vitrail — et encore le premier drame liturgique — et en-
core le premier tournoi — et encore la premiere charte de
liberte d'une commune — et encore le premier chant du
premier troubadour : toutes creations inattendues, jaillies
a la fois du sol de la France.
, J'ajoute: c'est alors qu'apparait aussi la premiere
chanson de geste. Sous Tinfluence de Texaltation
A3
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8 Roland a Roncevaux
religieuse et belliqueuse des croisades, k la faveur des
pderinages lointains de Rome et de Compostelle,
d'humbles traditions locales de nos eglises, la l6gende
de Charlemagne k Saint-Denis, de saint Roland k Blaye,
de saint Guillaume k Gellone, de saint Ogier k Meaux,
de tant d autres personnages carolingiens en tant d'autres
sanctuaires, prennent soudain une valeur neuve. Des
jongleurs nomades les racontent, les chantent au son
des vielles sur le parvis des 6glises, sur les champs de
' foires, aux etapes des pderins et des croises, peu k peu
les relient entre elles par le lien r6el de leurs itineraires
et par le lien mystique d'une id^e : Tidee que Dieu avait
jadis choisi Charlemagne et ses Francais pour 6tre les
champions de ses causes et mener en son nom par les
pays une incessante guerre sainte et que la mission qu'il
leur avait alors confiee n'avait ete que T^bauche et la
pr^figuration de la mission que la France des croisades
devait a son tour reprendre et accomplin C'est Tid^e
de la plus ancienne chanson de geste que nous ayons, la
Chanson de Roland, qui groupe autour du vieil empereur,
chevalier de Dieu, un peuple de chevaliers de Dieu ;
c'est ridee de tant d'autres romans qui, au xii*, au xiii®
si6cle, exaltent les vertus de loyaute, de d^sinteresse-
ment, de fid^lite, qui repfetent que * droite justice vaut
bonne pri6re ', qui enseignent, comme 1 6glise, le sacri-
fice, qui sont fondes, comme la tragedie corn6lienne, sur
rhonneur, et qui refl^tent comme de purs miroirs les
sentiments et les passions, Tesprit de T^poque feodale.
Et parce que j'ai choisi, pour y vivre le meilleur de
ma vie d'6rudit, cette epoque, et dans cette epoque, pouf
les 6tudier de preference, les chansons de geste, et
parmi les chansons de geste, pour lui consacrer le plus
de travail, la Chanson de Roland, je crois bien faire de
choisir, pour les analyser devant vous, entre tant de
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Roland a Roncevaux 9
scenes complexes de ce complexe po^me, celles oil
resplendit surtout, d'une splendeur d'ailleurs etrange et
mysterieuse, la chevalerie de Roland.
* * *
J'irai droit a ces scenes-1^, car cette heure est breve,
et d'ailleurs il suffit de quelques mots pour resumer
celles qui les pr^parent. Au terme de la longue guerre
que durant * sept ans tout pleins ' il a menee en Espagne,
le roi Charlemagne vient de conclure avec le roi sarrasin
Marsile une paix qu'il croit durable. II ramene vers la
France ses troupes victorieuses. Pour les garer contre
tout retour offensif d'un ennemi soumis de la veille, il
doit, quand elles franchiront les Pyrenees, laisser der-
ri^re elles, a Roncevaux, une arriere-garde. Roland
a reclame de lui Thonneur de la commander. Qui est
Roland? Un chevalier, son neveu, jeune, beau, fort,
qui, dans I'immense armee du vieux roi, semble entre
tous proche de son coeur. Cest lui, nous est-il dit, qui
* guide les autres' dans les batailles, lui qui conquiert
les royaumes, lui qui * chascun jur de mort s'abandonet ',
et, s'il perissait, Charles perdrait ' le bras droit de son
corps '. D'ou lui vient done son prestige, sa precellence ?
Serait-ce de sa vaillance, de sa purete ? Mais tous ses
compagnons sont, eux aussi, des vaillants et des purs.
Serait-ce de sa terrible ep6e, Durendal ? Mais Durendal
est une epee sainte, non pas une epee enchant^e ; elle
n*est rien que le symbole materiel de la valeur de qui
la manie. Serait-ce de sa tendresse pour le roi, son
seigneur? Mais ses compagnons Taiment du m^me
coeur. II semble que, dans cette armee de chevaliers
unanimes, pareillement devours k une meme cause,
Roland ne fasse que porter a leur paroxysme les vertus
des autres, qu'il se distingue des autrcs seulement par
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lo Roland a Roncevaux
une sorte d'ardeur imp6rieuse, d'outrance, que ses amis
appellent sa prouesse, que ses ennemis appellent son
orgueil.
Voici done qu'a Roncevaux, au pied des Pyrenees, il
vient de r^clamer Thonneur de rester a rarriere-garde.
Et voici que d'un meme 6lan, Olivier, son compagnon,
puis les dix autres pairs, puis Turpin Tarchev^que, puis
\ingt mille Francais, la fleur de France, se sont offerts
a rester avec lui. Or nous savons que leur troupe sera
attaqu6e par une arm6e sarrasine plus forte, qu'un
traftre, Ganelon, a conduite et cachee dans les gorges
voisines. Et ce qui fait le path^tique de la situation, c'est
que Roland et ses vingt mille volontaires pressentent
leur p6ril, Font k demi devine, et que pourtant des
raisons de fierte, d'honneur, qu'il serait trop long
d*analyser, mais qui sont justes et invincibles, les ont
decides k s'oflfrir k la redoutable mission, ont decide
Charlemagne k consentir.
Charlemagne, malgr6 ses pressentiments, s*est eloigne
dans la montagne. Par la route du col de Cise, sa
grande arm6e s'ecoule vers la France. Gardant Tentr^e
de cette route, au pied des Ports, les vingt mille atten-
dent. Les Sarrasins vont attaquer. Le po6me ne sera-
t-il done que le recit d'une immense tuerie ? Comme
des fauves^ceul6s, ou comme des martyrs dans le cirque,
les vingt mille n'auront-ils qu'^ subir leur destin^e?
Non, ils en sont les maitres, autant que des personnages
corneliens. Car la route reste libre derrifere eux : ils
peuvent battre en retraite vers Charlemagne ou le rappe-
ler, s'ils veulent, par un messager ou par la voix du cor.
Que feront-ils? Roland, maitre de rappeler Charle-
magne, et invite k le rappeler, refusera mais pour des
raisons inattendues, et qui sont bien propres, semble-t-il,
a nous surprendre et a nous choquer, puisqu'elles
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Roland a Roncevaux ii
semblent absurdes k Olivier, son plus cher compagnon,
son double. 6coutons-les tous deux :
* Mille trompettes sarrasines sonnent.^ Le bruit est
grand, les Frangais Tentendirent. Olivier dit: "Sire
companion, il se peut que nous ayons affaire aux Sar-
rasins. Roland r^pond : " Ah! que Dieu nous Toctroie !
Nous devons tenir ici^ pour notre roi. Pour son
seigneur, on doit souffnr toute detresse, et endurer les
grands chauds et les grands froids, et perdre du cuir et
du poiL Que chacun veille k y employer de grands
coups, afin qu'on ne chante pas de nous une mauvaise
chanson ! Le tort est aux paYens, aux Chretiens le droit.
Jamais mauvais exemple ne viendra de moi . . ."
' Olivier est mont6 sur une hauteur.^ II voit a plein
la terre d'Espagne et les Sarrasins, qui sont assembles
en si grande masse. Les heaumes aux gemmes serties
d'or brillent, et les 6cus, et les hauberts safres, et les
epieux et les gonfanons fixes aux fers. II ne peut
denombrer meme les corps de bataille: ils sont tant
qu'il n'en sait pas le compte. Au-dedans de lui-m^me il
est grandement trouble. Le plus vite qu'il peut, il d^vale
de la hauteur, vient aux Fran^ais, leur raconte tout.
* Olivier dit : " J'ai vu les palfens. Jamais homme sur
terre n'en vit plus. Devant nous ils sont bien cent
mille, Tecu au bras, le heaume lac6, le blanc haubert
rev^tu ; et, la hampe droite, luisent leurs epieux bruns.
Vous aurez une oataille, telle qu'il n'en fut jamais.
Seigneurs Fran^ais, que Dieu vous donne sa force!
Tenez fermement, pour que nous ne soyons pas vaincus ! **
Les Francjais disent: " Honni soit qui s'enfuit! Au
risque de mourir, pas un ne vous manquera."
* Olivier dit : " l!es paXens sont tr6s forts ; et nos Fran-
9ais, ce me semble, sont bien peu. Roland, mon com-
f)agnon, ah ! sonnez votre cor. Charles Tentendra, et
'arm6e reviendra.'' Roland repond : " Ce serait faire
comme un fou. En Douce France j'y perdrais mon
renom. Sur Theure je frapperai de Durendal de grands
coups. Sa lame saignera jusqu'^ Tor de la garde. Les
felons palens sont venus aux Ports pour leur malheur.
Je vous le jure, tous sont marques pour la mort."
* " Roland, mon compagnon, sonnez Tolifant ! Charles
I'entendra, ramfenera rarm^e ; il nous secourra avec
' Vers 1004-1016. ' Vers 1028-1097.
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12 Roland a Roncevaux
tous ses barons." Roland r^pond: " Ne plaise a
Dieu que pour moi mes parents soient blames et (jue
Douce France tombe dans le mepris ! Je frapperai de
Durendal k force, ma bonne ep^e que j'ai ceinteau cote.
Vous en verrez la lame tout ensanglant^e. Les felons
palens se sont assembles pour leur malheur. Je vous le
jure, ils'sont tous condamnes a la mort."
'"Roland, mon compagnon, sonnez votre olifant!
Charle§ Tentendra, qui est au passage des Ports. Je
vous le jure, les Fran^ais reviendront. — Ne plaise a
Dieu", lui r^pond Roland, '' qu'il soit jamais dit par nul
homme vivant que pour des paYens j'aie sonne mon cor.
Jamais mes parents n'en auront le reproche. Quand je
serai en la grande bataille, je frapperai mille coups et
sept cents, et vous verrez Tacier de Durendal sanglant.
Les Fran^ais sont hardis et frapperont vaillamment;
ceux d'Espagne n'6chapperont pas a la mort."
' Olivier dit : *' Pourquoi vous bl^merait-on ? J'ai vu
les Sarrasins d'Espagne : les vaux et les monts en sont
couverts, et les landes et toutes les plaines. Grandes
sont les armies de cette gent mauaite et bien petite
notre troupe!" Roland repond : "Mon ardeur s'en
accroit Ne plaise a Dieu ni k ses anges qu*^ cause de
moi France perde de son prix! J'aime mieux mourir
oue choir dans la honte ! Mieux nous frappons, mieux
1 empereur nous aime."
* Roland est preux et Olivier est sage. Tous deux
sont de courage meryeilleux. Une fois qu'ils sont k
cheval et en armes, jamais par peur de la mort ils
n'esquiveront une bataille. Les deux comtes sont bons
et leiirs paroles hautes.'
L'6trange conflit ! Lequel des deux a raison ? Olivier,
semble-t-il bien. Car en quel temps, en quel pays, quel
capitaine, surpris par un ennemi trop nombreux, a jamais
h6sit6 k appeler du renfort ? ' Pourquoi vous blamerait-
on ? je ne sais pas,' a dit Olivier, justement. Faut-il
croire que la soif du martyre, une fifevre d'ascetisme
mystique ppssede Roland ? Non pas ; il tient a la vie,
et ^ sa fiancee lointaine. Espere-t-il de Dieu un miracle ?
Pas davantage, et, s'il pense comme Jeanne : ' (Euvrez
et Dieu oeuvrera,' toujours est-il que pas une fois, tant
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Roland a Roncevaux 13
que dureront ses combats, il ne priera. II n'a d'autres
raisons de rebuter Olivier que celles-1^ m6me qu'il vient
de dire, et, s'il n'en a pas d'autres, n'apparait-il pas qu'il
va sacrifier ses vingt mille compagnons k un point
d'honneur de pure magnificence, et qu'il sera vingt mille
fois leur assassin ? C'est qu'il est * preux \ dit le poete.
Qu'est-ce done que prouesse ? et ne serait-ce qu'orgueil ?
que folie ?
Pourtant, et par contre, on sent bien qu'Olivier ' le
sage ', puisqu'il est homme de coeur, doit convenir avec
Roland d'un principe au moins : en tout temps, en tout
pays, une troupe se d6shonore si elle appelle du renfort
sans necessity. Tout bien pese, le differend du preux
et du sage se reduit done k r6pondre Tun oui, Tautre
non, k cette question : ^ Pouvons-nous remplir, k nous
seuls, notre mission ? Pouvons-nous, sans crier k Taide,
remporter la victoire ? *
Or, vous I'avez entendu : c'est la victoire que par
trois fois Roland a pr^dite et promise. Qu'il commence
done la bataille : c'est son devoir certain. Mais, a tout
instant, il pent se dedire : et, s'il n'est pas un aliene,
rinstant viendra, que nous guettons, oil il se dedira . . .
ou bien, c'est qu'il sera vainqueur.
Le poete divise la journee de Roncevaux en trois
batailles, Xxbs diversement belles.
La premiere est tout ardeur et toute joie. L'arche-
v^que Turpin promet aux vingt mille la gloire celeste,
s'ils meurent, mais Roland leur promet autre chose, le
triomphe terrestre ; il repousse comme une pens^e de
couard I'idee qu'il pourrait etre d6fait :
1 107. Mai seit del coer ki el piz se cuardet!
Nus remeindrum en estal en la place :
Par nos i ert e li colps e li caples!
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14 Roland a Roncevaux
II promet a ses Fran^ais la ruine de Tennemi, les
depouilles sarrasines, un butin * bel et gent * :
1168. Nuls reis de France n'out unkes si vaillant.
Et telle est, en effet, la vertu du cri d'armes : * Montjoie! ',
et telle la fougue des chevaliers, et telle la gaite de la
lutte sous le soleil clair, que bientot Roland semble
avoir pr6dit juste. Les vingt mille ne pensent plus
qu*au riche butin escompte, tous, jusqu'au sage Olivier
lui-m^me, qui s'ecrie :
1233. Ferez i, Francs, kar tr6s ben les veintrum . . .
1274. Dist Oliver: * Gente est notre bataille! *
Cette bataille est gagnee, en eflfet. H^las! Une
seconde arm^e sarrasine entre en lice. Les exploits
des epees fibres, Durendal, Hauteclere, Almice, se
multiplient. Vainement. Cette fois, les Francjais meu-
rent * par milliers, par troupeaux . . .' A mesure qu'ils
tombent, Charlemagne s*6loigne et notre espoir d^croit
que, si m^me on le rappelle, il puisse desormais revenir
k temps. N'est-il pas trop tard d6ja? Certes, trop
tard, et, pour que nous le sachions bien, le po^te, jouant
le franc jeu, decrit les signes funestes qui, loin du
champ de carnage, 1^-bas en France, presagent le
desastre :
' La bataille est merveilleuse et pesante . . > Les.
Fran^ais y perdent leurs meilleurs soutiens. lis ne
reverront plus leurs peres ni leurs parents, ni Charle-
magne qui les attend aux Ports. En France, s'elfeve
une tourmente etrange, un orage charg6 de tonnerre et
de vent, de pluie et de gr6le, demesurement. Lafoudre
tombe ^ coups serres et presses, la terre tremble. De
Saint-Michel-du-P6ril jusqu'aux Saints, de Besan^on
jusqu'au port de Wissant, il n'y a maison dont un mur
ne creve. En plein midi il y a de grandes t^nebres :
aucune clarte, sauf quand le ciel se fend. Nul ne le
^ Vers 1412-1420-1437.
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Roland a Roncevaux 15
voit qui ne s'epouvante. Plusieurs disent : " C'est la
consommation des temps, la fin du monde que voici
venue ". lis ne savent pas, ils ne disent pas vrai : c'est
la grande douleur pour la mort de Rolana/
Mais eux, les combattants, qui ne voient pas ces
presages, en seraient-ils encore k esperer leur salut ? II
n'en est rien. Olivier desormais s'enferme dans un
mutisme hautain. Turpin, pour la seconde fois, harangue
les chevaliers : mais c'est pour leur annoncer (v. 1520)
que pas un d'eux ne survivra. II n'est plus question
pour eux de vaincre, mais seulement de bien mourir.
Et Roland ? Lui qui peut encore sauver les restes de
cette noble troupe, est-il entendu qu'il ne veut pas?
Serait-il seul a ne pas voir? Non: lui aussi, il voit, il
sait. Cherchez, en effet, dans le r6cit de cette seconde
bataille, son propos favori de nagu^re, qu'il etait stir de
vaincre, vous le chercherez en vain. Pourtant, il parte
plusieurs fois dans la melee, et c'est pour rappeler les
memes arguments qu'il employait tout k I'heure.
1466. * Male chan9un n'en deit estre cantee . . /
1560. * Pur itels colps nos ad Charles plus cher/
II les r6p6te tous, hormis le seul qui, au debut, les
justifiait, la promesse de la victoire.
C'en est done fait. II a descendu la pente terrible.
De sa foi en son invincibilite, de la surestime de soi-
m6me, il a passe peu k peu a Tinquietude, a Tangoisse ;
a son tour, il voit la defaite certaine : et c'est quand le
roi Marsile lance une troisi^me armee pour achever
ceux que Dieu a ^pargnes. A cet instant, quand s'en-
gage la troisifeme bataille, combien sont-ils qui survi-
vent? Soixante seulement. Roland, nous le savons,
n'a plus qu'a les regarder mourir, comme il a regards les
autres. Par insensibilite ? par demence? On ne sait.
Pourtant comme nous n'avons plus rien a esperer,
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i6 Roland a Roncevaux
croyons-nous, sinon rach^vement, aussi rapide que
possible, de TaflFreux holocauste, void que Roland
s'approche d'Olivier, cherchant k dire une chose qu'il
ne sait comment dire : * Nous avons bien sujet de
plaindre douce France, la belle. . . . Pourquoi le roi
Charles n'est-il pas ici ? . . / Olivier le laisse parler,
feint de ne pas comprendre ... * Comment pourrions-
nous faire ? ' reprend Roland. A cet instant oil il laisse
enfin voir qu'il souflFre, et comme il trebuche, lui aussi,
sous le faix de sa croix, piti6 nous prend de lui . . . Si
je rappelais Charlemagne?' demande-t-il humblement,
foUement. Mais il lui reste k toucher le fond de sa
' detresse, et c'est quand Olivier, son compagnon, son
fr^re, reprend a son compte, ironique, m^prisant, les
arguments dont Roland lui-m^me se pr^valait tout k
rheure et les retourne contre le malheureux :
*"Ah!" dit Roland,^ '*roi, ami, que n'etes-vous ici?
Olivier, fr^re, comment pourrons-nous faire ? Comment
lui mander la nouvelle ? ' — Olivier dit : " Comment ? Je
ne sais pas. Un recit honteux pourrait courir sur nous,
j'aime mieux mourir."
* Roland dit: ** Je sonnerai Tolifant. Charles Tentendra,
§ui passe les Ports. Je vous le jure, les Francs revien-
ront." Olivier dit : '*Ce serait grand deshonneur et pour
tous vos parents un opprobre, et cette honte serait sur
eux toute leur vie. Quand je vous le demandais, vous
n'en fites rien. Faites-le maintenant : ce ne sera plus
par mon conseil. Sonner votre cor, ce ne serait pas
aun vaillant. Comme vos deux bras sont sanglants ! "
Le comte r6pond : " J'ai frappe de beaux coups.*'
* Roland ait : " Notre bataille est rude. Je sonnerai
mon cor, le roi Charles Tentendra." Olivier dit : " Ce ne
serait pas d'un preux. Quand je vous disais de le faire,
compagnon, vous n'avez pas daigne. Si le roi avait dte
avec nous, nous n'eussions rien souflFert. Ceux qui
gisent la ne m^ritent aucun bl^me. Par cette mienne
barbe, si je puis revoir ma gente soeur Aude, vous ne
coucherez jamais entre ses bras.*'
* Vers 1697-1736.
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Roland a Roncevaux 17
' Roland dit: " Pourquoide la colore centre moi?" Et
il r^pond : " Compagnon, c'est votre faute ; car vaillance
sens6e et folic sont deux choses, et mesure vaut mieux
qu'outrecuidance. Si nos Fran9ais sont morts, c'est par
votre legferet^. Jamais plus nous ne ferons le service
de Chanes. Si vous m aviez cru, mon seigneur serait
revenu; cette bataille, nous Taurioris gagnee; le roi
Marsile aurait €t€ tue ou pris. Votre prouesse, Roland,
c'est k la malheure que nous Tavons vue. Charles, le
Grand — jamais il n'y au^a un tel homme jusqu'au
dernier jugement — ne recevra plus notre aide. Vous
allez mourir et France en sera honnie. Aujourd'hui
prend fin notre loyal compagnonnage. Avant ce soir
nous nous separerons, et ce sera dur. ' '
Olivier a soulage sa rancune. Roland, que fera-t-il ?
A ces reproches si violents, et si tendres, et qui lui
viennent de son plus cher compagnon, que rdpondra-
t-il ? Va-t-il refuter Olivier ? ou, s'il ressent du remords,
va-t-il confesser enfin ce remords ? II se tait, et je ne
sais rien de plus beau que ce silence. II se tait, mais
Tarcheveque Turpin a entendu la querelle des deux
amis; et, poussant son cheval vers eux : ' Helas ! ' leur
dit-il, * elle n'a plus d'objet. Pourtant, sire Roland, oui,
sonnez Tolifant, afin que du moins le roi revienne et
nous venge et que nos corps ne soient pas manges des
loups, des sangliers et des chiens.' Roland repond:
' Seigneur, vous avez bien dit.'
* Roland ^ a mis Tolifant k ses levres. II I'embouche
bien, sonne a pleine force. Hauts sont les monts et
longue la voix au cor : k trente lieues on I'entend qui se
proTonge. Charles I'entetid et Tentendent tous ses
corps de troupe. Le roi dit: "Nos hommes livrent
bataille.'* Et Ganelon lui r6pond k I'encontre : " Qu'un
autre Teat dit, certes on y verrait un grand mensonge!"
* Le comte Roland, k grand effort, i grand ahan, tr^s
douloureusement sonne son olifant. rar sa bouche le
sang jaillit clair. Sa tempe se rompt. La voix de son
^ Vers 1753 et suivants.
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i8 Roland a Roncevaux
cor se rdpand ail loin. Charles Tentend, au passage des
Ports. Le due Naime 6coute, les Francs 6coutent . . .
" Le comte Roland a la bouche sanglante. Sa
tempe s'est rompue. II sonne douloureusement, k
grand'peine . . ." '
Sa souflFrance le justifie. Essayant d'interpreter cette
sc^ne, jadis, dans mes Legendes epiques^ j'avais 6crit
ceci : * Pour tous ceux d'ailleurs qui aux sifecles lointains
ont entendu chanter la Chanson de Roland^ pour tous ses
lecteurs modernes, plus ou moins obscur6ment, la justi-
fication de Roland a commence plus t6t, s'il est vrai que
c'est la vaillance et la mort de ses compagnons qui le
justifie progressivement, et qu'i mesure qu'il en mourait
davantage, nous avons souhait6 davantage que Roland
n'appelat point. Les vingt mille ont combattu, sont
morts sans jamais dire s'ils etaient du parti de Roland
ou du parti d'Olivier, et peut-etre tous ont-ils pense ainsi
qu'Olivier et tous se sont pourtant oflFerts k la mort
comme s'ils pensaient ainsi que Roland. Roland leur
devait cette mort, puisqu'ils en 6taient dignes . . . Au
d6but, Roland, etant Roland, etant celui qui s'd^ve
d'emblee, non a la conception, mais k la passion de son
devoir, ne pouvait pas appeler; plus tard, k mesure
qu'il devait ses compagnons aussi haut que lui, il ne
devait pas appeler.'
Aujourd'hui, pour avoir observe pendant les quatre
anndes de la guerre les choses que j'ai observ^es, sachant
mieux qu'un chef est sans force, qu'une troupe est sans
force s'il ne s'6tablit du chef a la troupe et de la troupe
au chef un courant double et continu de pens6es et de
sentiments bien accord^s, je ressens Tinsuffisance de
cette analyse et combien il 6tait faux de dire que Roland
d^ve progressivement ses compagnons jusqu'i lui. II
* Tome III, page 439.
4,
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Roland a Roncevaux 19
faut bien sentir au contraire qu'ils sont dignes de lui, et
Olivier tout le premier, d6s le d^but de la bataille, et que
cette equivalence morale remonte a des jours et k des
annees en arri^re. Comme Roland, depuis des jours et
des annees, ils sont ceux qui aspirent au parfait. Ses
victoires pass6es furent leurs victoires; son *orgueir
est fait de leur orgueil, sa ' folie ' est leur folie. II ne
s'est jamais distingue d'eux en rien, sinon par le don,
qui est son propre, de discerner avant eux, par une
intuition plus immediate, par une illumination plus
claire, ce qu'ils veulent. A son insu, k leur insu, il
incame leur volonte profonde. A Roncevaux, son
privilege de chef, de heros, de saint, est seulement de
voir au deli, d'apercevoir d'emblee Toeuvre comme
necessairement accomplie, la victoire comme necessaire-
ment remportee.
La victoire, qu'il avait predite a une heure oil sa
prediction semblait d'un fou, et dont lui-m^me a fini par
d6sesp6rer, puisqu'il sonne du cor en sa detresse, ab-
surdement, quand il est trop tard, la victoire, il Tatteint
au moment m^me oil il en desespere. II Tatteint, puis-
que le roi sarrasin s'enfuit, le poing coupe, puisque
bientOt les demieres troupes sarrasines s'enfuiront. La
victoire, les deux demiers survivants de ses compagnons,
Olivier et Turpin, auront le temps de Tentrevoir :
2183. Cist camp est vostre, mercit Deu, e mien,
lui dira Turpin, avant de succomber. Et lui-meme, qui
va mourir k son tour sur ce champ qui est sien, il contem-
plera la victoire, il jouira d'elle ddicieusement au milieu
des aifres de sa passion de martyr :
' Roland sent que sa mort est prochaine.^ Par les
oreilles sa cervelle se repand. II prie Dieu pour ses
* Vers 2259-2397.
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20 Roland a Roncevaux
pairs, afin qu'il les appelle ; puis, pour lui-meme, il prie
I'ange Gabriel. II prend Tolifant, pour que personne
ne jui fasse reproche, et Durendal, son ^p6e, en Tautre
main. Un peu plus loin qu'une portee d arbal^te, vers
TEspagne, il va, dans un gueret. II monte sur un
tertre. La, sous un bel arbre, il y a quatre perrons,
faits de marbre. Sur Therbe verte, il est tomW k la
renverse. II se p^me, car sa mort approche.
^ Hauts sont les monts, hauts sont les arbres. II y a
li quatre perrons, faits de marbre, qui luisent. Sur
rherbe verte, le comte Roland se p^me. Or un Sarrasin
le guette, qui a contrefait le mort et git parmi les autres,
ayant souill6 son corps et son visage de sang. II se
redresse debout, accourt. II etait beau et fort, et de
grande vaillance ; en .son orgueil il fait la folie dont il
mourra : il se saisit de Roland, de son corps et de ses
armes, et dit une parole : '* II est vaincu, le neveu de
Charles! Cette 6p6e, je Temporterai en Arabie!"
Comme il tirkit, le comte reprit un peu ses sens.
* Roland sent qu'il liii prend son epee. II ouvre les
aiiv e^¥ liii A\¥ iiri Yr\r\¥ • ** T*!! ri'<»e r\f%c Ackc riAfi-Pke rtft£x ia
Tacier, et le crine, et les os, Tui fait jaillir du chef les
deux yeux et, devant ses pieds, le renverse mort. Apr6s
il lui dit : ** PaKen, fils de serf, comment fus-tu si ose que
de te saisir de moi, soit k droit, soit k tort? Nul ne
I'entendra dire qui ne te tienne pour un fou! Voila
fendu le pavilion de mon olifant ; Tor en est tombe, et le
cristal/
* Roland sent que sa vue se perd. II se met sur pieds,
tant qu'il pent s'^vertue. Son visage a perdu sa couleur.
Devant lui est une pierre bise. II y frappe dix coups,
plein de deuil et de rancoeur. L'acier grince, il ne se bnse
ni ne s'6br6che. "Ah! dit le comte, sainte Marie, k
mon aide ! Ah ! Durendal, bonne Durendal, c'est pitie
de vous! Puisque je meurs, je n'ai plus cure de vous.
Par vous j'ai gagn6 en rase campagne tant de batailles,
et par vous dompte tant de larges terres, que Charles
tient, qui a la barbe chenue! Ne venez jamais aux
mains d'un homme qui puisse fuir devant un autre ! Un
bon vassal vous a longtemps tenue : il n'y aura jamais
votre pareille en France la Sainte."
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Roland a Roncevaux 21
' Roland frappe au perron de sardoine : Tacier ^nce,
il n'6clate pas, il ne s'6breche pas. Quand il voit qu'il
ne peut la oriser, il commence en lui-m^me k la plaindre:
" An ! Durendal, comme tu es belle, et claire, et blanche !
Contre le soleil comme tu luis et flambes ! Charles 6tait
aux vaux de Maurienne quand du ciel Dieu lui manda
par son ange qu'il te donnat k Tun de ses comtes
capitaines : alors il m'en ceignit, le gentil roi, le Magne.
Par elle, je lui conquis TAnjou et la Bretagne, par elle
je lui conquis le Poitou et le Maine. Je lui conquis
Normandie la Tranche, et par elle je lui conquis la Pro-
vence et TAquitaine, et la Lombardie et toute la Ro-
magne. Je lui conquis la Bavi^re et toutes les Flandres,
la Sourgogne et la Pologne entifere, Constantinople,
dont il avait re9u Thomma^e, et la Saxe, oil il fait ce
qu'il veut. Par elle je lui conquis I'Ecosse . . . et
1 Angleterre, sa chambre, comme il Tappelait. Par elle
je conquis tant et tant de contr6es, que Charles tient,
qui a la barbe blanche. Pour cette epee j'ai douleur et
peine. PlutOt mourir que la laisser aux paYens ! Dieu,
notre pere, ne souflFrez pas que France ait cette honte ! "
* Roland frappa contre une pierre bise. II en abat plus
que je ne vous sais dire. L'6p6e grince, elle n'eclate ni
ne se rompt. Vers le ciel elle rebondit. Quand le
comte voit qu'il ne la brisera point, il la plaint en lui-
meme tr6s doucement : " Ah ! Durendal, que tu es belle
et sainte! Ton pommeau d'or estpleinde reliques : une
dent de saint Pierre, du sang de saint Basile, et des
cheveux de monseigneur saint Denis, et du vetement
de sainte Marie. II n'est pas juste que des paYens te
?oss6dent : des chr^tiens doivent faire votre service,
^uissiez-vous ne jamais tomber aux mains d*un couard !
Par vous j^aurai conquis tant de larges terres, que tient
Charles, qui a la barbe fleurie! L'empereur en est
puissant et riche."
'Roland sent que la mort le prend tout: de sa tfite
elle descend vers son coeur. Jusqiie sous un pin il va
courant ; il s'est couche sur rherbe verte, face contre
terre. Sous lui il met son 6pee et Tolifant. II a tourn6
sa tdte du c6te de la gent pai'enne : il a fait ainsi, voulant
que Charles dise, et tous les siens, qu'il est mort en
yainqueur, le gentil comte. A faibles coups et souvent,
il bat sa coulpe. Pour ses pech6s il tend vers Dieu
son gant
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22 Roland a Ronceiutux
* Roland sent que son temps est fini. II est couche
sur un tertre escarp^, le viss^e toum6 vers TEspagne.
De Tune de ses mains il frappe sa poitrine : " Dieu, par
ta grace, mea culpa, pour mes p6ch6s, les grands et les
menus, que j'ai faits depuis Theure oii je naquis jusqu'a
ce jour oil me void abattu." II a tendu vers Dieu son
gant droit. Les anges du ciel descendent k lui.
'Le comte Roland est couche sous un pin. Vers
TEspagpe il a toume son visage. De maintes choses
il lui vient souvenance : de tant de terres qu*il a con-
quises, le vaillant, de Douce France, des hommes de
son lignage, de Charlema^e, son seigneur, qui Ta
nourri. II en pleure et soupire, il ne peut s'en emp^cher.
Mais il ne veut pas se mettre lui-m6me en oubli ; il bat
sa coulpe et demande k Dieu merci: " Vrai P6re, qui
jamais ne mentis, toi oui rappelas saint Lazare d'entre
les morts, qui sauvas Daniel des lions, sauve mon kme
de tous perils, pour les p6ches que j'ai faits dans ma
vie ! " 11 a offert k Dieu son gant droit : saint Gabriel
Ta pris de sa main. Sur son bras il a laiss6 retomber
sa tdte : il est alle, les mains jointes, k sa fin. Dieu lui
envoie son ange Ch^rubin et saint Michel du P6ril;
avec eux y vient saint Gabriel. lis portent Tame du
comte en paradis.
* Rolana est mort : Dieu a son ^me dans les cieux.'
Le roi Charles est revenu k Roncevaux. II voit le
champ de gloire tout couvert de morts, bient6t fleuri des
fleurs sacrdes *ki sunt vermeilles del sane de noz
barons'.^ Va-t-il prononcer contre Roland le terrible
Vare, redde legumes ? Non, mais il loue le victorieux,
et tous ses compagnons avec lui, et les v6n6re.
1093. RoUant est proz e Oliver est sage ;
Ambedui unt meveillus vasselage . . .
Bon sunt li cunte e lur paroles hahes.
Entre le ' preux ' et le ' sage ', faut-il choisir ? Rappe-
lons-nous plut6t cette parole de Pascal : ' Dieu a voulu
que les v6rites entrent du coeur dans I'esprit et non pas
de Tesprit dans lo coeur. . . . Et de li vient qu'au Ueu
* Vers 287a.
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Roland a Roncevaux 23
qu'en parlant des choses humaines on dit qu'il faut les
connaltre avant que de les aimer, les saints au contraire
disent, en parlant des choses divines, qu'il faut les aimer
pour les connaitre et qu'on n*entre dans la v6rit6 que
par la charit6/ Apprendre k aimer son propre sacri-
fice, n'est-ce pas une de ces choses divines ? Et quelle
doit ^tre la juste limite de cet amour? Ceux-li le
savent qui, dans la demi^re guerre — la demifere des
guerres — se sont ofFerts, les uns selon Tesprit du grand
vers de Comeille :
* Faites votre devoir et laissez faire aux dieux,'
les autres, selon Tesprit du grand vers de Pope :
' Act well your part, there all the honour lies/
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