In England's fatherland, Germany, two different principles are represented by two different tribes. With the Saxon the male, with the Frank the female predominates. The Frank, after coming to the years of maturity, yields to the "trieb", to "kind”, loses his self-assertion and strikes arms before his female "complement", who henceforth takes him in hand, rules him and shapes his destiny after her ideal; so he is stopped in his progress to individuality. The Saxon yields not; he is naturally chaste, repugnant to the "trieb", as to every power that tends to disturb his equilibrium and to endanger his independence. Independence, is to him existence. Interference, invasion on his status quo, from within or without, calls forth his resistance; and his resisting power is immense. When nature does conquer him, he subdues his womankind, and is the master. He is essentially individual, self, self-asserting, self-relying, self-possessed, cool and collected in the storm of passion as in the brunt of battle. The Frank, in his contact with kind, is gregarious, social: the Saxon solitary and shy; he segregates from the mass and builds his homestead away from the crowd, and his home is his world. So the Saxon develops a strong individuality, while the Frank disappears in the kind. But the Frank's kindness to kind, is rewarded by nature's kindness to him, in the "benigna naturae vena" of expression. His placid mind, relieved from internal conflicts, becomes expressive, eloquent, easy of word, facile of form, artistic; it can dwell on its conceptions, shape and model them in ease, and stay till the last finish is attained; he possesses eminently the sense of form and beauty. The Saxon, kept from satisfaction, is in perpetual unrest, perpetually consumed by the "trieb" which he resists; a prey to confused feelings and conceits which throng upon him and rapidly succeed each other; of unbound imagination; his mind is too full, too embarrassed to find expression, to sift, arrange and lay clear its conceptions; too restless to follow and develop a particular object till it is properly brought out and perfected. His ideas, born in the immediate truth of his own sensation and experience, are right enough; he is an original thinker and a man of heart, and has plenty of common sense; his difficulty lies in the forming. It is a pity that one half of mankind cannot realise how the other half feels and thinks. The Frank has colonized France, the Saxon England, and so the two different principles are repeated in the two nations. It is true that in England the Saxon heaviness has been partly relieved by the immigration of the Normans; but the groundwork of the nation remains Saxon, and its most valuable qualities, individuality, independence, force of will, tenacity of purpose, sense of truth and right, character, are Saxon inheritance. In insular England, the individual principle of the Saxon may even be said to have found its full, its excessive development. It mastered the King, the Church, as all the powers hostile to the free movement of the individual, and English history is the continual realization of this principle. |