Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18.djvu/469

1866.]

HIS month of October completes the eighth century since the battle of Hastings, perhaps the most important action that the modern world has known, with the single exception of the conflict that checked the advance of the Saracens in Europe in the eighth century,—if the battle of Tours can properly be considered an event of modern history. The issue of the battle of Hastings determined the course of English history; and when we observe how influential has been the part of England ever since it was fought, and bear in mind that the English race, great as it is, can scarcely be said to have got beyond the morning-time of its existence, we find it difficult to exaggerate the importance of a conflict by which its career for eight hundred years has been deeply and permanently colored. There is not a great event in English or American annals which is not directly traceable to what was done in the year 1066 by that buccaneering band which William the Bastard led from Normandy to England, to enforce a claim that had neither a legal nor a moral foundation, and which never could have been established had Harold's conduct been equal to his valor, and had Fortune favored the just cause. The sympathies of every fair-minded reader of the story of the Conquest must be with the Saxons; and yet is it impossible to deny that the event at Hastings was well for the world. It is with Harold as it is with Hannibal: our feelings are at war with our judgment as we read their histories. It is not possible to peruse the noble account that Dr. Arnold has left us of the Carthaginian's splendid struggle against the Roman aristocracy without feeling pained by its result. The feelings of men are with the man, and adverse to the order before which his genius failed. So is it with respect to Harold. Hastings, like Zama, impresses us as having been a "dishonest victory," to borrow the words with which Milton so emphatically characterizes Chæronea. But "cool reflection" leads to other conclusions, and justifies the earthly course of Providence, against which we are so often disposed to complain. There can be no doubt, in the mind of any moral man, that the invasion of England by Duke William was a wicked proceeding,—that it was even worse than Walker's invasions of Spanish-American countries, and as bad as an unprovoked attack on Cuba by this country, such as would have been made had the pro-slavery party remained in power. But it is not the less true that much good came from William's action, and that nearly all that is excellent in English and American history is the fruit of that action. The part that England has had in the world's course for eight centuries, including her stupendous work of colonization, is second to nothing that has been done by any nation, not even to the doings of the Roman republic: and to that part Saxon England never could have been equal.

The race that ruled in England down to the day of Hastings—call it the Saxon race, if you like the name, and for convenience' sake—was a slow, a sluggish, and a stupid race; and it never could have made a first-class nation of the insular kingdom. There is little in the history of the Saxons that allows us to believe they were capable of accomplishing anything that was great. The Danish invasions, as they are called, were of real use to England, as they prevented that country from reverting to barbarism, which assuredly would have been its fate had the Anglo-Saxons remained its undisturbed possessors. "In the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries," says Mr. Worsaae, "the Anglo-Saxons