Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/26

12 among the Northmen of primitive Iceland. If Normandy is the pays de gain, it is also the pays de sapience. Hard-headed and practical, the Norman is not an idealist or a mystic; even his religion has a practical flavor, and the Bretons are wont to assert that there has never been a Norman saint. With the verse of Corneille and the splendid monuments of Romanesque and Gothic architecture before us, no one can accuse the Normans of lack of artistic sense, yet here, too, the Norman imagination is inclined to be restrained and severe, realistic rather than romantic. Its typical modern writers are Flaubert and Maupassant; its typical painter is Millet, choosing his scenes from Barbizon, but loyal to the peasant types of his native Normandy. Indeed Henry Adams insists that Flaubert's style, exact, impersonal, austere, is singularly like that of those great works of Norman Romanesque, the old tower of Rouen cathedral and St. Stephen's abbey at Caen, and shows us "how an old art transmutes itself into a new one, without changing its methods." In history, a field in which the Norman attachment to the past has produced notable results, the distinguishing qualities of Norman work have been acute criticism and great erudition rather than brilliant imagination. In science, when a great Norman like Laplace discovered the nebular hypothesis, he relegated it to a note in the appendix to his ordered and systematic treatise on the