ART. IX.-ARE WE ANGLO-SAXONS?

AN English gentleman, being lately asked what he thought of the future of the Anglo-Saxons, answered, "I do not know. I have never seen an Anglo-Saxon." Mr. Gladstone also very correctly remarks that the name Anglo-Saxon is "somewhat conventional." Nevertheless, even a conventional term may commonly be presumed to have some application to reality. Nothing, for instance, could have been more dismally unsubstantial, toward the end, than "the holy Roman empire," which Voltaire wittily describes as having been so called because it was neither Roman nor holy nor an empire. Yet a film of reality attached to it until the style itself was extinguished in 1806. Accordingly, when the present writer, imitating E. A. Freeman, sometimes tells his friends that he was seven years old before the last Roman emperor died he claims to be expressing both a fiction and a fact. A formula sometimes partly creates, or perpetuates, a fact which without it might evanish. "Anglo-Saxon" is more substantial than "holy Roman empire," at least as this was in the long attenuation of its reality before it finally disappeared by the abdication of the last Austrian Cæsar. "Anglo-Saxon" describes an ethnological, historical, and political fact of very great moment. It sums up in four syllables the permanent conquest and occupation of Britain, except Wales and the Highlands, by a Germanic race, consisting of two principal tribes (besides Jutes and Frisians), the Saxons in the south, the Anglo or English in the east, middle, and north, forming conjointly "the English kin." These transformed the most of Britain into England (originally reaching to the Forth), bringing with them their wives and children, and even their cattle, establishing in the new possession their language, usages, and institutions, and extinguishing, expelling, or absorbing the aborigines. Whether the natives absorbed be more or fewer, they have completely lost their consciousness of race, their language, their historical memories, their insti

tutions, and have come to regard themselves only as AngloSaxons.

Nevertheless, the old way of disregarding the question how many Cymry and Gael have been absorbed into the AngloScottish people is becoming obsolete. The infusion used to be held so slight as to be unworthy of tracing out in its influence on the English character. Dr. Arnold, as his son Matthew tells us, and as his own lectures show, used to treat the intermixture of blood as practically nothing, no more necessary, for historical purposes, to be followed up than the aboriginal flora or fauna of Great Britain. England has always been predominantly Germanic. All her action, of necessity, has been cast into the mold of Teutonic speech, and Teutonic institutions specifically developed. Moreover, the Anglo-Scottish character, eminently as transferred to New England, shows the instinctive reserve, "the shy cynicism," of the North German race. While this implies a predominant Germanic admixture it does not make sure that the Teutons by blood are even a half of the English people. Dr. Beddoe, applying the various ethnological tests, such as shape of skull, form of the orbit of vision, shape and stature, cast of features, complexion, color of hair, especially in childhood, and temperament, decides that east of the middle meridian of England about one half of the people are of Teutonic descent (German or Scandinavian), and that toward the west Germanic blood steadily declines, until in Cornwall and somewhat to the west of the Severn it almost disappears. Westmoreland seems to be an exception, having a large Norwegian population. Pembrokeshire, too, is a "little England." There we may vaguely account the Teutons by descent as something more than a fourth of the English people.

On the other hand, Canon Taylor declares that the Lowland Scotch are more purely Teutonic in blood than the English. This seems probable enough, considering the openness of the rich Lowland plain to the great wave of Anglian immigration rolling northward, and the innumerable Caledonian firths which gave access to the later Scandinavian in

vaders. Besides, they say it can be demonstrated by a strictly scientific test. At the fairs in the Western Lowlands, we are told, after the usquebaugh has begun to do its work, the underlying sympathy of race between the Highlanders and the Irish begins to display itself in maudlin tears, kisses, and embraces, while the hard-headed Lowlanders, whom scarcely any amount of strong waters appears to unsettle, stand by and make their profit out of both. Rudyard Kipling's mother was a Macdonald. Could anything but this mixture of blood have enabled him to write a thing so absolutely English and so perfectly Gaelic as The Brushwood Boy? It has the charm of everything that is best in both races.

Perhaps, then, counting in the Lowlanders, the Westmorelanders and the men of Pembroke, we may reckon the Teutonic blood of Great Britain as approaching two fifths. As this is the blood of the conquering race, acting upon the scattered remnants of the conquered through its own speech and memories and institutions, it ought to have Teutonized the rest, where mountains have not enabled them to persist. And so it has. Still, as Matthew Arnold shows, England is by no means a Teutonic nation in the sense of North Germany or Sweden. It is, rather, a thoroughly Teutonized nation. Neither English literature nor science shows the ponderous, not to say often dull, perseverance and effort after architectonic completeness which marks the unmitigated German. Perhaps an average Englishman, or New Englander, or Virginian, or Marylander, of original stock might find himself more at home (apart from political spite) among pure Teutons than among unmixed Cambrians or Gael. Yet, of course, he finds himself most of all at home in that literature which, Teutonically serious and sober, is yet shot through and through with the bright, elusive gleams of Celtic fancy and feeling.

However, when we have decided that the Anglo-Saxons are a Germanic people deeply interfused with Celts, or a Celtic people deeply interfused with Saxons, we find that this conclusion is only the premise of a deeper conclusion. The eminent Welsh scholar, Professor Rhys, after many years'

study of British ethnology, announces his opinion that the substance of the British population is Ivernian. In other words, the British are not only a non-Teutonic people Teutonized, but a non-Aryan people Aryanized, and having an intermixture of true Aryans, Celts and Teutons approaching to equality of number with the aboriginal stock. Our computations here have to be vague, perhaps even self-contradictory. Then, before the coming of the English, we may assume that the Celts were the conquering aristocracy of Britain, and sufficiently numerous to Celticize the non-Aryan aborigines, instead of being absorbed in them, even as the Teutonic English were afterward sufficiently numerous and powerful to transform most of the Celticized Britons, instead of being transformed by them.

Beddoe, who points out the dark, saturnine, Ivernian type in the Silurians of South Wales, holds the population along the Severn, which was also Ivernian, to have been hardly Cambrianized when the English invasion began. He thinks that the still smoldering resentment of this aboriginal race against the Cymry probably facilitated the English conquest of both. If we take this view of Rhys, which Beddoe seems in part to confirm and Taylor not to contradict, we see that we may largely impute those elements of the English character (always including in this the Lowland Scotch) which we are accustomed to regard as Teutonic to the Ivernian constituent. Indeed, gravity and seriousness, which usually seem to imply tenacity of purpose, are said to be more distinctively traits of the Ivernians than of the true Teutons, although unquestionably physical vigor belongs to the two Aryan races in a higher measure. Canon Taylor, in fact, is strongly inclined to regard the Ivernians as a pre-Aryan adumbration of the Teutons; as it were, a microsthenic forecast of the more powerful race. Considering those preeminently decisive tests of descent, the shape of the skull and of the ocular orbit, he shows that the long-headed Teutons and Ivernians agree with each other and stand opposed to the broad-headed CeltoSlavic race, the Teutons, however, having, in the strenuous

life of the northern climates, developed into large and hardy blondes, in contrast with their dark, short, and weaker Ivernian ancestors, of whom a part seem to have been too inert for a change of type. Beddoe remarks, in singular agreement with this theory, that the children of marriages between Saxons and Ivernians are of better settled and more thriving temperament than the children of marriages between Saxons and Celts. Of course, we know that there are numbers of happily developed offspring of these latter marriages, but it should seem that the physical and psychical elements of this double parentage are rather more apt to pull apart than in the case of the duller but more. thoroughly homogeneous Iverno-Teutonic stock, the Ivernians being little else in character than somewhat feebly pronounced Teutons. We can therefore hardly call such marriages a mixture, but rather an enhancement of the latent Teutonism of the less developed primitive Ivernian type. On the other hand, Celto-Saxon marriages are pronouncedly, for good or evil, a mixture of widely different psychical characteristics. The physical dissimilarity is very much less. Both races are large, strong, blue-eyed blondes, but differing in shape of the skull and in temperament.

"Intermixtures of race" has two meanings. It may mean simply a close local interhabitation of different stocks, of which one has become the accepted model to which the others subordinate all that is peculiar in themselves. This is a sort of mechanical mixture, although (which is much to be desired in Austria) it may become so intimate and permanent as almost to have the effect of a vital union. In such a case the black and white of different races fuse into an indistinguishable gray, exhibiting the character of the leading race. Then, on the other hand, "intermixture" may mean, not a mechanical, but a chemical, or vital, union of two or three races, resulting in a third or fourth race, as distinct from its component stocks as water is distinct from hydrogen and oxygen. Taylor remarks that such a union of heterogeneous and in a manner opposing races appears to occur with peculiar