The Latinised Normans in England had the sense for fact,
which the Celts had not; and the love of strenuousness, clearness,
and rapidity, the high Latin spirit, which the Saxons had not. They
hated the slowness and dulness of the creeping Saxon; it offended
their clear, strenuous talent for affairs, as it offended the Celt's
quick and delicate perception. The Normans had the Roman talent for
affairs, the Roman decisiveness in emergencies. They have been
called prosaic, but this is not a right word for them; they were
neither sentimental, nor, strictly speaking, poetical. They had more
sense for rhetoric than for poetry, like the Romans; but, like the
Romans, they had too high a spirit not to like a noble intellectual
stimulus of some kind, and thus they were carried out of the region
of the merely prosaic. Their foible,--the bad excess of their
characterising quality of strenuousness,--was not a prosaic flatness,
it was hardness and insolence.
I have been obliged to fetch a very wide circuit, but at last I have
got what I went to seek. I have got a rough, but, I hope, clear
notion of these three forces, the Germanic genius, the Celtic genius,
the Norman genius. The Germanic genius has steadiness as its main
basis, with commonness and humdrum for its defect, fidelity to nature
for its excellence.
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