Thomas Edward Pickett

“ Whatever the facts, there is a philosophy that rises above conventions; precisely as if it should say—"In the higher planes of life, the conceptions of social evolution are sometimes predestinated and immaculate." Who knows? Thus much at least may be conceded to the maiden of the wilderness, to the daughter of the tropics, and to the Maiden of Falaise, that no three women who have figured in profane history as the mothers of great men have more profoundly affected the destinies of the English or Anglo-Norman race. ”

“ Far back in the history of our race there stands, luminous and large, in his milieu of mediæval mist, a mounted conqueror with sword and torch—the immediate offspring of Scandinavian Jarls—the remote progenitor of the Virginian "Cavalier." It is the founder of that Anglo-Norman civilization of which we form a part, and which, in many ways, still responds to the impulse of that imperial brain. ”

“ Shakespeare, in his splendid series of historical plays, has painted in vivid colors and fine dramatic sequence the manifestation of this Anglo-Norman influence through a succession of closely connected reigns—weaving into brilliant and picturesque history the fireside traditions which fascinated his youthful mind. The story that he tells is unique, not only in the literature of the race, but in the literature of man. "The only history that I know," said an English statesman discussing the annals of his race, "is the history that Shakespeare wrote." ”

“ This was at one time a popular theory among the savants. But there was always a tendency to lawlessness wherever the Anglo-Norman went. If any "convict" blood muddied the turbulent, brawling stream of migration, it was not from the race, but from the chance intermingling of a degenerate caste or breed, and whether you find that degenerate admixture in the rugged highlands or in the lovely champaign country at their feet, the convict blood is still there. In the highlands or the lowlands, in the mountains or the Bluegrass, generation after generation is weighted with the curse. ”

“ On the evening announced for the entertainment, the Courthouse was packed from floor to dome. Among the conspicuous figures toward the front was Colonel Robert B., a fine old Kentuckian of antique Norman type—tall, ruddy, high-featured, light haired; hearty, convivial, and profane—a boon companion and bon vivant. He sat expectantly but at ease, a bandaged arm resting upon the seat in front. He was cordially greeted by kinsmen and friends in every part of the house. The curtain rose and the minstrels filed upon the stage, looking for all the world like a lot of "free nigger" swells. ”

“ The author was an explorer by right of birth. He was a true son of his pioneer father, and a typical scion of an adventurous race. The daring navigator, Sir Francis Drake, the son of a Devonshire yeoman, was a true kinsman in spirit, and probably in blood. The same passion for exploration which drove the one to circle the universal seas in an English keel inspired the other to toil through the vast spaces of a continental wilderness and explore the haunts of pestilence upon the shores of the Mexican Gulf. ”

“ Yet, was it not an extraordinary incident of the evolution of our Western world that in the genesis of the Commonwealth of Kentucky two such factors or agencies as the Race and the Grass—inseparably linked—should be predestined each to a special function in the common work? "Either," said a sagacious observer from New England, "no other land ever lent itself so easily to civilization as the Bluegrass region, or it was exceptionally fortunate in its inhabitants." ”

“ But the Norman, who was a soldier, a lawyer, a diplomatist, orator, hunter, horseman and trader, was also a successful cultivator of the soil, and the Norman agriculturist of to-day who reminds the tourist in his physical traits, hair, eyes, and complexion, and even in the intonations of his voice, of an English farmer of the Anglo-Norman type, bears a more striking resemblance to his English kinsman indeed than to his dark-visaged compatriot, the vigneron of Southern France. ”

“ The Great Traveler, who construed at a glance the ethnical significance of those embodied charms, has long ago passed to his eternal rest. In her children she seems to live again. Her sons—handsome young Scandinavians of the higher type—are winning success and distinction in the great industrial movements of the times; and her beautiful daughter, vividly reproducing the attractions of the mother, is a passionate lover of travel, and but recently has demonstrated the Scandinavian quality of her blood in the midst of a terrific nine days' storm that swept the seas near the coast of Japan. ”

“ Even the imperious Isangrim was handicapped by lack of wit: a deprivation not unlike that of the clawless cat in Hades.
This sinister and sagacious quality of the Norman intellect seems to have had full play through all the varied experiences of the race; but its most enduring effects were visible in the great triune nationality evolved upon English soil. It quickened the sluggish wits of the Saxon; it tempered the rudeness and ferocity of the Dane, and became a shaping factor in the civilization of the world. ”

“ As they emerge into the twilight of history—into the savage gloaming betwixt the dog and the wolf—the observer recognizes two races, the Teutones and the Gothones, or Goths. The vast migratory columns of the former take possession of Central Europe. The other column,—the kindred Gothones or Goths,—making its exit from Central Asia, sweeps along the valley of the Vistula, follows the southern shores of the Baltic Sea, and moving to the mouths of the Elbe and the Rhine directs its columns of colonization into Denmark and the Danish Islands, and to the vast Scandinavian peninsula of the north. ”

“ An ardent theorist, like a jealous lover, may find confirmation strong in trifles light as air. It is a far cry from old Scandinavia to old Kentucky, but what brain is broad enough, what spirit is subtle enough, to comprehend the variety and infinitude of delicate, airy, intangible influences by which the busy hands of destiny have brought them together? Not the least of these agencies were affinities, customs, explorations, battles, contests, migrations, and the "wingy mysteries" of kindred names or words. ”

“ The most illustrious descendant of this noble Scottish family was an American—Alexander Hamilton—who, according to that very eminent authority, Prince Talleyrand, "was the greatest man of his epoch," an epoch illustrated by such names as Napoleon and Washington—his greatness consisting peculiarly in this, that he was not only variously gifted—soldier, scholar, orator, administrator, political philosopher and financier, but, like William of Normandy, he was a creative or constructive statesman, and his mother, like the Maiden of Falaise, was a daughter of France. ”

“ It was here—in the capacious auditorium of the Courthouse, and in the closing quarter of the last century—that a large and enthusiastic gathering of really typical Kentuckians, familiar from childhood with tales of wild adventure, greeted with rapturous applause the renowned hunter and explorer, Paul Du Chaillu, a native of Paris, France. A common taste for woodcraft had brought the alien elements in touch. The Frenchman was a swell hunter of big game, and had come hither to repeat his graphic recital of experiences in the equatorial haunts of that formidable anthropoid—the Gorilla. ”

“ Taine's ideal type of an Englishman was William Pitt, who is thus described by that admirable observer: "Sometimes," in his rounds of observation, he "detects the physiognomy of Pitt; the slight face, impressive and imperious; the pale and ardent eyes; the look which shines like the gleam of a sword. The man is of a finer mould, but his will is only the more incisive and firmer; it is iron transformed into steel." Contrast this portraiture of Pitt with his pictures of the taurine type of Englishman.
That munificent English savant, General Pitt-Rivers, is of the same Norman stock. ”

“ Another type admired by this clever Frenchman is thus described: "The blond maiden with downcast eyes, purer than one of Raffaelle's Madonnas, a sort of Eve, incapable of falling, whose voice is music, adorable in candour, gentleness, and goodness, and before whom one is tempted to lower the eyes out of respect. Since Virginia, Imogen, and the other women of Shakespeare or his great contemporaries—from these to Esther and to the Agnes of Dickens—English literature has placed them in the foreground; they are the perfect flower of the land." ”

“ When following the long dim path of Gothic migration we found but little that seemed to be in vivid relation with the ethnology of our own race; and it was not until we were afloat upon the Scandinavian seas, with Rolf Ganger looking out upon the kingdoms of the earth, that we began to feel ourselves (to speak in paradox) firmly planted upon historic ground. ”

“ A stranger is welcome in all circles. Even in the polar circles the hospitality loses none of its warmth. Probably it is in dispensing their hospitality that their passion for "strong liquor" is most marked. This liquor they drink out of horns; and that is why, said Du Chaillu, convincingly, that we say in Kentucky, "Will you take a horn?" But the Kentuckian seems to derive this peculiarity from every side. "Fill the largest horns," said the Saxon, Cedric, when his slaves were arranging the banquet for his Norman guests. ”

“ To citizens of Kentucky who have a critical and philosophic interest in the historic evolution of the Commonwealth, it will be peculiarly attractive in the circumstance that it connects, and in a special sense includes, the Genesis of Kentucky with that of the United States. He suggests in a most interesting way that this Commonwealth is not only a lineal product of the Elizabethan civilization which he has sought to trace, but that—cartographically at least—it formed an integral part of the first Republic established in the New World. ”

“ The discussion of the physical peculiarities of our ancestors never loses its interest among the thinkers of the various branches of the English race. How trippingly upon the tongue of the Anglo-Saxon child come the familiar lines of the English poet, a bard of the Georgian period:
"Deep-blooming, strong,
And yellow-haired, the blue-eyed Saxon came." ”

“ The Elizabethan type of character "displayed a marked power of assimilating whatever came within its influence." This trait, akin to that which centuries before had made the conquered English slowly but surely assimilate their Norman conquerors, the Yankees of our own day have not quite lost. Our native type still "absorbs" the foreign. The children of immigrants insensibly become native. The irresistible power of a common language and of the common ideals which underlie it still dominates. This tendency, he adds, declared itself from the earliest settlements of Jamestown and Plymouth. ”

“ If such conclusions are fairly deducible from an imperfect or incomplete study of a race of CATTLE in the mountain region of Kentucky, why should a logical mind discredit like conclusions resting upon testimony that is singularly cumulative and convergent in regard to a contemporaneous race of MEN that is historically traceable from Normandy—through England and Virginia—to the same or a similar physical environment in that same State of Kentucky? ”

“ The sentiment of race, properly directed, has its uses. But the director must not be a despot or a despot's agent. The feeling must be popular in origin and expression—voluntary, spontaneous, normal, autonomous. There was never a better illustration of its power than in the prolonged struggle of Kentucky for existence as an American State. There was never a better illustration of popular capacity in statecraft and of enterprise in war than in the early years of the last century (1800-12) . They—the people—discharged the functions of an independent State. Kentucky was in fact a little nation. ”

“ It is in this record alone we find that magical touch, that moving speech, that strange, pathetic eloquence which flows from royal lips inspired to utterance by the sorrows of an Anglo-Norman brain. Doubtless it is Shakespeare's noblest work. It is certainly a product of the same imperial spirit that breathes in the aspirations, the utterances, and the acts of the "melancholy Dane." ”

“ Possibly Montaigne by contribution of thought was an unconscious collaborator in the construction of "Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark," a drama which illustrates in brilliant, powerful, and fantastic fashion the varied intellectual and emotive capacities of the Scandinavian blood. In that royal Anglo-Norman, "Prince Hal" of England, the English dramatist depicts the man of action; in Hamlet, the brooding Prince of Denmark, he presents the man of thought. They were the favorite children of Shakespeare's prolific brain. ”

“ The Anglo-Saxon is the only successful expansionist; we must Anglo-Saxonize France! They forget that the Anglo-Saxon himself is indebted for his success as a colonist and trader to the Scandinavian French [Pg 91] men who colonized England under William the Conqueror, and that it was not until the Norman's demoniac spirit of "enterprise" took possession of the Anglo-Saxon thegns and ceorls that they even felt the impulse to "go down to the sea in ships." ”

“ The Duke of Argyle once said in the English House of Lords that three of the Irish leaders of that day (one of them John Redmond, the present Irish King) were genealogically superior men—men of illustrious descent—leaders of royal or noble Norman blood; confirming the declaration made by the author of the "Peerage" that it is not lands but ancestors that make a nobility. The career of the Norman as a conquering or migratory race has been a perpetual masquerade; in England taking the form of an Irishman and controlling the Parliament; in the same guise leading the armies of England and France ”

“ He made England the trading nation that she is. An eminent Kentuckian, who bore the distinctive marks of Norman blood, once said to a group of keenly attentive listeners, "The meanest of all aristocracies is a commercial aristocracy." A like disparaging conception of a powerful adversary was implied in the remark attributed to Napoleon, that "the English were a nation of shop-keepers"—un peuple marchand. It was this same race of innocuous Anglo-Norman traffickers that crushed Napoleon's iron columns at Waterloo, and forever closed his conquering career. ”

“ It is not easy, says an eminent English writer, to trace through the length of centuries "the measureless and invisible benefits which the life of one scholar bequeaths to the world." But such was the life, the work, the bequest of this Norman scholar, who died honored and beloved even by the rude, sullen, and implacable race which had been subjugated by the Norman kings. But Dr. Craik, with all his liberality and learning, is not disposed to accept the theory of a great migration or settlement preceding, or accompanying or following, the Norman conquest in the Eleventh Cen [Pg 37] tury. ”

“ William the Norman presented in vivid epitome the characteristic traits of his race, with other traits or variations of these traits that made him almost an abnormal figure even in the history of those times. He has been commonly depicted as physically a giant among his fellows; but Lord Lytton (a good authority) discredits these legends of gigantic stature; it is seldom we find, he declares, the association of great size and commanding intellect in great men ”

“ When the people rallied in loyal allegiance to the throne, the old conceptions of "feudalism" ceased to exist—vanishing centuries before Cervantes smiled Spain's "chivalry" away. In our own Websterian phrase, England was henceforth "one and indivisible." The fusion of warring elements was now as complete as if welded together by the hammer of Thor. The consequences of that initial step are told in the history of the English race—consequences which this [Pg 94] imperial statesman alone had the genius to forecast. To no mere man does the line of the Nineteenth Century poet so well apply ”