The imperial crown was still nearly ten years distant, but Charles was already the most glorious and powerful of European rulers. In spite of all his constant fighting and travelling his extraordinary energy found place for interest in calmer subjects, and he gathered round him in his Court at Aix the best of what the age had to show in culture, knowledge, and eloquence. In this circle the most striking figure was Alcuin of York; but Eginhard soon made for himself a position of importance. Charles lived familiarly and genially with the scholars and writers of his palace, calling them by pet names and nicknames, and receiving the like in return. The King himself was David; Alcuin, Flaccus; Eginhard is called Bezaleel, after the man of whom we are told in Exodus, chapter xxxi., that he was “filled with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in cutting of stones, and in carving of timber.” As the allusion implies, Eginhard was no mere book-learned scholar, but had brought from his monastery school much technical and artistic knowledge. He has been called an architect, and [pg xiv] many great buildings have been ascribed to him, but with more than doubtful probability. The minor arts were rather Eginhard’s forte, though it seems impossible to define them. Contemporaries speak of his carefully-wrought works, of the many tasks in which he was useful to Charles, but without exact specification. A contemporary document speaks of him as supervising the palace works at Aix; or rather, one Ansegisus is described as “the executant of the royal works in the royal palace at Aix, under the direction of the Abbot Eginhard, a man possessed of every kind of learning.”
He was of small stature, and this is often made good-humoured fun of by his fellow-scholars. He is called the dwarf, the midget, the mannikin. Theodulf describes him as running about with the activity of an ant, and his body is spoken of as a small house with a great tenant. He married Imma, a Frankish lady of good family. (It is merely a stupid legend that makes of her a daughter of Charlemagne.) He lived with her happily, and was inconsolable after her death. Before his wife’s death and without putting her away from him, he had embraced the monastic life—a proceeding which in no way scandalised the ideas of that century. He was the abbot of many monasteries, which he held, in spite of the [pg xv] canonical prohibition, at the same time. Saint Peter of Ghent and Saint Wandrille, near Rouen, are those with which he is specially associated. He was on several occasions employed by Charles on important embassies, but was for the most part rather his secretary and confidant than his minister.
His great master died in 814, and Eginhard survived him for twenty-nine years, having lived long enough to see the mighty fabric of Charles’s empire show signs of the rapid ruin that was soon to overtake it. He received from Lewis the Pious further ecclesiastical promotion, but still lived at the Court until 830. After that year his devotion to the Church mastered all other interests. He built a church at Mulinheim, and procured for it with great pains the relics of Saint Peter and Saint Marcellinus from Rome; and it was at Mulinheim, renamed [pg xvi] Seligenstadt (the city of the saints), far from the intrigues of courts, that he passed most of the rest of his life. His wife Imma (“once my faithful wife, and later my dear sister and companion”) died in 836, and Eginhard’s deep sorrow at her loss finds pathetic expression in letters still extant. The political confusion and the utter failure of Charlemagne’s plans must have increased Eginhard’s distaste for public affairs. He died at Seligenstadt (probably in 844). His epitaph gave as his two titles to fame his services to Charlemagne and his acquisition of the precious relics.
The Writings of Eginhard that have come down to us are—(1) the Life of Charlemagne; (2) the Annals; (3) Letters; (4) the History of the Translation of the Relics of Saint Peter and Saint Marcellinus; (5) a short poem on the martyrdom of these two saints. These writings are all, with the possible exception of the last mentioned, of high value and interest, but the Life of Charlemagne is by far the most celebrated and important.
The Life of Charlemagne is the most striking result of the Classical Renaissance so diligently fostered at the Court of Charlemagne by the Emperor himself. Its form is directly copied from the Lives of the Cæsars by Suetonius, and especially from the Life of Augustus in that series. Phrases are constantly borrowed, and in some cases whole sentences. This imitation of Suetonius has its good and its bad results. It necessarily removed Eginhard’s work from the category of mediæval chronicles, with their garrulity, their reckless inventions, their humour, their desire to please, to amuse, and to glorify their hero, their order, or their monastery. Eginhard’s Life is not without mistakes, some of which are pointed out [pg xvii] in the notes; but it is an honest, direct record of facts, and for these characteristics we are, doubtless, largely indebted to Suetonius’ influence. On the other hand, it was the example of his classical model that induced him to keep his work within such narrow limits. Compression was forced upon the Roman historian by the scope of his work, which embraced the lives of twelve emperors; and the life and reign of Augustus had already been fully handled by other historians. But Eginhard knew so much, and so little of equal value is written about his hero elsewhere, that his brevity is, for once, a quality hardly pardonable. Along with Asser’s Alfred and Boccaccio’s Dante it gives us an instance of a biographer who did not sufficiently magnify his office and his subject.
No other account of the Life and Reign of Charlemagne can find a place here. For some time English readers had reason to complain that there was no good and popular book dealing with the great Charles, for Gibbon’s chapter is admittedly not among the best parts of his history. But of late this reproach has been taken away. The two concluding volumes of Dr. Hodgkin’s great work, entitled “Italy and her Invaders,” deal with Charles and his relations with Italy (vols. vii. and viii. “The Frankish Invasions” [pg xviii] and “The Frankish Empire”). Dr. Hodgkin has also written a general sketch of the whole of Charles’s career (“Charles the Great.” Foreign Statesmen Series. Macmillan). More recently, Mr. Carless Davis has written a “Life of Charlemagne” for the Heroes of the Nations Series.
It is in works such as these (to mention no others) and not in Eginhard that the real historical significance of Charlemagne’s life-work appears. Eginhard stood too near to his hero, and had too little sense of historical perspective to realise the abiding greatness of what Charles accomplished. It is the lapse of 1100 years that has brought into increasing clearness the importance of those years which lie like a great watershed between the ancient and the mediæval world. Of him, as of most great rulers, it is true that he “builded better than he knew.” His empire soon became a tradition, his intellectual revival was eclipsed by a further plunge into the “Dark Ages,” but all that he did was not swept away. With him ends the ruin of the ancient world, and with him begins the building up of the mediæval and modern world.
He did not find in Eginhard an entirely worthy biographer; but the “mannikin’s” work has received unstinted praise since the time when it was written. [pg xix] It was praised by a contemporary as recalling the elegance of the classical authors; its popularity during the Middle Ages is attested to by the existence of sixty manuscript copies; and a French editor has declared that we have to go on to the thirteenth century, and to Joinville’s Life of St. Louis, before we find a rival in importance to Eginhard’s Life of Charlemagne.
The Monk of Saint Gall, it seems, must remain anonymous, for the attempt to identify him with Notker rests on no better foundation than the fact, or supposition, that both stammered. And this seems to be supposition rather than fact. We are, indeed, told on good authority that Notker stammered; but the view that the Monk of Saint Gall suffered from the same defect rests only on a sentence in Chapter XVII., where he contrasts the swift, direct glance of others with his own slow and rambling narrative—“Which I have been trying to unfold, though a stammerer, and toothless” (“quæ ego balbus et edentalus explicare tentavi”). It seems impossible to think that the words here must be taken in their literal sense. As the author is writing, not speaking, any defect of voice or teeth would in no way hinder his narrative: it is clear that the words are a piece of conventional and metaphorical depreciation.
[pg xx] We know, then, nothing of the author beyond what he tells us in his narrative; and he