The Historians' History of the World 07

In any effort of the mind to represent unto itself the personal attributes of the great Carlovingian emperor, it becomes indescribably confused, owing to the double image presented to the vision by the historic and the legendary Charlemagne. To the mediæval imagination, excited by the romantic strains of minnesingers and trouvères, the last was undoubtedly predominant. His mother, whom Villon calls Berthe aux grans pies (Bertha of the large feet, the original, perhaps, of the goose-footed queen still known in nursery tales), daughter of the king of Hungary, the betrothed of Pepin, for whom a false Bertha was substituted by the officer intrusted to bring home the royal bride, is as mythical a personage as Deïanira or Ariadne. Her wanderings in the forest; her residence with the good miller of Mans, for whom she spins so gracefully and so patiently; the coming of King Pepin when lost in the chase; his love at first sight for the gentle peasant maid; the gradual

dénouement of the truth; the punishment of the traitors; the marriage of the lovers, and the birth of Charles, form an introduction to the life of the hero of Carlovingian romance, which removes him at once into the region of the fabulous. And when at last he emerges into the twilight land which lies between the domains of legend and history, he becomes, after the immemorial habit of the myth, the nucleus round which are concreted innumerable traditions of warlike enterprise and religious animosity—the spontaneous products of a time when the instincts which underlie both are in a state of preternatural excitement.

Charlemagne, surrounded by his paladins and “douze pairs,” like the British Arthur amid his knights of the Round Table, formed a much more distinct and familiar image in the popular mind, than the great monarch who sat as a real lawgiver in the court of his palace at Aachen. And probably his relations with Harun-al-Rashid, and the actual incidents of the Saracenic wars, were altogether distorted and obscured by the legends of his campaigns in Spain and the Holy Land, to win from the children of Mahoun the sacred relics of Calvary, the crown of thorns, the holy lance, and the nails of the true cross. But it is through this delusive medium that the image of Charlemagne has generally been presented to our modern perceptions. Coloured by the prismatic light of legend, myth, and song, the form of the greatest man of early European times assumes to the gazer’s eye a brilliant, but strangely changeful aspect. We fill up, from mingled sources of history and romance, a great though indistinct outline: the vast but well-knit body, the towering stature, the “dome-shaped” skull, the broad, lofty forehead, with the “large quick eye” beneath, the snowy hair and beard which swept his waist, like the blossoming hawthorn or the flowering laurestinus, the giant strength which could cleave a knight in twain at a single blow, from helmet-peak to saddle-bow, his famous sword Joyeuse, with its religious legend engraven on the blade—Decem præceptorum custos Carolus

; his death-dealing spear, supposed by some to be the very lance which pierced the Saviour’s side; his glittering mail of proof; the large robes of otter-skin in which he sat wrapped, while, during the long winter evening, he listened to the barbara et antiquissima carmina of his favourite bards, most probably the earliest rhapsodies of the

Nibelungenlied; his hearty jovial spirit, the outpouring of a great, strong, sensuous nature; his bonhomie

, developed in practical jokes upon pedants and fools; his strong common sense, his courtesy, his patronage of learning, his feats of strength, his amours, his restless locomotion, his laborious efforts to write, his fatherly fondness for those beautiful but unworthy daughters whom he could not bear to leave behind, even in his warlike expeditions—all these form a complex portraiture most probably very unlike “the rough, tough, and shaggy old monarch,” as Sir F. Palgrave calls him, who had the courage, the energy, and the skill to govern that wild ninth-century world. Yet it may be doubted whether some modern writers have not wandered still further from the original, while they ignore the lapse of a thousand years, and depict a constitutional monarch of modern Europe. “Each generation, or school,” says Sir F. Palgrave, with some little exaggeration, “has endeavoured to exhibit him as a normal model of excellence. Courtly Mézeray invests the son of Pepin with the taste of Louis Quatorze; the polished Abbé Velly bestows upon the Frankish emperor the abstract perfection of a dramatic hero. Boulainvilliers, the champion of the noblesse, worships the founder of hereditary feudality; Mably discovers in the Capitularies the maxims of popular liberty, Montesquieu the perfect philosophy of legislation.”e

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