When it had
passed, Normandy stood confirmed for centuries (and is still confirmed)
in a character of its own. No longer adventurous but mercantile, apt, of
a resisting courage, sober in thought, leaning upon tradition, not
imperially but domestically strong: the country of Corneille and of
Malesherbes, a reflection of that spirit in letters; the conservative
body of to-day--for in our generation that is the mark of Normandy--and,
in arms, the recruitment to which Napoleon addressed his short and
famous order that "the Normans that day should do their duty."
The Old Things
Those who travel about England for their pleasure, or, for that matter,
about any part of Western Europe, rightly associate with such travel the
pleasure of history; for history adds to a man, giving him, as it were,
a great memory of things--like a human memory, but stretched over a far
longer space than that of one human life. It makes him, I do not say
wise and great, but certainly in communion with wisdom and greatness.
It adds also to the soil he treads, for to this it adds meaning. How
good it is when you come out of Tewkesbury by the Cheltenham road to
look upon those fields to the left and know that they are not only
pleasant meadows, but also the place in which a great battle of the
mediaeval monarchy was decided, or as you stand by that ferry, which is
not known enough to Englishmen (for it is one of the most beautiful
things in England), and look back and see Tewkesbury tower, framed
between tall trees over the level of the Severn, to see also the Abbey
buildings in your eye of the mind--a great mass of similar stone with
solid Norman walls, stretching on hugely to the right of the Minster.
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