Here with us it seems at a certain point to meet with a
conflicting force, which checks it and prevents its pushing on to
science; but before reaching this point what conquests has it not
won! and all the more, perhaps, for stopping short at this point, for
spending its exertions within a bounded field, the field of plain
sense, of direct practical utility. How it has augmented the
comforts and conveniences of life for us! Doors that open, windows
that shut, locks that turn, razors that shave, coats that wear,
watches that go, and a thousand more such good things, are the
invention of the Philistines.
Here, then, if commingling there is in our race, are two very unlike
elements to commingle; the steady-going Saxon temperament and the
sentimental Celtic temperament. But before we go on to try and
verify, in our life and literature, the alleged fact of this
commingling, we have yet another element to take into account, the
Norman element. The critic in the Saturday Review, whom I have
already quoted, says that in looking for traces of Normanism in our
national genius, as in looking for traces of Celtism in it, we do but
lose our labour; he says, indeed, that there went to the original
making of our nation a very great deal more of a Norman element than
of a Celtic element, but he asserts that both elements have now so
completely disappeared, that it is vain to look for any trace of
either of them in the modern Englishman.
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