Charles Homer Haskins

“ The human elements in frontier-making are still more complex than the geographical. Obviously we have to do not with individuals but with groups, and with those larger groups which have acquired a full measure of what the sociologists call ‘consciousness of kind,’ to the point of constituting some kind of national unity or national organization. We speak of the self-determination of peoples, but what is a people? Is it created by race or language or political allegiance, or only by that more subtle compound which we call nationality? How large must a people be to have a right to stand alone? ”

“ Philip Augustus was not an heroic figure, and to the men of his age he was probably less sympathetic than his adversary Richard. Vigorous and enduring, a generous liver, quick-tempered but slow to cherish hatred, Philip was preëminently the cautious, shrewd, unscrupulous, far-sighted statesman. He could fight when necessary, but he had no great personal courage and excelled in strategy and prevision rather than in tactics or leadership in the field, and he preferred to gain his ends by the arts of diplomacy. The quality upon which all his contemporaries dwell is his wisdom. ”

“ It is one of the worst sins of the Hapsburgs that, far from acting as peacemakers or even as impartial arbiters between their discordant races, they deliberately and systematically strove to aggravate national animosities and to fan the flames of discord, hoping to be able to play off one race against another in the authentic Turkish fashion, and seeming to imagine that Austria could subsist through internal dissensions, just as Poland was once thought to subsist through her anarchy. ”

“ No land of the western Mediterranean has burnt itself so deeply into the imagination and sentiment of the English-speaking peoples. Twice has this vivid land of the south played a leading part in the world’s life and thought, once under the Greeks, of “wind-swift thought and city-founding mind,” as we may read in the marbles of Pæstum and Selinus and in the deathless pages of Thucydides; and a second time under the Norman princes and their Hohenstaufen successors, creators of an extraordinarily vigorous and precocious state and a brilliant cosmopolitan culture. ”

“ Moreover, language, like race, is a two-edged sword for Germany. If Alsace ought to be part of the empire because it speaks chiefly German, so ought the German-speaking portions of Austria and Switzerland. And if France ought to have given up hope of Alsace because of its German-speaking population, Germany should make no complaint over the parallel renunciation of Prussian Poland or Upper Silesia. Germany cannot ask to apply the principle in the west and reject it in the east. ”

“ What, then, was the Scandinavian contribution to the making of Normandy if it was neither law nor speech nor race? First and foremost, it was Normandy itself, created as a distinct entity by the Norman occupation and the grant to Rollo and his followers, without whom it would have remained an undifferentiated part of northern France. Next, a new element in the population, numerically small in proportion to the mass, but a leaven to the whole—quick to absorb Frankish law and Christian culture but retaining its northern qualities of enterprise, of daring, and of leadership. ”

“ Whatever mistakes there may have been, whatever selfish interests have occasionally come unpleasantly to light, I think it may be justly affirmed that on no similar occasion in the past has so earnest and systematic an effort been made to settle territorial questions on the basis, not of the interests or the convenience of the Great Powers, but of the rights and aspirations of the peoples directly concerned; that the Peace Conference at Paris has liberated and unified more nations than any previous European congress, or all the congresses of the last century taken together ”

“ Just as, in Henry James’s phrase, the English landscape is a landlord’s landscape, and the French a peasant’s, so the mairie and the préfecture, the public garden and the public band, the café and the ever-open church, the workman’s blouse and the grandam’s bonnet, remind us continually that we are in a Latin country and on our way to Paris. ”

“ By securing the potash of Upper Alsace France halves the German supply and thus breaks the German monopoly of the world’s mineral potash; by joining the iron of Lorraine to the iron of Briey, Longwy, and Nancy, France obtains, save for the small share of Luxemburg, full control of the greatest iron field in Europe. The minette ore is no longer shared between France and Germany, it is monopolized by France. If France had Germany’s coal, she might try to establish an economic supremacy as great as that possessed by Germany at the outbreak of the war. ”

“ I care no more for myself nor for anything in this world." Two days later he died, cursing his sons, cursing the day he had been born, repeating constantly, "Shame on a conquered king." Deserted by all save his illegitimate son Geoffrey, who received his father's blessing and his signet ring marked with the leopard of England, Henry was plundered by his attendants of gold and furnishings and apparel, just as William the Conqueror had been despoiled in the hour of his death at Rouen, till some one in pity threw over the royal corpse the short cloak, or 'curt mantle,' by which men called him. ”

“ The loss of so immensely valuable a territory would mean a severe blow to the economical life, as well as to the pride, of the German people. It was a sacrifice that could be fairly demanded only if the majority of the population in Upper Silesia clearly and unmistakably desired union with Poland. As to the wishes of that population, the evidence available was strongly in favor of Polish claims, but it was not absolutely conclusive. Hence the Conference finally resolved that in so grave a matter the decision must be left in the hands of the people themselves through a plebiscite. ”

“ The death of the Young King left as Henry’s eldest heir Richard, known to the modern world as the Lion-Hearted. With much of his father’s energy, Richard seems to have inherited more than any of his brothers the tastes and temperament of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Adventurous and high-spirited, fond of pomp and splendor, a lover of poetry and music, be it the songs of Provençal minstrels or the solemn chants of the church, he belonged on this side of his nature to the dukes of Aquitaine and the country of the troubadours. ”

“ Many people are of the opinion that the only history which matters is modern history, and the more modern the better because the nearer to ourselves and our time. To such everything is meaningless before the French Revolution or the Franco-Prussian War—or perhaps the War of 1914. To those who care only for their own time the past has no perspective; as a distinguished maker and writer of history has said, James Buchanan and Tiglath-Pileser become contemporaries. ”

“ Only because the duke was strong at home could he hope to be strong abroad, only because he was master of an extraordinarily vigorous, coherent, and well-organized state in Normandy could he attempt the at first sight impossible task of conquering a kingdom and the still greater task of organizing it under a firm government. We must take account, not only of the weakness of England, but also of the strength of Normandy, stronger than any of its continental neighbors, stronger even than royalty itself. ”

“ Richard, then merely count of Poitou, was the first western prince to take the cross in this holy war; his father and Philip soon sealed their crusading vows with a public reconciliation under a great elm on the borders of Normandy and France, and the chroniclers tell us that every man made peace with his neighbor, thinking no more of tournaments and fine raiment, the lust of the flesh and the pride of the eye, but only of the recovery of the Holy City. Such great waves of renunciation and religious enthusiasm are peculiarly characteristic of the Middle Ages, but their force was soon spent. ”

“ There is, one may object, nothing monastic in this wonderful pæan of mediæval knighthood, whose religion is that of the God of battles who has never lied, and whose hero meets death with his face toward Spain and his imperishable sword beneath him; but knights and monks had more in common than was once supposed, and we are coming to see that the monasteries, especially the monasteries of the great highways, had a large share in the making, if not in the final writing, of the mediæval epic as well as the mediæval chronicles. ”

“ It is contrary to our prejudices that a single state should be formed out of the hard-headed Norman, the Celtic fisherman of the Breton coast,—the ‘Pêcheur d’Islande’ of a later day,—the Angevin, Tourangeau, Poitevin, the troubadour of Aquitaine, and the Gascon of the far south, with his alien blood and non-Aryan language, already a well-marked type whose swaggering gasconades foreshadow the d’Artagnan of the Three Musketeers and the ‘cadets de Gascogne’ of Cyrano de Bergerac. ”

“ King in England, duke in Normandy, count in Anjou and Maine, duke again in Aquitaine, Henry ruled each of his dominions as its feudal lord—very much as if the German Emperor to-day combined in himself the titles of king of Prussia and of Bavaria, grand duke of Baden, duke of Brunswick, prince of Waldeck, and so on throughout the members of the German confederation. Such a government is not an empire in the sense of the ancient Roman or the modern British empires, for it has no dependencies. ”

“ There, as a result of the prayers of the faithful, one may see the sick and infirm rise whole from their wagons, the dumb open their mouths to the praise of God, the possessed recover a sane mind. The priests who preside over each wagon are seen exhorting all to repentance, confession, lamentations, and the resolution of a better life, while old and young and even little children, prostrate on the ground, call on the Mother of God and utter to her, from the depth of their hearts, sobs and sighs, with words of confession and praise. ”

“ I have walked with bloody brand and with whistling spear, with the wound-bird following me. The Vikings made a fierce attack; we raised a furious storm, the flame ran over the dwellings of men, we laid the bleeding corses to rest in the gates of the city. [8]
And at the end, like Ragnar Lodbrok captured and dying in the pit of serpents, he can tell his tale of feeding the eagle and the she-wolf since he first reddened the sword at the age of twenty, and end his life undaunted to the ever-recurring refrain, "We hewed with the sword":
Death has no terrors. I am willing to depart. ”

“ The flying javelin bit, peace was belied there, the wolf was glad, and the bow was drawn, the bolts clattered, the spear-points bit, the flaxen-bowstring bore the arrows out of the bow. He brandished the buckler on his arm, the rouser of the play of blades—he is a mighty hero. The fray grew greater everywhere about the king. It was famed east over the sea, Eric's war-faring. [5]
Or listen to the weird sisters as they weave the web of Ireland's fate under Brian Boru:—
Wide-stretched is the warp presaging the slaughter, the hanging cloud of the beam; it is raining blood. ”

“ If we look only to the scale of a man’s acts without regard to their moral character, we must hail in the victor of Val-ès-dunes, of Varaville, and of Senlac, in the restorer of Normandy, the Conqueror of England, one who may fairly claim his place in the first rank of the world’s greatest men. No man ever did his work more thoroughly at the moment; no man ever left his work behind him as more truly an abiding possession for all time.... ”

“ They are well cared for, the warriors that cast dice in Harold’s court. They are endowed with wealth and with fair swords, with the ore of the Huns, and with maids from the East. They are glad when they have hopes of a battle, they will leap up in hot haste and ply the oars, snapping the oar-thongs and cracking the tholes. ”

“ Only a formal and mechanical view of history seeks to ticket off particular races against particular regions as the sole sources of population and power; only false national pride conceives of any people as continually in the vanguard of civilization. Races are mixed things, institutions and civilization are still more complex, and no people can claim to be a unique and permanent source of light and strength. ”

“ The Norman landscape also gives us the feeling of finish and repose and the sentiment of a rich past, not merely in the obvious externals of crumbling wall and ivied tower, but in that deeper sense of a people bound from immemorial antiquity to the soil, adapted to every local difference through long generations of use and wont, in an intimate union of man and nature which makes the Norman inseparable from his land. ”

“ Modern Germany owes more to Martin Luther than to Nietzsche, more to Charles the Great, who eleven hundred years ago conquered and civilized the Saxons and began the subjugation of the Slavs, than to many a more modern figure in the Sieges-allee at Berlin. Our method of reckoning time and latitude by sixtieths owes less to the contemporaries of James Buchanan than to those of Tiglath-Pileser. If we must apply material standards to history, we must consider the mass as well as the square of the distance. ”