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diff --git a/30944-0.txt b/30944-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f3e6e9f --- /dev/null +++ b/30944-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,3905 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook, Lectures Delivered in America in 1874, by +Charles Kingsley, Edited by Fanny Kingsley + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 + + +Author: Charles Kingsley + +Editor: Fanny Kingsley + +Release Date: January 12, 2010 [eBook #30944] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: UTF-8 + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LECTURES DELIVERED IN AMERICA IN +1874*** + + +Transcribed from the 1875 Longmans, Green, and Co. edition by David +Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org + + LONDON: PRINTED BY + SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE + AND PARLIAMENT STREET + + + + + + LECTURES + DELIVERED IN AMERICA + IN 1874 + + + BY + CHARLES KINGSLEY, F.L.S., F.G.S. + + RECTOR OF EVERSLEY: CANON OF WESTMINSTER + CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO THE QUEEN AND THE PRINCE OF WALES + + * * * * * + + LONDON + LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. + 1875 + + _All rights reserved_ + + + + +DEDICATION. + + + * * * * * + + TO + CYRUS FIELD, J. A. C. GRAY, + AND ALL THOSE VALUED AMERICAN FRIENDS WHO WELCOMED + MY HUSBAND TO THEIR GREAT COUNTRY, + AND THROUGH WHOSE GENEROUS KINDNESS HE WAS ENABLED + IN THE LAST YEAR OF HIS LIFE + TO REALISE THE DREAMS OF HIS YOUTH + BY THE SIGHT, NOT ONLY OP THE EASTERN STATES AND CITIES, + BUT OF THE FAR WEST, THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, + AND THE YO SEMITE VALLEY, + I DEDICATE THESE LECTURES WITH DEEPEST GRATITUDE + + In Memoriam. + + FANNY E. KINGSLEY. + +BYFLEET: _August_ 1875. + + + + +CONTENTS. + +LECT. PAGE + I. WESTMINSTER ABBEY 1 + II. THE STAGE AS IT WAS ONCE 32 + III. THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 65 + IV. THE SERVANT OF THE LORD 98 + V. ANCIENT CIVILISATION 125 + + + + + + +LECTURE I. +WESTMINSTER ABBEY. + + +Reverence for age, at least so it has long seemed to me, reverence for +age, I say, is a fair test of the vigour of youth; and, conversely, +insolence toward the old and the past, whether in individuals or in +nations, is a sign rather of weakness than of strength. And the cause, I +think, is this. The rich and strong young natures, which feel themselves +capable of original thought and work, have a corresponding respect for +those who, in the generations gone by, have thought and worked as they +hope to do hereafter. And this temper, understand me, so far from being +servile, or even merely conservative, usually accompanies true +independence of spirit. The young athlete, like the young race-horse, +does not despise, but emulate, his sire; even though the old victor be +long past his prime. The young soldier admires the old general; the +young midshipman the old admiral, just in proportion as he himself is +likely to be a daring and able officer hereafter. The son, when grown to +man’s estate, may say to his father, I look on you still with all respect +and admiration. I have learnt, and desire always, to learn from you. +But you must be to me now, not a dictator, but an example. You became +what you are by following your own line; and you must let me rival you, +and do you honour, by following mine. + +This, I believe, is true of nations as well as of individuals. I do not +hesitate to say that, paradoxical as it may seem, the most original +races—those who have succeeded best and left their stamp most broadly and +permanently on the human race—have also been the most teachable, provided +they were allowed to learn in their own way and to adapt to their own +purposes any higher ancient civilisation with which they came in contact. +What more striking instances of this truth—for truth it is—than the +reverence of the free Republican Greek for the old despotic civilisation +of Egypt? and of the free Norseman, our own ancestor, for the old and +equally despotic civilisation of Rome? + +These—the two most originative and most progressive races of Europe—had a +faith in, an awe of, the supposed or real wisdom of the men of old time, +which was often exaggerated into a superstition; but never—thanks to +their own innate force—degenerated into a bondage. + +Pardon me this somewhat dry proœmium; and pardon me, too, if it leads me +on to a compliment to the American people, which I trust you will not +think impertinent. + +For I have seen, and seen with joy, a like spirit in those Americans whom +it has been my good fortune to meet in my own land. I mean this:—That I +found in them, however self-teaching and self-determining they might be, +that genial reverence for antiquity which I hold to be the sign of a +truly generous—that is in the right sense of the grand old word—a truly +high-bred, nature. I have been touched, and deeply touched, at finding +so many of them, on landing for the first time at Liverpool, hurrying off +to our quaint old city of Chester to gaze on its old girdle of walls and +towers; Roman, Mediæval, Caroline; its curious ‘Rows’ of overhanging +houses; its fragments of Roman baths and inscriptions; its modest little +Cathedral; and the—really very few—relics of English history which it +contains. Even two banners of an old Cheshire regiment which had been in +the Peninsular war were almost as interesting, to some, as an illuminated +Bible of the early Middle Age. More than once have I had to repress the +enthusiasm of some charming lady and say, ‘But this is nothing. Do not +waste your admiration here. Go on. See the British Museum, its marbles +and its manuscripts—See the French Cathedrals; the ruins of Provence and +Italy; the galleries of Florence, Naples, Rome.’ + +‘Ah, but you must remember,’ was the answer, ‘these are the first old +things I ever saw.’ + +A mere sentiment? Yes: but as poets know, and statesmen ought to know, +it is by sentiment, when well directed—as by sorrow, when well used—by +sentiment, I say, great nations live. When sentiment dies out, and mere +prosaic calculation of loss and profit takes its place, then comes a +Byzantine epoch, a Chinese epoch, decrepitude, and slow decay. + +And so the eagerness of those generous young souls was to me a good +augury for the future, of them, and of their native land. They seemed to +me—and I say again it touched me, often deeply—to be realising to +themselves their rightful place in the community of the civilised nations +of all lands, and of all times—realising to themselves that they were +indeed + + Heirs of all the ages, foremost in the ranks of time; + +and minded, therefore, like wise and noble heirs, not to despise and +squander, but to treasure and to use that inheritance, and the +accumulated labours of the mighty dead. + +I saw this, I say, at Chester. And therefore I was not surprised to find +the pleasant experience repeated, and to even a higher degree, at +Westminster. A pleasant experience, I say. I know few more agreeable +occupations than showing a party of Americans round our own great Abbey; +and sentimentalising, if you will, in sympathy with them, over England’s +Pantheon. + +I pause to confess once more that it is almost an impertinence in me to +pay you such a compliment. You have a right to answer me—How could it be +otherwise?—Are we not educated people? Has not our taste been trained by +native authors, who were at least civilised enough to value the great +past, without the need of any European crossing the seas to tell us of +its wealth? + +If you reprove me thus, I can but say that the reproof is just, and will +remain just, as long as your poets are what they are; and as long, above +all, as you reverence as much in America as we do in England, the poetry +of Mr. Longfellow. He has not, if I recollect aright, ever employed his +muse in commemorating our great Abbey; but that muse is instinct with all +those lofty and yet tender emotions which the sight of that great Abbey +should call out. He knows, as few know on our side of the wide water, +the effect, chastening and yet ennobling, of such architecture, +consecrated by such associations. He has not only perceived and drank in +all that is purest and noblest in the now sleeping last ten centuries: +but he has combined it, again and again, with that which is purest and +noblest in the waking and yearning present; and combined it organically +and livingly, as leaf and stem combines with flower and fruit. Yes; as +long as the poet who could write both the _Belfry of Bruges_ and _The +Village Blacksmith_ is read among you, there is no need for me to bid you +reverence the past; and little need, I trust, for me to tell those whom I +leave at home to reverence the present. For it is a fact—of which some +Americans may not be as well aware as they should be—that your exquisite +poet has exercised an influence in Britain it may be as great as, and +certainly more varied than, that which he has exercised in his native +land. With us—as, I presume, with you—he has penetrated into thousands +of Puritan homes, and awakened tens of thousands of young hearts to the +beauty and the nobleness of the old pre-Reformation age, and of that +romance and art from which their too exclusive hereditary training had, +until his time, shut them out. And he has thus, truly, done a sacred +deed in turning the hearts of the children to their fathers. That was +enough: but that is not the whole. He has, conversely, turned the hearts +of the fathers to the children. The world-wide humanity of his poems, +and, to be just, of all your American poets who have studied in his +school, has produced throughout Great Britain a just reverence and +affection for the American mind which will have—which has had +already—large social and political results. Be sure, be sure, that in +spite of passing jars, our empire will never be long unjust to yours, +while Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Lowell remain not merely the household +bards—though that is much—but counsellors, comforters, and trusted +friends to hundreds of thousands of gentle and earnest souls; from the +palace to the parsonage, from the little village shop to the farm-house +on the lonely down. + +But there is another American author—who was the delight of my own youth, +and who should have been my teacher also, for he was a master of our +common tongue, and his prose is as graceful and felicitous as poor Elia’s +own, and it is certainly more manly—another American author, I say, who, +with that high-bred reverence for what is old, has told you already more +about Westminster Abbey, and told it better, than I am likely to tell it. +Need I say that I mean the lamented Washington Irving? Ah, that our +authors had always been as just to you as he was just to us; and indeed +more than just; for in his courtesy and geniality he saw us somewhat _en +beau_, and treated old John Bull too much as the poet advises us to treat +young and fair ladies— + + Be to their faults a little blind, + Be to their virtues very kind. + +But what a charming book is that old ‘Sketch-book.’ And what a charming +essay that on our great Abbey, set with such gems of prose as these,— + +‘The sun was pouring down a yellow autumnal ray into the square of the +cloisters, beaming upon a scanty spot of grass in the centre, and +lighting up an angle of the vaulted passage with a kind of dusty +splendour. From between the arcades, the eye glanced up to a bit of blue +sky, or a passing cloud, and beheld the sun-gilt pinnacles of the Abbey +towering into the azure heaven.’ + +Or this again, describing the general effect of Henry the Seventh’s +unrivalled chapel,—‘The very walls are wrought into universal ornament; +encrusted with tracery, and scooped into niches, crowded with the statues +of saints and martyrs. Stone seems, by the cunning labour of the chisel, +to have been robbed of its weight and density; suspended aloft as if by +magic; and the fretted roof achieved with the wonderful minuteness and +airy security of a cobweb.’ + +‘Dusty splendour,’ ‘airy security,’ epithets so unexpected, and yet so +felicitous, as to be seemingly accidental. Such are the tokens of that +highest art, which is—to conceal its own existence. After such speech as +that, what have I to tell you of the great old Abbey? + +Yet there are one or two things, I dare to say, which Washington Irving +would have written differently had he visited Westminster, not forty +years ago, but now. + +I think, in the first place, that if he visited the great Abbey now, he +would not have noticed that look of dilapidation at which he hints—and +perhaps had a right to hint—some forty years ago. Dilapidation, dirt, +and negligence are as hateful to us now, as to the builder of the newest +house outside. We too, for more than a generation past, have felt, in +common with the rest of England and with all the nations of Northern +Europe, that awakened reverence for Mediæval Art and Mediæval History, +which is—for good and for evil—the special social phenomenon of our +times; the natural and, on the whole, useful countercheck to that extreme +of revolutionary feeling which issues—as it did in Paris but three years +ago—in utter hatred and renunciation of the past, and destruction of its +monuments. + +To preserve, to restore, and, if not, to copy, as a sort of filial duty, +the buildings which our forefathers have left us, is now held to be the +very mark of cultivation and good taste in Britain. It may be that we +carry it too far; that by a servile and Chinese exactness of imitation we +are crippling what originality of genius may exist among our draughtsmen, +sculptors, architects. But we at least confess thereby that we cannot +invent and create as could our ancestors five hundred years ago; and as +long as that is the case it is more wise in us—as in any people—to +exhaust the signification and power of the past, and to learn all we can +from older schools of art and thought ere we attempt novelties of our own +which, I confess freely, usually issue in the ugly and the ludicrous. + +Be that as it may, we of Westminster Abbey have become, like other +Englishmen, repairers and restorers. Had we not so become, the nation +would have demanded an account of us, as guardians of its national +mausoleum, the building of which our illustrious Dean has so well said— + +‘Of all the characteristics of Westminster Abbey, that which most endears +it to the nation and gives most force to its name—which has, more than +anything else, made it the home of the people of England and the most +venerated fabric of the English Church—is not so much its glory as the +seat of the coronations, or as the sepulchre of the kings; not so much +its school, or its monastery, or its chapter, or its sanctuary, as the +fact that it is the resting-place of famous Englishmen, from every rank +and creed, and every form of genius. It is not only Reims Cathedral and +St. Denys both in one; but it is what the Pantheon was intended to be to +France—what the Valhalla is to Germany—what Santa Croce is to Italy. . . +It is this which inspired the saying of Nelson—Victory or Westminster +Abbey. It is this which has intertwined it with so many eloquent +passages of Macaulay. It is this which gives point to the allusions of +recent Nonconformist statesmen, least inclined to draw illustrations from +ecclesiastical buildings. It is this which gives most promise of +vitality to the whole institution. Kings are no longer buried within its +walls; even the splendour of pageants has ceased to attract. But the +desire to be buried in Westminster Abbey is as strong as ever. + +‘This sprang, in the first instance, as a natural off-shoot from the +coronations and interments of the kings. Had they, like those of France, +of Spain, of Austria, of Russia—been buried far away in some secluded +spot, or had the English nation stood aloof from the English monarchy, it +might have been otherwise. The sepulchral chapels built by Henry the +Third and Henry the Seventh might have stood alone in their glory. No +meaner dust need ever have mingled with the dust of Plantagenets, Tudors, +Stuarts, and Guelphs. . . . But it has been the peculiar privilege of +the kings of England that neither in life nor in death have they been +parted from their people. As the Council of the Nation and the Courts of +Law have pressed into the Palace of Westminster, and engirdled the very +throne itself, so the ashes of the great citizens of England have pressed +into the sepulchre of the kings, and surrounded them as with a guard of +honour after their death. We are sometimes inclined bitterly to contrast +the placid dignity of our recumbent kings, with Chatham gesticulating +from the northern transept, or Pitt from the western door, or Shakspeare +leaning on his column in Poet’s Corner, or Wolfe expiring by the chapel +of St. John. But, in fact, they are, in their different ways, keeping +guard over the shrine of our monarchs and our laws; and their very +incongruity and variety become symbols of that harmonious diversity in +unity which pervades our whole commonwealth.’ + +Honoured by such a trust, we who serve God daily in the great Abbey are +not unmindful of the duty which lies on us to preserve and to restore, to +the best of our power, the general fabric; and to call on government and +on private persons to preserve and restore those monuments, for which +they, not we, are responsible. A stranger will not often enter our Abbey +without finding somewhere or other among its vast arcades, skilled +workmen busy over mosaic, marble, bronze, or ‘storied window richly +dight;’ and the very cloisters, which to Washington Irving’s eye were +‘discoloured with damp, crumbling with age, and crusted with a coat of +hoary moss,’ are being repaired till that ‘rich tracery of the arches, +and that leafy beauty of the roses which adorn the keystones’—of which he +tells—shall be as sharp and bright as they were first, 500 years ago. + +One sentiment, again, which was called up in the mind of your charming +essayist, at the sight of Westminster Abbey, I have not felt myself: I +mean its sadness. ‘What,’ says he, ‘is this vast assembly of sepulchres +but a treasury of humiliation? a huge pile of reiterated homilies on the +emptiness of renown and the certainty of oblivion.’ + +So does that ‘mournful magnificence’ of which he speaks, seem to have +weighed on him, that he takes for the motto of his whole essay, that +grand Elizabethan epigram— + + When I behold, with deep astonishment, + To famous Westminster how there resort + Living in brasse or stony monument, + The Princes and the worthies of all sort; + Do I not see re-formed nobilitie, + Without contempt, or pride, or ostentation, + And look upon offenseless majestie, + Naked of pomp or earthly domination? + And how a play-game of a painted stone + Contents the quiet, now, and silent sprites, + Whom all the world, which late they stood upon, + Could not content, nor quench their appetites. + Life is a frost of cold felicities; + And death the thaw of all our vanities. + +True, true—who knows it not, who has lived fifty years in such a world as +this?—and yet but half the truth. + +Were there no after-life, no juster home beyond the grave, where each +good deed—so spake the most august of lips—shall in no wise lose its +reward—is it nought, _virûm volitare per ora_, to live upon the lips of +men, and find an immortality, even for a few centuries, in their hearts? +I know what answer healthy souls have made in every age to that question; +and what they will make to the end, as long as the respect of their +fellow-creatures is, as our Creator meant that it should be, precious to +virtuous men. And let none talk of ‘the play-game of a painted stone,’ +of ‘the worthless honours of a bust.’ The worth of honour lies in that +same worthlessness. Fair money wage for fair work done, no wise man will +despise. But that is pay, not honour; the very preciousness whereof—like +the old victor’s parsley crown in the Greek games—is that it had no +value, gave no pleasure, save that which is imperishable, spiritual, and +not to be represented by gold nor quintessential diamond. + +Therefore, to me at least, the Abbey speaks, not of vanity and +disappointment, but of content and peace. + + The quiet now and silent sprites + +of whom old Christolero sings, they are content; and well for them that +they should be. They have received their nation’s thanks, and ask no +more, save to lie there in peace. They have had justice done them; and +more than one is there, who had scant justice done him while alive. Even +Castlereagh is there, in spite of Byron’s and of Shelley’s scorn. It may +be that they too have found out ere now, that there he ought to be. The +nation has been just to him who, in such wild times as the world had not +seen for full three hundred years, did his duty according to his light, +and died in doing it; and his sad noble face looks down on Englishmen as +they go by, not with reproach, but rather with content. + +Content, I say, and peace. Peace from their toil, and peace with their +fellow-men. They are at least at rest. _Obdormierunt in pace_. They +have fallen asleep in peace. The galled shoulder is freed from the +collar at last. The brave old horse has done his stage and lain down in +the inn. There are no more mistakes now, no more sores, no more falls; +and no more whip, thank God, laid on too often when it was least needed +and most felt. + +And there are no more quarrels, too. Old personal feuds, old party +bickerings, old differences of creed, and hatreds in the name of the God +of love—all those are past, in that world of which the Abbey is to me a +symbol and a sacrament. Pitt and Fox, Warren Hastings and Macaulay, they +can afford to be near to each other in the Abbey; for they understand +each other now elsewhere; and the Romish Abbot’s bones do not stir in +their grave beside the bones of the Protestant Divine whom he, it may be, +would have burned alive on earth. + +In the south aisle of Henry the VIIth’s Chapel lies in royal pomp she who +so long was Britain’s bane—‘the daughter of debate, who discord still did +sow’—poor Mary Queen of Scots. But English and Scots alike have +forgotten the streams of noble blood she cost their nations; and look +sadly and pityingly upon her effigy—why not? + + Nothing is left of her + Now but pure womanly. + +And in the corresponding aisle upon the north, in a like tomb—which the +voice of the English people demanded from the son of Mary Stuart—lies +even a sadder figure still—poor Queen Elizabeth. To her indeed, in her +last days, Vanity of vanities—all was vanity. Tyrone’s rebellion killed +her. ‘This fruit have I of all my labours which I have taken under the +sun’—and with a whole book of Ecclesiastes written on her mighty heart, +the old crowned lioness of England coiled herself up in her lair, refused +food, and died, and took her place henceforth opposite to her ‘dear +cousin’ whom she really tried to save from herself—who would have slain +her if she could, and whom she had at last, in obedience to the voice of +the people of England, to slay against her will. They have made up that +quarrel now. + +Ay, and that tomb is the sacred symbol of a reconciliation even more +pathetic and more strange. Elizabeth lies—seemingly by her own desire—in +the same vault as her own sister, Mary Tudor. ‘Bloody Mary,’ now, no +more. James the First, who had no love for either of them, has placed at +the head of the monument ‘two lines,’ as has been well said, ‘full of a +far deeper feeling than we should naturally have ascribed to him’— + +‘Fellows in the kingdom, and in the tomb, Here we sleep; Mary and +Elizabeth the sisters; in hope of the resurrection.’ + +I make no comment on those words; or on that double sepulchre. But did I +not say well, that the great Abbey was a place of peace—a place to remind +hardworked, purblind, and often, alas! embittered souls— + + For Mother Earth she gathers all + Into her bosom, great and small. + Ah! could we look into her face, + We should not shrink from her embrace. + +Yes, all old misunderstandings are cleared up by now in that just world +wherein all live to God. They live to God; and therefore the great Abbey +is to me awful indeed, but never sad. Awful it ought to be, for it is a +symbol of both worlds, the seen and the unseen; and of the veil, as thin +as cobweb, yet opaque as night, which parts the two. Awful it is; and +ought to be—like that with which it grew—the life of a great nation, +growing slowly to manhood, as all great nations grow, through ignorance +and waywardness, often through sin and sorrow; hewing onward a devious +track through unknown wildernesses; and struggling, victorious, though +with bleeding feet, athwart the tangled woods and thorny brakes of stern +experience. + +Awful it is; and should be. And, therefore, I at least do not regret +that its very form, outside, should want those heaven-pointing spires, +that delicate lightness, that airy joyousness, of many a foreign +cathedral—even of our own Salisbury and Lichfield. You will see in its +outer shape little, if any, of that type of architecture which was, as I +believe, copied from scenery with which you, as Americans, must be even +more familiar than were the mediæval architects who travelled through the +German forests and across the Alps to Rome. True, we have our noble +high-pitched snow-roof. Our architect, like the rest, had seen the +mountain ranges jut black and bare above the snows of winter. He had +seen those snows slip down in sheets, rush down in torrents from the sun, +off the steep slabs of rock which coped the hill-side; and he, like the +rest, has copied in that roof, for use as well as beauty, the mountain +rocks. + +But he has not, as many another mediæval architect has done, decked his +roofs as Nature has decked hers, with the spruce and fir-tree spires, +which cling to the hill-side of the crag, old above young, pinnacle above +pinnacle, whorl above whorl; and clothed with them the sides and summit +of the stone mountain which he had raised, till, like a group of firs +upon an isolated rock, every point of the building should seem in act to +grow toward heaven, and the grey leads of the Minster roof stand out amid +peaks and turrets rich with carven foliage, as the grey rocks stand out +of the primæval woods. + +That part of the mediæval builder’s task was left unfinished, and indeed +hardly attempted, by our Westminster architects, either under Henry III., +Edward I., or Henry V. + +Their Minster is grand enough by grave height and severe proportion; and +he who enters stooping under that low-browed arch of the north door, +beneath the beetling crag of weatherworn and crumbling stone, may feel +like one who, in some old northern fairy tale, enters a cave in some lone +mountain side where trolls and dragons guard the hoards of buried kings. + +And awful it is, and should be still, inside; under that vaulted roof a +hundred feet above, all more mysterious and more huge, and yet more soft, +beneath the murky London air. + +But sad I cannot call it. Nor, I think, would you feel it sad, when you +perceive how richly successive architects have squandered on it the +treasures of their fancy; and made it, so they say, perhaps the most +splendid specimen in the world of one of those stone forests, in which +the men of old delighted to reproduce those leafy minsters which God, not +man, has built; where they sent the columns aloft like the boles of giant +trees, and wreathed their capitals, sometimes their very shafts, with +vines and flowers; and decked with foliage and with fruit the bosses +above and the corbels below; and sent up out of those corbels upright +shafts along the walls, in likeness of the trees which sprang out of the +rocks above their head; and raised those walls into great cliffs; and +pierced those cliffs with the arches of the triforium, as with wild +creatures’ caves or hermits’ cells; and represented in the horizontal +string-courses and window-sills the strata of the rocks; and opened the +windows into wide and lofty glades, broken, as in the forest, by the +tracery of stems and boughs, through which were seen, not only the outer, +but the upper world. For they craved—as all true artists crave—for light +and colour; and had the sky above been one perpetual blue, they might +have been content with it, and left their glass transparent. But in our +dark dank northern clime, rain and snowstorm, black cloud and grey mist, +were all that they were like to see outside for six months in the year. +So they took such light and colour as nature gave in her few gayer moods, +and set aloft in their stained glass windows the hues of the noonday and +of the sunset, and the purple of the heather, and the gold of the gorse, +and the azure of the bugloss, and the crimson of the poppy; and among +them, in gorgeous robes, the angels and the saints of heaven, and the +memories of heroic virtues and heroic sufferings, that they might lift up +the eyes and hearts of men for ever out of the dark sad world of the cold +north, with all its coarsenesses and its crimes, towards a realm of +perpetual holiness, amid a perpetual summer of beauty and of light: as +one who, from between the black jaws of a narrow glen, or from beneath +the black shade of gigantic trees, catches a glimpse of far lands gay +with gardens and cottages; and purple mountain ranges; and the far-off +sea; and the hazy horizon melting into the hazy sky; and finds his soul +led forth into an infinite, at once of freedom and repose. + +Awful, and yet not sad; at least to one who is reminded by it, even in +its darkest winter’s gloom, of the primæval tropic forest at its two most +exquisite moments—its too brief twilight, and its too swift dawn. + +Awful, and yet not sad; at least to an Englishman, while right and left +are ranged the statues, the busts, the names, the deeds, of men who have +helped, each in his place, to make my country, and your country too, that +which they are. + +For am I not in goodly company? Am I not in very deed upon my best +behaviour? among my betters? and at court? Among men before whom I +should have been ashamed to say or do a base or foolish thing? Among men +who have taught me, have ennobled me, though they lived centuries since? +Men whom I should have loved had I met them on earth? Men whom I may +meet yet, and tell them how I love them, in some other world? Men, too, +whom I might have hated, and who might have hated me, had we met on this +poor piecemeal earth; but whom I may learn to regard with justice and +with charity in the world where all shall know, even as they are known? +Men, too—alas! how fast their number grows—whom I have known, have loved, +and lost too soon; and all gleaming out of the gloom, as every image of +the dead should do, in pure white marble, as if purged from earthly +taint? To them, too— + + Nothing is left of them + Now but pure manly. + +Yes, while their monuments remind me that they are not dead, but +living—for all live to God—then awed I am, and humbled; better so: but +sad I cannot be in such grand company. + +I said, the men who helped to make my country, and yours too. It would +be an impertinence in me to remind most of you of that. You know as well +as I that you are represented just as much as the English people, by +every monument in that Abbey earlier than the Civil Wars, and by most +monuments of later date, especially by those of all our literary men. +You know that, and you value the old Abbey accordingly. But a day may +come—a generation may come, in a nation so rapidly increasing by foreign +immigration, as well as by home-born citizenship—a generation may come +who will forget that fact; and orators arise who will be glad that it +should be forgotten—for awhile. But if you would not that that evil day +should come then teach your children—That the history and the freedom of +America began neither with the War of Independence, nor with the sailing +of the Pilgrim Fathers, nor with the settlement of Virginia; but 1500 +years and more before, in the days when our common Teutonic ancestors, as +free then as this day, knew how + + In den Deutschen Forsten + Wie der Aar zu horsten, + +when Herman smote the Romans in the Teutoburger-Wald, and the great Cæsar +wailed in vain to his slain general, ‘Varus, give me back my legions!’ +Teach your children that the Congress which sits at Washington is as much +the child of Magna Charta as the Parliament which sits at Westminster; +and that when you resisted the unjust demands of an English king and +council, you did but that which the free commons of England held the +right to do, and did, not only after, but before, the temporary tyranny +of the Norman kings. + +Show them the tombs of English kings; not of those Norman kings—no Norman +king lies buried in our Abbey—there is no royal interment between Edward +the Confessor, the last English prince of Cerdic’s house, and Henry the +Third, the first of the new English line of kings. Tell them, in justice +to our common forefathers, that those men were no tyrants, but _kings_, +who swore to keep, and for the most part did keep, like loyal gentlemen, +the ancient English laws, which they had sworn in Westminster Abbey to +maintain; and that the few of them who persisted in outraging the rights +or the conscience of the free people of England, paid for their perjury +with their crowns, or with their lives. And tell them, too, in justice +to our common ancestors, that there were never wanting to the kings, the +nobles, or the commons of England, since the days when Simon de Montfort +organised the House of Commons in Westminster Hall, on the 2nd of May, +1258—there were never wanting, I say, to the kings, the nobles, or the +commons of England, counsellors who dared speak the truth and defend the +right, even at the risk of their own goods and their own lives. + +Remind them, too—or let our monuments remind them—that even in the worst +times of the War of Independence, there were not wanting, here in +England, statesmen who dared to speak out for justice and humanity; and +that they were not only confessed to be the leading men of their own day, +but the very men whom England delighted to honour by places in her +Pantheon. Show them the monuments of Chatham, Pitt, and Fox—Burke sleeps +in peace elsewhere—and remind them that the great earl, who literally +died as much in your service as in ours, whose fiery invectives against +the cruelties of that old war are, I am proud to say, still common-places +for declamation among our English schoolboys, dared, even when all was at +the worst, to tell the English House of Lords—‘If I were an American, as +I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I +never would lay down my arms—never, never, never!’ + +Yes—an American as well as an Englishman may find himself in the old +Abbey in right good company. + +Yes—and I do not hesitate to say, that if you will look through the +monuments erected in that Abbey, since those of Pitt and Fox—you will +find that the great majority commemorate the children, not of +obstruction, but of progress; not of darkness, but of light. + +Holland, Tierney, Mackintosh, Grattan, Peel, Canning, Palmerston, Isaac +Watts, Bell, Wilberforce, Sharp, the Macaulays, Fowell Buxton, Francis +Horner, Charles Buller, Cobden, Watt, Rennell, Telford, Locke, Brunel, +Grote, Thackeray, Dickens, Maurice—men who, each in his own way, toiled +for freedom of some kind; freedom of race, of laws, of commerce, of +locomotion, of production, of speech, of thought, of education, of human +charity, and of sympathy—these are the men whom England still delights to +honour; whose busts around our walls show that the ancient spirit is not +dead, and that we, as you, are still, as 1500 years ago, the sons of +freedom and of light. + +But, beside these statesmen who were just and true to you, and therefore +to their native land, there lie men before whose monuments I would ask +thoughtful Americans to pause—I mean those of our old fighters, by land +and sea. I do not speak merely of those who lived before our Civil Wars, +though they are indeed our common heritage. And when you look at the +noble monuments of De Vere and Norris, the fathers of the English +infantry, you should remember that your ancestors and mine, or that of +any other Englishman, may have trailed pike and handled sword side by +side under those very men, in those old wars of the Netherlands, which +your own great historian, Mr. Motley, has so well described; or have +sailed together to Cadiz fight, and to the Spanish Main, with Raleigh or +with Drake. + +There are those, again, who did their duty two and three generations +later—though one of the noblest of them all, old Admiral Blake, alas! +lies we know not where—cast out, with Cromwell and his heroes, by the +fanatics and sycophants of the Restoration—whom not only we, but Royalty +itself, would now restore, could we recover their noble ashes, to their +rightful resting-place. + +And these, if not always our common ancestors, were, often enough, our +common cousins, as in the case of my own family, in which one brother was +settling in New England, to found there a whole new family of Kingsleys +while the other brother was fighting in the Parliamentary army, and +helping to defeat Charles at Rowton Moor. + +But there is another class of warriors’ tombs, which I ask you, if ever +you visit the Abbey, to look on with respect, and let me say, affection +too. I mean the men who did their duty, by land and sea, in that long +series of wars which, commencing in 1739, ended in 1783, with our +recognition of your right and power to be a free and independent people. +Of those who fought against you I say nought. But I must speak of those +who fought for you—who brought to naught, by sheer hard blows, that +family compact of the House of Bourbon, which would have been as +dangerous to you upon this side of the ocean as to us upon the other; who +smote with a continual stroke the trans-Atlantic power of Spain, till +they placed her once vast and rich possessions at your mercy to this day; +and who—even more important still—prevented the French from seizing at +last the whole valley of the Mississippi, and girdling your nascent +dominion with a hostile frontier, from Louisiana round to the mouth of +the St. Lawrence. + +When you see Wolfe’s huge cenotaph, with its curious bronze bas-relief of +the taking of the heights of Abraham, think, I pray you, that not only +for England, but for you, the ‘little red-haired corporal’ conquered and +died. + +Remember, too, that while your ancestors were fighting well by land, and +Washington and such as he were learning their lesson at Fort Duquesne and +elsewhere better than we could teach them, we were fighting well where we +knew how to fight—at sea. And when, near to Wolfe’s monument, or in the +Nave, you see such names as Cornwallis, Saumarez, Wager, Vernon—the +conqueror of Portobello—Lord Aubrey Beauclerk, and so forth—bethink you +that every French or Spanish ship which these men took, and every convoy +they cut off, from Toulon to Carthagena, and from Carthagena to Halifax, +made more and more possible the safe severance from England of the very +Colonies which you were then helping us to defend. And then agree, like +the generous-hearted people which you are, that if, in after years, we +sinned against you—and how heavy were our sins, I know too well—there was +a time, before those evil days, when we fought for you, and by your side, +as the old lion by the young; even though, like the old lion and the +young, we began, only too soon, tearing each other to pieces over the +division of the prey. + +Nay, I will go further, and say this, paradoxical as it may seem:—When +you enter the North Transept from St. Margaret’s Churchyard you see on +your right hand a huge but not ungraceful naval monument of white marble, +inscribed with the names of Bayne, Blair, Lord Robert Manners—three +commanders of Rodney’s, in the crowning victory of April 12, 1782—fought +upon Tropic waters, over which I have sailed, flushed with the thought +that my own grandfather was that day on board of Rodney’s ship. + +Now do you all know what that day’s great fight meant for you,—fought +though it was, while you, alas! were still at war with us? It meant +this. That that day—followed up, six months after, by Lord Howe’s relief +of Gibraltar—settled, I hold, the fate of the New World for many a year. +True, in one sense, it was settled already. Cornwallis had already +capitulated at York Town. But even then the old lion, disgraced, +bleeding, fainting, ready to yield—but only to you, of his own kin and +blood—struck, though with failing paw, two such tremendous blows at his +old enemies, as deprived them thenceforth of any real power in the New +World; precipitated that bankruptcy and ruin which issued in the French +and Spanish revolutions; and made certain, as I believe, the coming day +when the Anglo-Saxon race shall be the real masters of the whole New +World. + +Of poets and of men of letters I say nought. They are the heritage, +neither of us, nor you, but of the human race. The mere man of letters +may well sleep in the very centre of that busy civilisation from which he +drew his inspiration: but not the poet—not, at least, the poet of these +days. He goes not to the town, but nature, for his inspirations, and to +nature when he dies he should return. Such men—artificial, and +town-bred—however brilliant, or even grand at times—as Davenant, Dryden, +Cowley, Congreve, Prior, Gay—sleep fitly in our care here. Yet even +Pope—though one of such in style and heart—preferred the parish church of +the then rural Twickenham, and Gray the lonely graveyard of Stoke Pogis. +Ben Jonson has a right to lie with us. He was a townsman to the very +heart, and a court-poet too. But Chaucer, Spenser, Drayton—such are, to +my mind, out of place. Chaucer lies here, because he lived hard by. +Spenser through bitter need and woe. But I should have rather buried +Chaucer in some trim garden, Spenser beneath the forest aisles, and +Drayton by some silver stream—each man’s dust resting where his heart was +set. Happier, it seems to me, are those who like Shakespeare, Wordsworth +and Southey, Scott and Burns, lie far away, in scenes they knew and +loved; fulfilling Burke’s wise choice: ‘After all I had sooner sleep in +the southern corner of a country churchyard than in the tomb of all the +Capulets.’ + +Yes—these worthies, one and all, are a token that the Great Abbey, and +all its memories of 800 years, does not belong to us alone, nor even to +the British Empire alone and all its Colonies, but to America likewise! +That when an American enters beneath that mighty shade, he treads on +common and ancestral ground, as sacred to him as it is to us; the symbol +of common descent, common development, common speech, common creed, +common laws, common literature, common national interests, and I trust, +of a common respect and affection, such as the wise can only feel toward +the wise, and the strong toward the strong. + +Is all this sentiment? Remember what I said just now: by well-used +sentiment, and well-used sorrow, great nations live. + + + + +LECTURE II. +THE STAGE AS IT WAS ONCE. + + +What the Stage is now, I presume, all know. I am not myself a playgoer, +but I am informed that, in Europe at least, it is not in a state to +arouse any deep interest or respect in any cultivated or virtuous person. +Meanwhile, keeping fast to my intention of talking to you only about +things worthy of your interest and respect, because they are good, true, +and beautiful, I wish to tell you what the Stage was once, in a republic +of the past—what it may be again, I sometimes dream, in some republic of +the future. + +Let me take you back in fancy some 2314 years—440 years before the +Christian era, and try to sketch for you—alas! how clumsily—a great, +though tiny people, in one of their greatest moments—in one of the +greatest moments, it may be, of the human race. For surely it is a great +and a rare moment for humanity, when all that is loftiest in it—when +reverence for the Unseen powers, reverence for the heroic dead, reverence +for the father-land; and that reverence, too, for self, which is +expressed in stateliness and self-restraint, in grace and courtesy; when +all these, I say, can lend themselves, even for a day, to the richest +enjoyment of life—to the enjoyment of beauty in form and sound, and of +relaxation, not brutalizing, but ennobling. + +Rare, alas! have such seasons been in the history of poor humanity. But +when they have come, they have lifted it up one stage higher thenceforth. +Men, having been such once, may become such again; and the work which +such times have left behind them becomes immortal. + + A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. + +Let me take you to the then still unfinished theatre of Athens, hewn out +of the limestone rock on the south-east slope of the Acropolis. + +Above are the new marble buildings of the Parthenon, rich with the +statues and bas-reliefs of Phidias and his scholars, gleaming white +against the blue sky, with the huge bronze statue of Athené Promachos, +fifty feet in height, towering up among the temples and colonnades. In +front, and far below, gleams the blue sea, and Salamis beyond. + +And there are gathered the people of Athens—50,000 of them, possibly, +when the theatre was complete and full. If it be fine, they all wear +garlands on their heads. If the sun be too hot, they wear wide-brimmed +straw hats. And if a storm comes on, they will take refuge in the +porticos beneath; not without wine and cakes, for what they have come to +see will last for many an hour, and they intend to feast their eyes and +ears from sunrise to sunset. On the highest seats are slaves and +freedmen, below them the free citizens; and on the lowest seats of all +are the dignitaries of the republic—the priests, the magistrates, and the +other χαλοὶ χἀγαθοὶ—the fair and good men—as the citizens of the highest +rank were called, and with them foreign ambassadors and distinguished +strangers. What an audience—the rapidest, subtlest, wittiest, down to +the very cobblers and tinkers, the world has ever seen. And what noble +figures on those front seats; Pericles, with Aspasia beside him, and all +his friends—Anaxagoras the sage, Phidias the sculptor, and many another +immortal artist; and somewhere among the free citizens, perhaps beside +his father Sophroniscus the sculptor, a short, square, pugnosed boy of +ten years old, looking at it all with strange eyes—‘who will be one day,’ +so said the Pythoness at Delphi, ‘the wisest man in Greece’—sage, +metaphysician, humourist, warrior, patriot, martyr—for his name is +_Socrates_. + +All are in their dresses of office; for this is not merely a day of +amusement, but of religious ceremony; sacred to Dionysos—Bacchus, the +inspiring god, who raises men above themselves, for good—or for evil. + +The evil, or at least the mere animal aspect of that inspiration, was to +be seen in forms grotesque and sensuous enough in those very festivals, +when the gayer and coarser part of the population, in town and country, +broke out into frantic masquerade, of which that silly carnival of Rome +is perhaps the last paltry and unmeaning relic. ‘When,’ as the learned +O. Müller says, ‘the desire of escaping from self into something new and +strange, of living in an imaginary world, broke forth in a thousand ways; +not merely in revelry and solemn, though fantastic songs, but in a +hundred disguises, imitating the subordinate beings—satyrs, pans, and +nymphs, by whom the god was surrounded, and through whom life seemed to +pass from him into vegetation, and branch off into a variety of beautiful +or grotesque forms—beings who were ever present to the fancy of the +Greeks, as a convenient step by which they could approach more nearly to +the presence of the Divinity.’ But even out of that seemingly bare +chaos, Athenian genius was learning how to construct, under Eupolis, +Cratinus and Aristophanes, that elder school of comedy, which remains not +only unsurpassed, but unapproachable, save by Rabelais alone, as the +ideal cloudland of masquerading wisdom, in which the whole universe goes +mad—but with a subtle method in its madness. + +Yes, so it has been, under some form or other, in every race and +clime—ever since Eve ate of the magic fruit, that she might be as a god, +knowing good and evil, and found, poor thing, as most have since, that it +was far easier and more pleasant to know the evil than to know the good. +But that theatre was built that men might know therein the good as well +as the evil. To learn the evil, indeed, according to their light, and +the sure vengeance of Até and the Furies which tracks up the evil-doer. +But to learn also the good—lessons of piety, patriotism, heroism, +justice, mercy, self-sacrifice, and all that comes out of the hearts of +men and women not dragged _below_, but raised _above_ themselves; and +behind all—at least in the nobler and earlier tragedies of Æschylus and +Sophocles, before Euripides had introduced the tragedy of mere human +passion; that sensation tragedy, which is the only one the world knows +now, and of which the world is growing rapidly tired—behind all, I say, +lessons of the awful and unfathomable mystery of human existence, of +unseen destiny; of that seemingly capricious distribution of weal and +woe, to which we can find no solution on this side the grave, for which +the old Greek could find no solution whatsoever. + +Therefore there was a central object in the old Greek theatre, most +important to it, but which does not exist in our theatres, and did not in +the old Roman; because our tragedies, like the Roman, are mere plays +concerning love, murder, and so forth, while the Greek were concerning +the deepest relations of man to the Unseen. + +The almost circular orchestra, or pit, between the benches and the stage, +was empty of what we call spectators—because it was destined for the true +and ideal spectators—the representatives of humanity; in its centre was a +round platform, the θυμελή—originally the altar of Bacchus—from which the +leader of these representatives, the leader of the Chorus, could converse +with the actors on the stage and take his part in the drama; and round +this thymelé the Chorus ranged, with measured dance and song, chanting, +to the sound of a simple flute, odes such as the world had never heard +before or since, save perhaps in the temple-worship at Jerusalem. A +chorus now, as you know, means merely any number of persons singing in +full harmony on any subject. The Chorus was then in tragedy, and indeed +in the higher comedy, what Schlegel well calls ‘the ideal spectator,’—a +personified reflection on the action going on, the incorporation into the +representation itself of the sentiments of the poet, as the spokesman of +the whole human race. He goes on to say (and I think truly), ‘that the +Chorus always retained among the Greeks a peculiar national +signification, publicity being, according to their republican notions, +essential to the completeness of every important transaction.’ Thus the +Chorus represented idealised public opinion: not of course, the shifting, +hasty public opinion of the moment—to that it was a conservative check, +and it calmed to soberness and charity—for it was the matured public +opinion of centuries; the experience, and usually the sad experience, of +many generations; the very spirit of the Greek race. + +The Chorus might be composed of what the poet would. Of ancient +citizens, waiting for their sons to come back from the war, as in the +_Agamemnon_ of Æschylus; of sea-nymphs, as in his _Prometheus Bound_; +even of the very Furies who hunt the matricide, as in his _Eumenides_; of +Senators as in the _Antigone_ of Sophocles; or of village farmers as in +his _Œdipus at Colonos_—and now I have named five of the greatest poems, +as I hold, written by mortal man till Dante rose. Or it may be the +Chorus was composed—as in the comedies of Aristophanes, the greatest +humourist the world has ever seen—of birds, or of frogs, or even of +clouds. It may rise to the level of Don Quixote, or sink to that of +Sancho Panza; for it is always the incarnation of such wisdom, heavenly +or earthly, as the poet wishes the people to bring to bear on the +subject-matter! + +But let the poets themselves, rather than me, speak awhile. Allow me to +give you a few specimens of these choruses—the first as an example of +that practical, and yet surely not un-divine wisdom, by which they +supplied the place of our modern preacher, or essayist, or didactic poet. + +Listen to this of the old men’s chorus in the _Agamemnon_, in the +spirited translation of my friend Professor Blackie:— + + ’Twas said of old, and ’tis said to-day, + That wealth to prosperous stature grown + Begets a birth of its own: + That a surfeit of evil by good is prepared, + And sons must bear what allotment of woe + Their sires were spared. + But this I refuse to believe: I know + That impious deeds conspire + To beget an offspring of impious deeds + Too like their ugly sire. + But whoso is just, though his wealth like a river + Flow down, shall be scathless: his house shall rejoice + In an offspring of beauty for ever. + + The heart of the haughty delights to beget + A haughty heart. From time to time + In children’s children recurrent appears + The ancestral crime. + When the dark hour comes that the gods have decreed + And the Fury burns with wrathful fires, + A demon unholy, with ire unabated, + Lies like black night on the halls of the fated; + And the recreant Son plunges guiltily on + To perfect the guilt of his Sires. + + But Justice shines in a lowly cell; + In the homes of poverty, smoke-begrimed, + With the sober-minded she loves to dwell. + But she turns aside + From the rich man’s house with averted eye, + The golden-fretted halls of pride + Where hands with lucre are foul, and the praise + Of counterfeit goodness smoothly sways; + And wisely she guides in the strong man’s despite + All things to an issue of RIGHT. + +Let me now give you another passage from the _Eumenides_—or _Furies_, of +Æschylus. + +Orestes, prince of Argos, you must remember, has avenged on his mother +Clytemnestra the murder of his father, king Agamemnon, on his return from +Troy. Pursued by the Furies, he takes refuge in the temple of Apollo at +Delphi, and then, still Fury-haunted, goes to Athens, where Pallas Athené +the warrior-maiden, the tutelary goddess of Athens, bids him refer his +cause to the Areopagus, the highest court of Athens, Apollo acting as his +advocate, and she sitting as umpire in the midst. The white and black +balls are thrown into the urn, and are equal; and Orestes is only +delivered by the decision of Athené—as the representative of the nearer +race of gods, the Olympians, the friends of man, in whose likeness man is +made. The Furies are the representatives of the older and darker +creed—which yet has a depth of truth in it—of the irreversible dooms +which underlie all nature; and which represent the _Law_, and not the +Gospel, the consequence of the mere act, independent of the spirit which +has prompted it. + +They break out in fury against the overbearing arrogance of these younger +gods. Athené bears their rage with equanimity, addresses them in the +language of kindness, even of veneration, till these so indomitable +beings are unable to withstand the charm of her mild eloquence. They are +to have a sanctuary in the Athenian land, and to be called no more Furies +(Erinnys), but Eumenides—the _well-conditioned_—the kindly goddesses. +And all ends with a solemn procession round the orchestra, with hymns of +blessing, while the terrible Chorus of the Furies, clothed in black, with +blood-stained girdles, and serpents in their hair, in masks having +perhaps somewhat of the terrific beauty of Medusa-masks, are convoyed to +their new sanctuary by a procession of children, women, and old men in +purple robes and torches in their hands, after Athené and the Furies have +sung, in response to each other, a chorus from which I must beg leave to +give you an extract or two. + + _Eldest Fury_ (_Leader of the Chorus_). + + Far from thy dwelling, and far from thy border, + By the grace of my godhead benignant I order + The blight which may blacken the bloom of the trees. + Far from thy border, and far from thy dwelling, + Be the hot blast which shrivels the bud in its swelling, + The seed-rotting taint, and the creeping disease. + Thy flocks be still doubled, thy seasons be steady, + And when Hermes is near thee, thy hand be still ready + The Heaven-dropt bounty to seize. + + _Athené_. + + Hear her words, my city’s warders— + Fraught with blessings, she prevaileth + With Olympians and Infernals, + Dread Erinnys much revered. + Mortal faith she guideth plainly + To what goal she pleaseth, sending + Songs to some, to others days + With tearful sorrows dulled. + + _Furies_. + + Far from thy border + The lawless disorder + That sateless of evil shall reign; + Far from thy dwelling, + The dear blood welling, + That taints thine own hearth with the slain. + When slaughter from slaughter + Shall flow like the water, + And rancour from rancour shall grow. + But joy with joy blending, + Live, each to all lending; + And hating one-hearted the foe. + When bliss hath departed; + From love single-hearted, + A fountain of healing shall flow. + + _Athené_. + + Wisely now the tongue of kindness + Thou hast found, the way of love. + And these terror-speaking faces + Now look wealth to me and mine. + Her so willing, ye more willing, + Now receive. This land and city, + On ancient right securely throned, + Shall shine for evermore. + + _Furies_. + + Hail, and all hail, mighty people, be greeted, + On the sons of Athena shines sunshine the clearest. + Blest people, near Jove the Olympian seated. + And dear to the maiden his daughter the dearest. + Timely wise ’neath the wings of the daughter ye gather, + And mildly looks down on her children the Father. + +Those of you here who love your country as well as the old Athenians +loved theirs, will feel at once the grand political significance of such +a scene, in which patriotism and religion become one—and feel, too, the +exquisite dramatic effect of the innocent, the weak, the unwarlike, +welcoming among them, without fear, because without guilt, those ancient +snaky-haired sisters, emblems of all that is most terrible and most +inscrutable, in the destiny of nations, of families, and of men: + + To their hallowed habitations + ’Neath Ogygian earth’s foundations + In that darksome hall + Sacrifice and supplication + Shall not fail. In adoration + Silent worship all. + +Listen again, to the gentler patriotism of a gentler poet, Sophocles +himself. The village of Colonos, a mile from Athens, was his birthplace; +and in his _Œdipus Coloneus_, he makes his Chorus of village officials +sing thus of their consecrated olive grove: + + In good hap, stranger, to these rural seats + Thou comest, to this region’s blest retreats, + Where white Colonos lifts his head, + And glories in the bounding steed. + Where sadly sweet the frequent nightingale + Impassioned pours his evening song, + And charms with varied notes each verdant vale, + The ivy’s dark-green boughs among, + Or sheltered ’neath the clustering vine + Which, high above him form a bower, + Safe from the sun or stormy shower, + Where frolic Bacchus often roves, + And visits with his fostering nymphs the groves. + + Bathed in the dew of heaven each morn, + Fresh is the fair Narcissus born, + Of those great gods the crown of old; + The crocus glitters, robed in gold. + Here restless fountains ever murmuring glide, + And as their crispèd streamlets play, + To feed, Cephisus, thine unfailing tide, + Fresh verdure marks their winding way. + Here oft to raise the tuneful song + The virgin band of Muses deigns, + And car-borne Aphrodite guides her golden reins. + +Then they go on, this band of village elders, to praise the gods for +their special gifts to that small Athenian land. They praise Pallas +Athené, who gave their forefathers the olive; then Poseidon—Neptune, as +the Romans call him—who gave their forefathers the horse; and something +more—the ship,—the horse of the sea, as they, like the old Norse Vikings +after them, delighted to call it.— + + Our highest vaunt is this—Thy grace, + Poseidon, we behold. + The ruling curb, embossed with gold, + Controls the courser’s managed pace. + Though loud, oh king, thy billows roar, + Our strong hands grasp the labouring oar, + And while the Nereids round it play, + Light cuts our bounding bark its way. + +What a combination of fine humanities! Dance and song, patriotism and +religion, so often parted among us, have flowed together into one in +these stately villagers; each a small farmer; each a trained soldier, and +probably a trained seaman also; each a self-governed citizen; and each a +cultured gentleman, if ever there were gentlemen on earth. + +But what drama, doing, or action—for such is the meaning of the word—is +going on upon the stage, to be commented on by the sympathizing Chorus? + +One drama, at least, was acted in Athens in that year—440 B.C.—which you, +I doubt not, know well—that _Antigone_ of Sophocles, which Mendelssohn +has resuscitated, in our own generation, by setting it to music, divine +indeed, though very different from the music to which it was set, +probably by Sophocles himself, at its first, and for ought we know, its +only representation. For pieces had not then, as now, a run of a hundred +nights and more. The Athenian genius was so fertile, and the Athenian +audience so eager for novelty, that new pieces were demanded, and were +forthcoming, for each of the great festivals, and if a piece was +represented a second time it was usually after an interval of some years. +They did not, moreover, like the moderns, run every night to some theatre +or other, as a part of the day’s amusement. Tragedy, and even comedy, +were serious subjects, calling out, not a passing sigh, or passing laugh, +but all the higher faculties and emotions. And as serious subjects were +to be expressed in verse and music, which gave stateliness, doubtless, +even to the richest burlesques of Aristophanes, and lifted them out of +mere street-buffoonery into an ideal fairy land of the grotesque, how +much more stateliness must verse and music have added to their tragedy! +And how much have we lost, toward a true appreciation of their dramatic +art, by losing almost utterly not only the laws of their melody and +harmony, but even the true metric time of their odes! music and metre, +which must have surely been as noble as their poetry, their sculpture, +their architecture, possessed by the same exquisite sense of form and of +proportion. One thing we can understand—how this musical form of the +drama, which still remains to us in lower shapes, in the oratorio, in the +opera, must have helped to raise their tragedies into that ideal sphere +in which they all, like the _Antigone_, live and move. So ideal and yet +so human; nay rather, truly ideal, because truly human. The gods, the +heroes, the kings, the princesses of Greek tragedy were dear to the +hearts of Greek republicans, not merely as the founders of their states, +not merely as the tutelary deities, many of them, of their country: but +as men and women like themselves, only more vast; with mightier wills, +mightier virtues, mightier sorrows, and often mightier crimes; their +inward free-will battling, as Schlegel has well seen, against outward +circumstance and overruling fate, as every man should battle, unless he +sink to be a brute. ‘In tragedy,’ says Schlegel—uttering thus a deep and +momentous truth—‘the gods themselves either come forward as the servants +of destiny and mediate executors of its decrees, or approve themselves +godlike only by asserting their liberty of action and entering upon the +same struggles with fate which man himself has to encounter.’ And I +believe this, that this Greek tragedy, with its godlike men and manlike +gods, and heroes who had become gods by the very vastness of their +humanity, was a preparation, and it may be a necessary preparation, for +the true Christian faith in a Son of man, who is at once utterly human +and utterly divine. Man is made in the likeness of God—is the root-idea, +only half-conscious, only half-expressed, but instinctive, without which +neither the Greek Tragedies, nor the Homeric Poems, six hundred years +before them, could have been composed. Doubtless the idea that man was +like a god degenerated too often into the idea that the gods were like +men, and as wicked. But that travestie of a great truth is not confined +to those old Greeks. Some so-called Christian theories—as I hold—have +sinned in that direction as deeply as the Athenians of old. + +Meanwhile, I say, that this long acquiescence in the conception of +godlike struggle, godlike daring, godlike suffering, godlike martyrdom; +the very conception which was so foreign to the mythologies of any other +race—save that of the Jews, and perhaps of our own Teutonic +forefathers—did prepare, must have prepared, men to receive as most +rational and probable, as the satisfaction of their highest instincts, +the idea of a Being in whom all those partial rays culminated in clear, +pure light; of a Being at once utterly human and utterly divine; who by +struggle, suffering, self-sacrifice, without a parallel, achieved a +victory over circumstance and all the dark powers which beleaguer man +without a parallel likewise. + +Take, as an example, the figure which you know best—the figure of +Antigone herself—devoting herself to be entombed alone, for the sake of +love and duty. Love of a brother, which she can only prove, alas! by +burying his corpse. Duty to the dead, an instinct depending on no +written law, but springing out of the very depths of those blind and yet +sacred monitions which prove that the true man is not an animal, but a +spirit; fulfilling her holy purpose, unchecked by fear, unswayed by her +sisters’ entreaties. Hardening her heart magnificently till her fate is +sealed; and then after proving her godlike courage, proving the +tenderness of her womanhood by that melodious wail over her own untimely +death and the loss of marriage joys, which some of you must know from the +music of Mendelssohn, and which the late Dean Milman has put into English +thus— + + Come, fellow-citizens, and see + The desolate Antigone. + On the last path her steps shall tread, + Set forth, the journey of the dead, + Watching, with vainly lingering gaze, + Her last, last sun’s expiring rays, + + Never to see it, never more, + For down to Acheron’s dread shore, + A living victim am I led + To Hades’ universal bed. + To my dark lot no bridal joys + Belong, nor e’er the jocund noise + Of hymeneal chant shall sound for me, + But death, cold death, my only spouse shall be. + + Oh tomb! Oh bridal chamber! Oh deep-delved + And strongly-guarded mansion! I descend + To meet in your dread chambers all my kindred, + Who in dark multitudes have crowded down + Where Proserpine received the dead. But I, + The last, and oh how few more miserable, + Go down, or ere my sands of life are run. + +And let me ask you whether the contemplation of such a self-sacrifice +should draw you, should have drawn those who heard the tale nearer to, or +further from, a certain cross which stood on Calvary some 1800 years ago? +May not the tale of Antigone heard from mother or from nurse have nerved +ere now some martyr-maiden to dare and suffer in an even holier cause? + +But to return. This set purpose of the Athenian dramatists of the best +school to set before men a magnified humanity, explains much in their +dramas which seem to us at first not only strange but faulty. The masks +which gave one grand but unvarying type of countenance to each well-known +historic personage, and thus excluded the play of feature, animated +gesture, and almost all which we now consider as ‘acting’ proper; the +thicksoled cothurni which gave the actor a more than human stature; the +poverty (according to our notions) of the scenery, which usually +represented merely the front of a palace or other public place, and was +often though not always unchanged during the whole performance; the total +absence in fact, of anything like that scenic illusion which most +managers of theatres seem now to consider as their highest achievement; +the small number of the actors, two, or at most three only, being present +on the stage at once,—the simplicity of the action, in which intrigue (in +the play-house sense) and any complication of plot are utterly absent; +all this must have concentrated not the eye of the spectator on the +scene, but his ear upon the voice, and his emotions on the personages who +stood out before him without a background, sharp-cut and clear as a group +of statuary which is the same, place it where you will, complete in +itself—a world of beauty, independent of all other things and beings save +on the ground on which it needs must stand. It was the personage rather +than his surroundings, which was to be impressed by every word on the +spectator’s heart and intellect; and the very essence of Greek tragedy is +expressed in the still famous words of Medea— + + Che resta? Io. + +Contrast this with the European drama—especially with the highest form of +it—our own Elizabethan. It resembles, as has been often said in better +words than mine, not statuary but painting. These dramas affect colour, +light, and shadow, background whether of town or country, description of +scenery where scenic machinery is inadequate, all in fact, which can +blend the action and the actors with the surrounding circumstances, +without letting them altogether melt into the circumstances; which can +show them a part of the great whole, by harmony or discord with the whole +universe, down to the flowers beneath their feet. This, too, had to be +done: how it became possible for even the genius of a Shakespeare to get +it done, I may with your leave hint to you hereafter. Why it was not +given to the Greeks to do it, I know not. + +Let us at least thank them for what they did. One work was given them, +and that one they fulfilled as it had never been fulfilled before; as it +will never need to be fulfilled again; for the Greeks’ work was done not +for themselves alone but for all races in all times; and Greek Art is the +heirloom of the whole human race; and that work was to assert in drama, +lyric, sculpture, music, gymnastic, the dignity of man—the dignity of man +which they perceived for the most part with their intense æsthetic sense, +through the beautiful in man. Man with them was divine, inasmuch as he +could perceive beauty and be beautiful himself. Beauty might be +physical, æsthetic, intellectual, moral. But in proportion as a thing +was perfect it revealed its own perfection by its beauty. Goodness +itself was a form—though the highest form—of beauty. Καλος meant both +the physically beautiful and the morally good; αἰσχρὸς both the ugly and +the bad. + +Out of this root-idea sprang the whole of that Greek sculpture, which is +still, and perhaps ever will be, one of the unrivalled wonders of the +world. + +Their first statues, remember, were statues of the gods. This is an +historic fact. Before B.C. 580 there were probably no statues in Greece +save those of deities. But of what form? We all know that the usual +tendency of man has been to represent his gods as more or less monstrous. +Their monstrosity may have been meant, as it was certainly with the +Mexican idols, and probably those of the Semitic races of Syria and +Palestine, to symbolise the ferocious passions which they attributed to +those objects of their dread, appeasable alone by human sacrifice. Or +the monstrosity, as with the hawk-headed or cat-headed Egyptian idols, +the winged bulls of Nineveh and Babylon, the many-handed deities of +Hindostan—merely symbolised powers which could not, so the priest and the +sculptor held, belong to mere humanity. Now, of such monstrous forms of +idols, the records in Greece are very few and very ancient—relics of an +older worship, and most probably of an older race. From the earliest +historic period, the Greek was discerning more and more that the divine +could be best represented by the human; the tendency of his statuary was +more and more to honour that divine, by embodying it in the highest human +beauty. + +In lonely mountain shrines there still might linger, feared and honoured, +dolls like those black virgins, of unknown antiquity, which still work +wonders on the European continent. In the mysterious cavern of Phigalia, +for instance, on the Eleatic shore of Peloponnese, there may have been in +remote times—so the legend ran—an old black wooden image, a woman with a +horse’s head and mane, and serpents growing round her head, who held a +dolphin in one hand and a dove in the other. And this image may have +been connected with old nature-myths about the marriage of Demeter and +Poseidon—that is, of encroachments of the sea upon the land; and the +other myths of Demeter, the earth-mother, may have clustered round the +place, till the Phigalians were glad—for it was profitable as well as +honourable—to believe that in their cavern Demeter sat mourning for the +loss of Proserpine, whom Pluto had carried down to Hades, and all the +earth was barren till Zeus sent the Fates, or Iris, to call her forth, +and restore fertility to the world. And it may be true—the legend as +Pausanias tells it 600 years after—that the old wooden idol having been +burnt, and the worship of Demeter neglected till a famine ensued, the +Phigalians, warned by the Oracle of Delphi, hired Onatas, a contemporary +of Polygnotus and Phidias, to make them a bronze replica of the old idol, +from some old copy and from a dream of his own. The story may be true. +When Pausanias went thither, in the second century after Christ, the cave +and the fountain, and the sacred grove of oaks, and the altar outside, +which was to be polluted with the blood of no victim—the only offerings +being fruits and honey, and undressed wool—were still there. The statue +was gone. Some said it had been destroyed by the fall of the cliff; some +were not sure that it had ever been there at all. And meanwhile +Praxiteles had already brought to perfection (Paus. 1, 2, sec. 4) the +ideal of Demeter, mother-like, as Heré—whom we still call Juno now—but +softer-featured, and her eyes more closed. + +And so for mother earth, as for the rest, the best representation of the +divine was the human. Now, conceive such an idea taking hold, however +slowly, of a people of rare physical beauty, of acutest eye for +proportion and grace, with opportunities of studying the human figure +such as exist nowhere now, save among tropic savages, and gifted, +moreover, in that as in all other matters, with that innate diligence, of +which Mr. Carlyle has said, ‘that genius is only an infinite capacity of +taking pains,’ and we can understand somewhat of the causes which +produced those statues, human and divine, which awe and shame the +artificiality and degeneracy of our modern so-called civilisation—we can +understand somewhat of the reverence for the human form, of the careful +study of every line, the storing up for use each scattered fragment of +beauty of which the artist caught sight, even in his daily walks, and +consecrating it in his memory to the service of him or her whom he was +trying to embody in marble or in bronze. And when the fashion came in of +making statues of victors in the games, and other distinguished persons, +a new element was introduced, which had large social as well as artistic +results. The sculptor carried his usual reverence into his careful +delineation of the victor’s form, while he obtained in him a model, +usually of the very highest type, for perfecting his idea of some +divinity. The possibility of gaining the right to a statue gave a fresh +impulse to all competitors in the public games, and through them to the +gymnastic training throughout all the states of Greece, which made the +Greeks the most physically able and graceful, as well as the most +beautiful people known to the history of the human race. A people who, +reverencing beauty, reverenced likewise grace or acted beauty, so utterly +and honestly, that nothing was too humble for a free man to do, if it +were not done awkwardly and ill. As an instance, Sophocles himself—over +and above his poetic genius, one of the most cultivated gentlemen, as +well as one of the most exquisite musicians, dancers, and gymnasts, and +one of the most just, pious, and gentle of all Greece—could not, by +reason of the weakness of his voice, act in his own plays, as poets were +wont to do, and had to perform only the office of stage-manager. Twice +he took part in the action, once as the blind old Thamyris playing on the +harp, and once in his own lost tragedy, the ‘Nausicaa.’ There in the +scene in which the Princess, as she does in Homer’s ‘Odyssey,’ comes down +to the sea-shore with her maidens to wash the household clothes, and then +to play at ball—Sophocles himself, a man then of middle age, did the one +thing he could do better than any there—and, dressed in women’s clothes, +among the lads who represented the maidens, played at ball before the +Athenian people. + +Yes: just 60 years after the representation of the _Antigone_, 10,000 +Greeks, far on the plains of Babylon, cut through the whole Persian army, +as the railway train cuts through a herd of buffalo, and then losing all +their generals by treacherous warfare, fought their way north from +Babylon to Trebizond on the Black Sea, under the guidance of a young +Athenian, a pupil of Socrates, who had never served in the army before. +The retreat of Xenophon and his 10,000 will remain for ever as one of the +grandest triumphs of civilisation over brute force: but what made it +possible? That these men, and their ancestors before them, had been for +at least 100 years in _training_, physical, intellectual, and moral, +which made their bodies and their minds able to dare and suffer like +those old heroes of whom their tragedy had taught them, and whose spirits +they still believed would help the valiant Greek. And yet that feat, +which looks to us so splendid, attracted, as far as I am aware, no +special admiration at the time. So was the cultivated Greek expected to +behave whenever he came in contact with the uncultivated barbarian. + +But from what had sprung in that little state, this exuberance of +splendid life, physical, æsthetic, intellectual, which made, and will +make the name of Athens and of the whole cluster of Greek republics for +ever admirable to civilised man? Had it sprung from long years of +peaceful prosperity? From infinite making of money and comfort, +according to the laws of so-called political economy, and the dictates of +enlightened selfishness? Not so. But rather out of terror and agony, +and all but utter ruin—and out of a magnificent want of economy—and the +divine daring and folly—of self-sacrifice. + +In Salamis across the strait a trophy stood, and round that trophy, forty +years before, Sophocles the author of _Antigone_, then sixteen years of +age, the loveliest and most cultivated lad in Athens, undraped like a +faun, with lyre in hand, was leading the Chorus of Athenian youths, and +singing to Athené, the tutelary goddess, a hymn of triumph for a glorious +victory,—the very symbol of Greece and Athens, springing up into a joyous +second youth after invasion and desolation, as the grass springs up after +the prairie fire has passed. But the fire had been terrible. It had +burnt Athens at least, down to the very roots. True, while Sophocles was +dancing, Xerxes, the great king of the East, foiled at Salamis, as his +father Darius had been foiled at Marathon ten years before, was fleeing +back to Persia, leaving his innumerable hosts of slaves and mercenaries +to be destroyed piecemeal, by land at Platea, by sea at Mycalé. The bold +hope was over, in which the Persian, ever since the days of Cyrus, had +indulged—that he, the despot of the East, should be the despot of the +West likewise. It seemed to them as possible, though not as easy, to +subdue the Aryan Greek, as it had been to subdue the Semite and the +Turanian, the Babylonian, and the Syrian; to rifle his temples, to +destroy his idols, carry off his women and children as colonists into +distant lands, as they had been doing with all the nations of the East. +And they had succeeded with isolated colonies, isolated islands of +Greeks, and the shores of Asia Minor. But when they dared, at last, to +attack the Greek in his own sacred land of Hellas, they found they had +bearded a lion in his den. Nay rather—as those old Greeks would have +said—they had dared to attack Pallas Athené, the eldest daughter of +Zeus—emblem of that serene and pure divine wisdom, of whom Solomon sang +of old: ‘The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way, before His +works of old. When He prepared the heavens, I was there, when He +appointed the foundation of the earth, then was I by Him, as one brought +up with Him, and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before him: +rejoicing in the habitable part of His earth; _and my delight was with +the sons of men_,’—to attack her and her brother Apollo, Lord of light, +and beauty, and culture, and grace, and inspiration,—to attack them, not +in the name of Ormuzd, nor of any other deity, but in the name of mere +brute force and lust of conquest. The old Persian spirit was gone out of +them. They were the symbols now of nothing save despotism and self-will, +wealth and self-indulgence. They, once the children of Ormuzd or light, +had become the children of Ahriman or darkness; and therefore it was, as +I believe, that Xerxes’ 1,000 ships, and the two million (or, as some +have it, five million) human beings availed naught against the little +fleets and little battalions of men who believed with a living belief in +Athené and Apollo, and therefore—ponder it well, for it is true—with a +living belief, under whatsoever confusions and divisions of personality, +in a God who loved, taught, inspired men, a just God who befriended the +righteous cause, the cause of freedom and patriotism, a Deity, the echo +of whose mind and will to man was the song of Athené on Olympus, when she + + Chanted of order and right, and of foresight, and order of peoples; + Chanted of labour and craft, wealth in the port and the garner; + Chanted of valour and fame, and the man who can fall with the + foremost, + Fighting for children and wife, and the field which his father + bequeathed him. + Sweetly and cunningly sang she, and planned new lessons for mortals. + Happy who hearing obey her, the wise unsullied Athené. + +Ah, that they had always obeyed her, those old Greeks. But meanwhile, as +I said, the agony had been extreme. If Athens had sinned, she had been +purged as by fire; and the fire—surely of God—had been terrible. +Northern Greece had either been laid waste with fire and sword, or had +gone over to the Persian, traitors in their despair. Attica, almost the +only loyal state, had been overrun; the old men, women, and children had +fled to the neighbouring islands, or to the Peloponnese. Athens itself +had been destroyed; and while young Sophocles was dancing round the +trophy at Salamis, the Acropolis was still a heap of blackened ruins. + +But over and above their valour, over and above their loyalty, over and +above their exquisite æsthetic faculty, these Athenians had a resilience +of self-reliant energy, like that of the French—like that, to do you but +justice, of your Americans after your Chicago fire; and Athens rose from +her ashes to be awhile, not only, as she had nobly earned by suffering +and endurance, the leading state in Greece, but a mighty fortress, a rich +commercial port, a living centre of art, poetry, philosophy, such as this +earth has never seen before or since. + +On the plateau of that little crag of the Acropolis some 800 feet in +length, by 400 in breadth—about the size and shape of the Castle Rock at +Edinburgh—was gathered, within forty years of the battle of Salamis, more +and more noble beauty than ever stood together on any other spot of like +size. + +The sudden relief from crushing pressure, and the joyous consciousness of +well-earned honours, made the whole spirit-nature of the people blossom +out, as it were, into manifold forms of activity, beauty, research, and +raised, in raising Greece, the whole human race thenceforth. + +What might they not have done—looking at what they actually did—for the +whole race of man? + +But no—they fell, even more rapidly than they rose, till their grace and +their cultivation, for them they could not lose, made them the willing +ministers to the luxury, the frivolity, the sentimentality, the vice of +the whole old world—the Scapia or Figaro of the old world—infinitely +able, but with all his ability consecrated to the service of his own base +self. The Greekling—as Juvenal has it—in want of a dinner, would climb +somehow to heaven itself, at the bidding of his Roman master. + +Ah, what a fall! And what was the inherent weakness which caused that +fall? + +I say at once—want of honesty. The Greek was not to be depended on; if +it suited him, he would lie, betray, overreach, change sides, and think +it no sin. He was the sharpest of men. Sharp practice, in our modern +sense of the word, was the very element in which he floated. Any scholar +knows it. In the grand times of Marathon and Salamis, down to the +disastrous times of the Peloponnesian war and the thirty tyrants, no +public man’s hands were clean, with the exception, perhaps, of that +Aristides, who was banished because men were tired of hearing him called +the Just. The exciting cause of the Peloponnesian war, and the +consequent downfall of Athens, was not merely the tyranny she exercised +over the states allied to her, it was the sharp practice of the +Athenians, in misappropriating the tribute paid by the allies to the +decoration of Athens. And in laying the foundations of the Parthenon was +sown, by a just judgment, the seed of ruin for the state which gloried in +it. And if the rulers were such, what were the people? If the free were +such, what were the slaves? + +Hence, weakness at home and abroad, mistrust of generals and admirals, +paralysing all bold and clear action, peculations and corruptions at +home, internecine wars between factions inside states, and between states +or groups of states, revolutions followed by despotism, and final +exhaustion and slavery,— slavery to a people who were coming across the +western sea, hard-headed, hard-hearted, caring nothing for art, or +science, whose pleasures were coarse and cruel, but with a certain rough +honesty, reverence for country, for law, and for the ties of a family—men +of a somewhat old English type, who had over and above, like the English, +the inspiring belief that they could conquer the whole world, and who +very nearly succeeded in that—as we have, to our great blessing, not +succeeded—I mean, of course, the Romans. + + + + +LECTURE III. +THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. + + +Let me begin this lecture with a scene in the North Atlantic 863 years +since. + +‘Bjarne Grimolfson was blown with his ship into the Irish Ocean; and +there came worms and the ship began to sink under them. They had a boat +which they had payed with seals’ blubber, for that the sea-worms will not +hurt. But when they got into the boat they saw that it would not hold +them all. Then said Bjarne, “As the boat will only hold the half of us, +my advice is that we should draw lots who shall go in her; for that will +not be unworthy of our manhood.” This advice seemed so good that none +gainsaid it; and they drew lots. And the lot fell to Bjarne that he +should go in the boat with half his crew. But as he got into the boat, +there spake an Icelander who was in the ship and had followed Bjarne from +Iceland, “Art thou going to leave me here, Bjarne?” Quoth Bjarne, “So it +must be.” Then said the man, “Another thing didst thou promise my +father, when I sailed with thee from Iceland, than to desert me thus. +For thou saidst that we both should share the same lot.” Bjarne said, +“And that we will not do. Get thou down into the boat, and I will get up +into the ship, now I see that thou art so greedy after life.” So Bjarne +went up into the ship, and the man down into the boat; and the boat went +on its voyage till they came to Dublin in Ireland. But most men say that +Bjarne and his comrades perished among the worms; for they were never +heard of after.’ + +This story may serve as a text for my whole lecture. Not only does it +smack of the sea-breeze and the salt water like all the finest old Norse +sagas: but it gives a glimpse at least, of the nobleness which underlay +the grim and often cruel nature of the Norseman. It belongs, too, to the +culminating epoch, to the beginning of that era when the Scandinavian +peoples had their great times; when the old fierceness of the worshippers +of Thor and Odin was tempered, without being effeminated by the Faith of +the ‘White Christ,’ till the very men who had been the destroyers of +Western Europe became its civilisers. + +It should have, moreover, a special interest to Americans. For—as +American antiquaries are well aware—Bjarne was on his voyage home from +the coast of New England; possibly from that very Mount Hope Bay, which +seems to have borne the same name in the time of those old Norsemen, as +afterwards in the days of King Philip the last sachem of the Wampanong +Indians. He was going back to Greenland, perhaps for reinforcements, +finding, he and his fellow-captain, Thorfinn, the Esquimaux who then +dwelt in that land too strong for them. For the Norsemen were then on +the very edge of a discovery, which might have changed the history not +only of this continent but of Europe likewise. They had found and +colonised Iceland and Greenland. They had found Labrador, and called it +Helluland, from its ice-polished rocks. They had found Nova Scotia +seemingly and called it Markland from its woods. They had found New +England and called it Vinland the Good. A fair land they found it, well +wooded, with good pasturage; so that they had already imported cows, and +a bull whose lowings terrified the Esquimaux. They had found self-sown +corn too, probably maize. The streams were full of salmon. But they had +called the land Vinland, by reason of its grapes. Quaint enough, and +bearing in its very quaintness the stamp of truth, is the story of the +first finding of the wild fox-grapes. How Leif the Fortunate, almost as +soon as he first landed, missed a little wizened old German servant of +his father’s, Tyrker by name, and was much vexed thereat, for he had been +brought up on the old man’s knee, and hurrying off to find him met Tyrker +coming back twisting his eyes about—a trick of his—smacking his lips and +talking German to himself in high excitement. And when they get him to +talk Norse again, he says, ‘I have not been far, but I have news for you. +I have found vines and grapes!’ ‘Is that true, foster-father?’ says +Leif. ‘True it is,’ says the old German, ‘for I was brought up where +there was never any lack of them.’ The saga—as given by Rafn—has a +detailed description of this quaint personage’s appearance; and it would +not be amiss if American wine-growers should employ an American +sculptor—and there are great American sculptors—to render that +description into marble, and set up little Tyrker in some public place, +as the Silenus of the New World. + +Thus the first cargoes homeward from Vinland to Greenland had been of +timber and of raisins, and of vine-stocks which were not like to thrive. + +And more. Beyond Vinland the Good there was said to be another land, +Whiteman’s Land—or Ireland the Mickle, as some called it. For these +Norse traders from Limerick had found Ari Marson, and Ketla of Ruykjanes, +supposed to have been long since drowned at sea, and said that the people +had made him and Ketla chiefs, and baptised Ari. What is all this? and +what is this, too, which the Esquimaux children taken in Markland told +the Northmen, of a land beyond them where the folk wore white clothes, +and carried flags on poles? Are these all dreams? or was some part of +that great civilisation, the relics whereof your antiquarians find in so +many parts of the United States, still in existence some 900 years ago; +and were these old Norse cousins of ours upon the very edge of it? Be +that as it may, how nearly did these fierce Vikings, some of whom seemed +to have sailed far south along the shore, become aware that just beyond +them lay a land of fruits and spices, gold, and gems? The adverse +current of the Gulf Stream, it may be, would have long prevented their +getting past the Bahamas into the Gulf of Mexico; but, sooner or later, +some storm must have carried a Greenland viking to San Domingo, or to +Cuba; and then, as has been well said, some Scandinavian dynasty might +have sat upon the throne of Mexico. + +These stories are well known to antiquarians. They may be found, almost +all of them, in Professor Rafn’s _Antiquitates Americanæ_. The action in +them stands out often so clear and dramatic, that the internal evidence +of historic truth is irresistible. Thorvald, who, when he saw what seems +to be, they say, the bluff head of Alderton at the south-east end of +Boston Bay, said, ‘Here should I like to dwell,’ and, shot by an +Esquimaux arrow, bade bury him on that place, with a cross at his head +and a cross at his feet, and call the place Cross Ness for evermore; +Gudrida, the magnificent widow, who wins hearts and sees strange deeds +from Iceland to Greenland, and Greenland to Vinland and back, and at +last, worn out and sad, goes off on a pilgrimage to Rome; Helgi and +Finnbogi, the Norwegians, who, like our Arctic voyagers in after times, +devise all sorts of sports and games to keep the men in humour during the +long winter at Hope; and last, but not least, the terrible Freydisa, who +when the Norse are seized with a sudden panic at the Esquimaux, and flee +from them, as they had three weeks before fled from Thorfinn’s bellowing +bull, turns, when so weak that she cannot escape, single-handed on the +savages, and catching up a slain man’s sword, puts them all to flight +with her fierce visage and fierce cries—Freydisa the Terrible, who, in +another voyage, persuades her husband to fall on Helgi and Finnbogi, when +asleep, and murder them and all their men; and then, when he will not +murder the five women too, takes up an axe and slays them all herself, +and getting back to Greenland, when the dark and unexplained tale comes +out, lives unpunished, but abhorred henceforth. All these folks, I say, +are no phantoms, but realities; at least, if I can judge of internal +evidence. + +But, beyond them, and hovering on the verge of Mythus and fairy land, +there is a ballad called ‘Finn the Fair,’ and how + + An upland Earl had twa braw sons, + My story to begin; + The tane was hight Haldane the strong, + The tither was winsome Finn. + +and so forth; which was still sung, with other ‘rimur,’ or ballads, in +the Faroes, at the end of the last century. Professor Rafn has inserted +it, because it talks of Vinland as a well-known place, and because the +brothers are sent by the princess to slay American kings; but that Rime +has another value. + +It is of a beauty so perfect, and yet so like the old Scotch ballads in +its heroic conception of love, and in all its forms and its qualities, +that it is one proof more, to any student of early European poetry, that +we and these old Norsemen are men of the same blood. Your own Professor +Longfellow may know it far better than I, who am no Norse scholar. But, +if he does, might I beg him to translate it some day, as none but he can +translate? It is so sad, that no tenderness less exquisite than his can +prevent its being painful; and, at least in its denouement, so naive, +that no purity less exquisite than his can prevent its being dreadful. +But the Rime is as worthy of Mr. Longfellow as he is worthy of the Rime. + +If anything more important than is told by Professor Rafn and Mr. Black +{71} be now known to the antiquarians of Massachussets, let me entreat +them to pardon my ignorance. But let me record my opinion that, though +somewhat too much may have been made in past years of certain +rock-inscriptions, and so forth, on this side of the Atlantic, there can +be no reasonable doubt that our own race landed and tried to settle on +the shore of New England six hundred years before their kinsmen, and, in +many cases, their actual descendants, the august Pilgrim Fathers of the +17th century. And so, as I said, a Scandinavian dynasty might have been +seated now upon the throne of Mexico. And how was that strange chance +lost? First, of course, by the length and danger of the coasting voyage. +It was one thing to have, like Columbus and Vespucci, Cortes and Pizarro, +the Azores as a half-way port; another to have Greenland, or even +Iceland. It was one thing to run South West upon Columbus’ track, across +the Mar de Damas, the Ladies Sea, which hardly knows a storm, with the +blazing blue above, the blazing blue below, in an ever-warming climate, +where every breath is life and joy; another to struggle against the fogs +and icebergs, the rocks and currents, of the dreary North Atlantic. No +wonder, then, that the knowledge of Markland, and Vinland, and Whiteman’s +Land died away in a few generations, and became but fire-side sagas for +the winter nights. + +But there were other causes, more honourable to the dogged energy of the +Norse. They were in those very years conquering and settling nearer home +as no other people—unless, perhaps, the old Ionian Greeks, conquered and +settled. + +Greenland, we have seen, they held—the western side at least—and held it +long and well enough to afford, it is said, 2,600 pounds of walrus’ teeth +as yearly tithe to the Pope, besides Peter’s pence, and to build many a +convent, and church, and cathedral, with farms and homesteads round; for +one saga speaks of Greenland as producing wheat of the finest quality. +All is ruined now, perhaps by gradual change of climate. + +But they had richer fields of enterprise than Greenland, Iceland, and the +Faroes. Their boldest outlaws at that very time—whether from Norway, +Sweden, Denmark, or Britain—were forming the imperial life-guard of the +Byzantine Emperor, as the once famous Varangers of Constantinople; and +that splendid epoch of their race was just dawning, of which my lamented +friend, the late Sir Edmund Head, says so well in his preface to Viga +Glum’s Icelandic _Saga_, ‘The Sagas, of which this tale is one, were +composed for the men who have left their mark in every corner of Europe; +and whose language and laws are at this moment important elements in the +speech and institutions of England, America, and Australia. There is no +page of modern history in which the influence of the Norsemen and their +conquests must not be taken into account—Russia, Constantinople, Greece, +Palestine, Sicily, the coasts of Africa, Southern Italy, France, the +Spanish Peninsula, England, Scotland, Ireland, and every rock and island +round them, have been visited, and most of them at one time or the other +ruled, by the men of Scandinavia. The motto on the sword of Roger +Guiscard was a proud one: + + Appulus et Calaber, Siculus mihi servit et Afer.’ + +Every island, says Sir Edmund Head, and truly—for the name of almost +every island on the coast of England, Scotland, and Eastern Ireland, ends +in either _ey_ or _ay_ or _oe_, a Norse appellative, as is the word +island itself—is a mark of its having been, at some time or other, +visited by the Vikings of Scandinavia. + +Norway, meanwhile, was convulsed by war; and what perhaps was of more +immediate consequence, Svend Fork-beard, whom we Englishmen call +Sweyn—the renegade from that Christian Faith which had been forced on him +by his German conqueror, the Emperor Otto II.—with his illustrious son +Cnut, whom we call Canute, were just calling together all the most daring +spirits of the Baltic coasts for the subjugation of England; and when +that great feat was performed, the Scandinavian emigration was paralysed, +probably, for a time by the fearful wars at home. While the King of +Sweden, and St. Olaf Tryggvason, king of Norway, were setting on Denmark +during Cnut’s pilgrimage to Rome, and Cnut, sailing with a mighty fleet +to Norway, was driving St. Olaf into Russia, to return and fall in the +fratricidal battle of Stiklestead—during, strangely enough, a total +eclipse of the sun—Vinland was like enough to remain still uncolonised. +After Cnut’s short-lived triumph—king as he was of Denmark, Norway, +England, and half Scotland, and what not of Wendish Folk inside the +Baltic—the force of the Norsemen seems to have been exhausted in their +native lands. Once more only, if I remember right, did ‘Lochlin,’ really +and hopefully send forth her ‘mailed swarm’ to conquer a foreign land; +and with a result unexpected alike by them and by their enemies. Had it +been otherwise, we might not have been here this day. + +Let me sketch for you once more—though you have heard it, doubtless, many +a time—the tale of that tremendous fortnight which settled the fate of +Britain, and therefore of North America; which decided—just in those +great times when the decision was to be made—whether we should be on a +par with the other civilised nations of Europe, like them the ‘heirs of +all the ages,’ with our share not only of Roman Christianity and Roman +centralisation—a member of the great comity of European nations, held +together in one Christian bond by the Pope—but heirs also of Roman +civilisation, Roman literature, Roman law; and therefore, in due time, of +Greek philosophy and art. No less a question than this, it seems to me, +hung in the balance during that fortnight of autumn, 1066. + +Poor old Edward the Confessor, holy, weak, and sad, lay in his new choir +of Westminster—where the wicked ceased from troubling, and the weary were +at rest. The crowned ascetic had left no heir behind. England seemed as +a corpse, to which all the eagles might gather together; and the +South-English, in their utter need, had chosen for their king the ablest, +and it may be the justest, man in Britain—Earl Harold Godwinsson: +himself, like half the upper classes of England then, of the all-dominant +Norse blood; for his mother was a Danish princess. Then out of Norway, +with a mighty host, came Harold Hardraade, taller than all men, the ideal +Viking of his time. Half-brother of the now dead St. Olaf, severely +wounded when he was but fifteen, at Stiklestead, when Olaf fell, he had +warred and plundered on many a coast. He had been away to Russia to King +Jaroslaf; he had been in the Emperor’s Varanger guard at +Constantinople—and, it was whispered, had slain a lion there with his +bare hands; he had carved his name and his comrades’ in Runic +characters—if you go to Venice you may see them at this day—on the loins +of the great marble lion, which stood in his time not in Venice but in +Athens. And now, king of Norway and conqueror, for the time, of Denmark, +why should he not take England, as Sweyn and Canute took it sixty years +before, when the flower of the English gentry perished at the fatal +battle of Assingdune? If he and his half-barbarous host had conquered, +the civilisation of Britain would have been thrown back, perhaps, for +centuries. But it was not to be. + +England _was_ to be conquered by the Norman; but by the civilised, not +the barbaric; by the Norse who had settled, but four generations before, +in the North East of France under Rou, Rollo, Rolf the Ganger—so-called, +they say, because his legs were so long that, when on horseback, he +touched the ground and seemed to gang, or walk. He and his Norsemen had +taken their share of France, and called it Normandy to this day; and +meanwhile, with that docility and adaptability which marks so often truly +great spirits, they had changed their creed, their language, their +habits, and had become, from heathen and murderous Berserkers, the most +truly civilised people of Europe, and—as was most natural then—the most +faithful allies and servants of the Pope of Rome. So greatly had they +changed, and so fast, that William Duke of Normandy, the +great-great-grandson of Rolf the wild Viking, was perhaps the finest +gentleman, as well as the most cultivated sovereign, and the greatest +statesman and warrior, in all Europe. + +So Harold of Norway came with all his Vikings to Stamford Bridge by York; +and took, by coming, only that which Harold of England promised him, +namely, ‘forasmuch as he was taller than any other man, seven feet of +English ground.’ + +The story of that great battle, told with a few inaccuracies, but told as +only great poets tell, you should read, if you have not read it already, +in the _Heimskringla_ of Snorri Sturluson, the Homer of the North— + + High feast that day held the birds of the air and the beasts of the + field, + White-tailed erne and sallow glede, + Dusky raven, with horny neb, + And the grey deer, the wolf of the wood. + +The bones of the slain, men say, whitened the place for fifty years to +come. + +And remember, that on the same day on which that fight befell—Sept. 27, +1066—William, Duke of Normandy, with all his French-speaking Norsemen, +was sailing across the British Channel, under the protection of a banner +consecrated by the Pope, to conquer that England which the Norse-speaking +Normans could not conquer. + +And now King Harold showed himself a man. He turned at once from the +North of England to the South. He raised the folk of the Southern, as he +had raised those of the Central and Northern shires; and in sixteen +days—after a march which in those times was a prodigious feat—he was +entrenched upon the fatal down which men called Heathfield then, and +Senlac, but Battle to this day—with William and his French Normans +opposite him on Telham hill. + +Then came the battle of Hastings. You all know what befell upon that +day; and how the old weapon was matched against the new—the English axe +against the Norman lance—and beaten only because the English broke their +ranks. If you wish to refresh your memories, read the tale once more in +Mr. Freeman’s _History of England_, or Prof. Creasy’s _Fifteen Decisive +Battles of the World_, or even, best of all, the late Lord Lytton’s +splendid romance of _Harold_. And when you go to England, go, as some of +you may have gone already, to Battle; and there from off the Abbey +grounds, or from Mountjoy behind, look down off what was then ‘The Heathy +Field,’ over the long slopes of green pasture and the rich hop-gardens, +where were no hop-gardens then, and the flat tide-marshes winding between +the wooded heights, towards the southern sea; and imagine for yourselves +the feelings of an Englishman as he contemplates that broad green sloping +lawn, on which was decided the destiny of his native land. Here, right +beneath, rode Taillefer up the slope before them all, singing the song of +Roland, tossing his lance in air and catching it as it fell, with all the +Norse berserker spirit of his ancestors flashing out in him, at the +thought of one fair fight, and then purgatory, or Valhalla—Taillefer +perhaps preferred the latter. Yonder on the left, in that copse where +the red-ochre gully runs, is Sanguelac, the drain of blood, into which +(as the Bayeux tapestry, woven by Matilda’s maids, still shows) the +Norman knights fell, horse and man, till the gully was bridged with +writhing bodies for those who rode after. Here, where you stand—the +crest of the hill marks where it must have been—was the stockade on which +depended the fate of England. Yonder, perhaps, stalked out one English +squire or house-carle after another: tall men with long-handled +battle-axes—one specially terrible, with a wooden helmet which no sword +could pierce—who hewed and hewed down knight on knight, till they +themselves were borne to earth at last. And here, among the trees and +ruins of the garden, kept trim by those who know the treasure which they +own, stood Harold’s two standards of the fighting man and the dragon of +Wessex. And here, close by (for here, for many a century, stood the high +altar of Battle Abbey, where monks sang masses for Harold’s soul), upon +this very spot the Swan-neck found her hero lover’s corpse. ‘Ah,’ says +many an Englishman—and who will blame him for it—‘how grand to have died +beneath that standard on that day!’ Yes, and how right. And yet how +right, likewise, that the Norman’s cry of Dexaie, ‘God Help,’ and not the +English hurrah, should have won that day, till William rode up Mountjoye +in the afternoon to see the English army, terrible even in defeat, +struggling through copse and marsh away toward Brede, and, like +retreating lions driven into their native woods, slaying more in the +pursuit than they slew even in the fight. + +But so it was to be; for so it ought to have been. You, my American +friends, delight, as I have said already, in seeing the old places of the +old country. Go, I beg you, and look at that old place, and if you be +wise, you will carry back from it one lesson: that God’s thoughts are not +as our thoughts; nor His ways as our ways. + +It was a fearful time which followed. I cannot but believe that our +forefathers had been, in some way or other, great sinners, or two such +conquests as Canute’s and William’s would not have fallen on them within +the short space of sixty years. They did not want for courage, as +Stanford Brigg and Hastings showed full well. English swine, their +Norman conquerors called them often enough; but never English cowards. +Their ruinous vice, if we are to trust the records of the time, was what +the old monks called accidia—ἀχηδία—and ranked it as one of the seven +deadly sins: a general careless, sleepy, comfortable habit of mind, which +lets all go its way for good or evil—a habit of mind too often +accompanied, as in the case of the Anglo-Danes, with self-indulgence, +often coarse enough. Huge eaters and huger drinkers, fuddled with ale, +were the men who went down at Hastings—though they went down like +heroes—before the staid and sober Norman out of France. + +But those were fearful times. As long as William lived, ruthless as he +was to all rebels, he kept order and did justice with a strong and steady +hand; for he brought with him from Normandy the instincts of a truly +great statesman. And in his sons’ time matters grew worse and worse. +After that, in the troubles of Stephen’s reign, anarchy let loose tyranny +in its most fearful form, and things were done which recall the cruelties +of the old Spanish conquistadores in America. Scott’s charming romance +of _Ivanhoe_ must be taken, I fear, as a too true picture of English +society in the time of Richard I. + +And what came of it all? What was the result of all this misery and +wrong? + +This, paradoxical as it may seem—that the Norman conquest was the making +of the English people; of the Free Commons of England. + +Paradoxical, but true. First, you must dismiss from your minds the too +common notion that there is now, in England a governing Norman +aristocracy, or that there has been one, at least since the year 1215, +when Magna Charta was won from the Norman John by Normans and by English +alike. For the first victors at Hastings, like the first conquistadores +in America, perished, as the monk chronicles point out, rapidly by their +own crimes; and very few of our nobility can trace their names back to +the authentic Battle Abbey roll. The great majority of the peers have +sprung from, and all have intermarried with, the Commons; and the peerage +has been from the first, and has become more and more as centuries have +rolled on, the prize of success in life. + +The cause is plain. The conquest of England by the Normans was not one +of those conquests of a savage by a civilised race, or of a cowardly race +by a brave race, which results in the slavery of the conquered, and +leaves the gulf of caste between two races, master and slave. That was +the case in France, and resulted, after centuries of oppression, in the +great and dreadful revolution of 1793, which convulsed not only France +but the whole civilised world. But caste, thank God, has never existed +in England, since at least the first generation after the Norman +conquest. + +The vast majority, all but the whole population of England, have been +always free; and free, as they are not where caste exists, to change +their occupations. They could intermarry, if they were able men, into +the ranks above them; as they did sink, if they were unable men, into the +ranks below them. Any man acquainted with the origin of our English +surnames may verify this fact for himself, by looking at the names of a +single parish or a single street of shops. There, jumbled together, he +will find names marking the noblest Saxon or Angle blood—Kenward or +Kenric, Osgood or Osborne, side by side with Cordery or Banister—now +names of farmers in my own parish—or other Norman-French names which may +be, like those two last, in Battle Abbey roll—and side by side the almost +ubiquitous Brown, whose ancestor was probably some Danish or Norwegian +housecarle, proud of his name Biorn the bear, and the ubiquitous Smith or +Smythe, the smiter, whose forefather, whether he now be peasant or peer, +assuredly handled the tongs and hammer at his own forge. This holds true +equally in New England and in Old. When I search through (as I delight +to do) your New England surnames, I find the same jumble of names—West +Saxon, Angle, Danish, Norman, and French-Norman likewise, many of +primæval and heathen antiquity, many of high nobility, all worked +together, as at home, to form the Free Commoners of England. + +If any should wish to know more on this curious and important subject, +let me recommend them to study Ferguson’s _Teutonic Name System_, a book +from which you will discover that some of our quaintest, and seemingly +most plebeian surnames—many surnames, too, which are extinct in England, +but remain in America—are really corruptions of good old Teutonic names, +which our ancestors may have carried in the German Forest, before an +Englishman set foot on British soil; from which he will rise with the +comfortable feeling that we English-speaking men, from the highest to the +lowest, are literally kinsmen. Nay, so utterly made up now is the old +blood-feud between Norseman and Englishman, between the descendants of +those who conquered and those who were conquered, that in the children of +our Prince of Wales, after 800 years, the blood of William of Normandy is +mingled with the blood of the very Harold who fell at Hastings. And so, +by the bitter woes which followed the Norman conquest was the whole +population, Dane, Angle, and Saxon, earl and churl, freeman and slave, +crushed and welded together into one homogeneous mass, made just and +merciful towards each other by the most wholesome of all teachings, a +community of suffering; and if they had been, as I fear they were, a lazy +and a sensual people, were taught + + That life is not as idle ore, + But heated hot with burning fears, + And bathed in baths of hissing tears, + And battered with the strokes of doom + To shape and use. + +But how did these wild Vikings become Christian men? It is a long story. +So staunch a race was sure to be converted only very slowly. Noble +missionaries as Ansgar, Rembert, and Poppo, had worked for 150 years and +more among the heathens of Denmark. But the patriotism of the Norseman +always recoiled, even though in secret, from the fact that they were +German monks, backed by the authority of the German emperor; and many a +man, like Svend Fork-beard, father of the great Canute, though he had the +Kaiser himself for godfather, turned heathen once more, the moment he was +free, because his baptism was the badge of foreign conquest, and neither +pope nor Kaiser should lord it over him, body or soul. St. Olaf, indeed, +forced Christianity on the Norse at the sword’s point, often by horrid +cruelties, and perished in the attempt. But who forced it on the +Norsemen of Scotland, England, Ireland, Neustria, Russia, and all the +Eastern Baltic? It was absorbed and in most cases, I believe, gradually +and willingly, as a gospel and good news to hearts worn out with the +storm of their own passions. And whence came their Christianity? Much +of it, as in the case of the Danes, and still more of the French Normans, +came direct from Rome, the city which, let them defy its influence as +they would, was still the fount of all theology, as well as of all +civilisation. But I must believe that much of it came from that +mysterious ancient Western Church, the Church of St. Patric, St. Bridget, +St. Columba, which had covered with rude cells and chapels the rocky +islets of the North Atlantic, even to Iceland itself. Even to Iceland; +for when that island was first discovered, about A.D. 840, the Norsemen +found in an isle, on the east and west and elsewhere, Irish books and +bells and wooden crosses, and named that island Papey, the isle of the +popes—some little colony of monks, who lived by fishing, and who are said +to have left the land when the Norsemen settled in it. Let us believe, +for it is consonant with reason and experience, that the sight of those +poor monks, plundered and massacred again and again by the ‘mailed swarms +of Lochlin,’ yet never exterminated, but springing up again in the same +place, ready for fresh massacre, a sacred plant which God had planted, +and which no rage of man could trample out—let us believe, I say, that +that sight taught at last to the buccaneers of the old world that there +was a purer manliness, a loftier heroism, than the ferocious +self-assertion of the Berserker, even the heroism of humility, +gentleness, self-restraint, self-sacrifice. That there was a strength +which was made perfect in weakness; a glory, not of the sword but of the +cross. We will believe that that was the lesson which the Norsemen +learnt, after many a wild and bloodstained voyage, from the monks of Iona +or of Derry, which caused the building of such churches as that which +Sightrys, king of Dublin, raised about the year 1030, not in the Norse +but in the Irish quarter of Dublin: a sacred token of amity between the +new settlers and the natives on the ground of a common faith. Let us +believe, too, that the influence of woman was not wanting in the good +work—that the story of St. Margaret and Malcolm Canmore was repeated, +though inversely, in the case of many a heathen Scandinavian jarl, who, +marrying the princely daughter of some Scottish chieftain, found in her +creed at last something more precious than herself; while his brother or +his cousin became, at Dublin or Wexford or Waterford, the husband of some +saffron-robed Irish princess, ‘fair as an elf,’ as the old saying was; +‘some maiden of the three transcendent hues,’ of whom the old book of +Linane says— + + Red as the blood which flowed from stricken deer, + White as the snow on which that blood ran down, + Black as the raven who drank up that blood. + +—and possibly, as in the case of Brian Boru’s mother, had given his +fair-haired sister in marriage to some Irish prince, and could not resist +the spell of their new creed, and the spell too, it may be, of some +sister of theirs who had long given up all thought of earthly marriage to +tend the undying fire of St. Bridget among the consecrated virgins of +Kildare. + +I am not drawing from mere imagination. That such things must have +happened, and happened again and again, is certain to anyone who knows, +even superficially, the documents of that time. And I doubt not that, in +manners as well as in religion, the Norse were humanised and civilised by +their contact with the Celts, both in Scotland and in Ireland, Both +peoples had valour, intellect, imagination: but the Celt had that which +the burly angular Norse character, however deep and stately, and however +humorous, wanted; namely, music of nature, tenderness, grace, rapidity, +playfulness; just the qualities, combining with the Scandinavian (and in +Scotland with the Angle) elements of character which have produced, in +Ireland and in Scotland, two schools of lyric poetry second to none in +the world. + +And so they were converted to what was then a dark and awful creed; a +creed of ascetic self-torture and purgatorial fires for those who escaped +the still more dreadful, because endless, doom of the rest of the human +race. But, because it was a sad creed, it suited better men, who had, +when conscience reawakened in them, but too good reason to be sad; and +the minsters and cloisters which sprang up over the whole of Northern +Europe, and even beyond it, along the dreary western shores of Greenland +itself, are the symbols of a splendid repentance for their own sins and +for the sins of their forefathers. + +Gudruna herself, of whom I spoke just now, one of those old Norse +heroines who helped to discover America, though a historic personage, is +a symbolic one likewise, and the pattern of a whole class. She, too, +after many journeys to Iceland, Greenland, and Winland, goes on a +pilgrimage to Rome, to get, I presume, absolution from the Pope himself +for all the sins of her strange, rich, stormy, wayward life. + +Have you not read—many of you surely have—La Motte Fouqué’s _Romance of +Sintram_? It embodies all that I would say. It is the spiritual drama +of that early middle age; very sad, morbid if you will, but true to fact. +The Lady Verena ought not, perhaps, to desert her husband, and shut +herself up in a cloister. But so she would have done in those old days. +And who shall judge her harshly for so doing? When the brutality of the +man seems past all cure, who shall blame the woman if she glides away +into some atmosphere of peace and purity, to pray for him whom neither +warnings nor caresses will amend? It is a sad book, _Sintram_. And yet +not too sad. For they were a sad people, those old Norse forefathers of +ours. Their Christianity was sad; their minsters sad; there are few +sadder, though few grander, buildings than a Norman church. + +And yet, perhaps, their Christianity did not make them sad. It was but +the other and the healthier side of that sadness which they had as +heathens. Read which you will of the old sagas—heathen or +half-Christian—the Eyrbiggia, Viga Glum, Burnt Niall, Grettir the Strong, +and, above all, Snorri Sturluson’s _Heimskringla_ itself—and you will see +at once how sad they are. There is, in the old sagas, none of that +enjoyment of life which shines out everywhere in Greek poetry, even +through its deepest tragedies. Not in complacency with Nature’s beauty, +but in the fierce struggle with her wrath, does the Norseman feel +pleasure. Nature to him was not, as in Mr. Longfellow’s exquisite poem, +{91} the kind old nurse, to take him on her knee and whisper to him, ever +anew, the story without an end. She was a weird witch-wife, mother of +storm demons and frost giants, who must be fought with steadily, warily, +wearily, over dreary heaths and snow-capped fells, and rugged nesses and +tossing sounds, and away into the boundless sea—or who could live?—till +he got hardened in the fight into ruthlessness of need and greed. The +poor strip of flat strath, ploughed and re-ploughed again in the short +summer days, would yield no more; or wet harvests spoiled the crops, or +heavy snows starved the cattle. And so the Norseman launched his ships +when the lands were sown in spring, and went forth to pillage or to +trade, as luck would have, to summerted, as he himself called it; and +came back, if he ever came, in autumn to the women to help at +harvest-time, with blood upon his hand. But had he staid at home, blood +would have been there still. Three out of four of them had been mixed up +in some man-slaying, or had some blood-feud to avenge among their own +kin. + +The whole of Scandinavia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Orkney, and the rest, +remind me ever of that terrible picture of the great Norse painter, +Tiddeman, in which two splendid youths, lashed together, in true Norse +duel fashion by the waist, are hewing each other to death with the short +axe, about some hot words over their ale. The loss of life, and that of +the most gallant of the young, in those days must have been enormous. If +the vitality of the race had not been even more enormous, they must have +destroyed each other, as the Red Indians have done, off the face of the +earth. They lived these Norsemen, not to live—they lived to die. For +what cared they? Death—what was death to them! what it was to the +Jomsburger Viking, who, when led out to execution, said to the headsman, +‘Die! with all pleasure. We used to question in Jomsburg whether a man +felt when his head was off? Now I shall know; but if I do, take care, +for I shall smite thee with my knife. And meanwhile, spoil not this long +hair of mine; it is so beautiful.’ + +But, oh! what waste. What might not these men have done if they had +sought peace, not war; if they had learned a few centuries sooner to do +justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with their God? + +And yet one loves them, blood-stained as they are. Your own poets, men +brought up under circumstances, under ideas the most opposite to theirs, +love them, and cannot help it. And why? It is not merely for their bold +daring, it is not merely for their stern endurance; nor again that they +had in them that shift and thrift, those steady and common-sense business +habits, which made their noblest men not ashamed to go on voyages of +merchandise. Nor is it, again, that grim humour—humour as of the modern +Scotch—which so often flashes out into an actual jest, but more usually +underlies unspoken all their deeds. Is it not rather that these men are +our forefathers? that their blood runs in the veins of perhaps three men +out of four in any general assembly, whether in America or in Britain? +Startling as the assertion may be, I believe it to be strictly true. + +Be that as it may, I cannot read the stories of your western men, the +writings of Bret Harte, or Colonel John Hay, for instance, without +feeling at every turn that there are the old Norse alive again, beyond +the very ocean which they first crossed, 850 years ago. + +Let me try to prove my point, and end with a story, as I began with one. + +It is just 30 years before the Norman conquest of England, the evening of +the battle of Sticklestead. St. Olaf’s corpse is still lying unburied on +the hillside. The reforming and Christian king has fallen in the attempt +to force Christianity and despotism on the Conservative and half-heathen +party—the free bonders or yeoman-farmers of Norway. Thormod, his +poet,—the man, as his name means, of thunder mood—who has been standing +in the ranks, at last has an arrow in his left side. He breaks off the +shaft, and thus sore wounded goes up, when all is lost, to a farm where +is a great barn full of wounded. One Kimbe comes, a man out of the +opposite or bonder part. ‘There is great howling and screaming in +there,’ he says. ‘King Olaf’s men fought bravely enough: but it is a +shame brisk young lads cannot bear their wounds. On what side wert thou +in the fight?’ ‘On the best side,’ says the beaten Thormod. Kimbe sees +that Thormod has a gold bracelet on his arm. ‘Thou art surely a king’s +man. Give me thy gold ring and I will hide thee, ere the bonders kill +thee.’ + +Thormod said, ‘Take it, if thou canst get it. I have lost that which is +worth more;’ and he stretched out his left hand, and Kimbe tried to take +it. But Thormod, swinging his sword, cut off his hand; and it is said +Kimbe behaved no better over his wound than those he had been blaming. + +Then Thormod went into the barn; and after he had sung his song there in +praise of his dead king, he went into an inner room, where was a fire, +and water warming, and a handsome girl binding up men’s wounds. And he +sat down by the door; and one said to him ‘Why art thou so dead pale? +Why dost thou not call for the leech?’ Then sung Thormod— + + I am not blooming; and the fair + And slender maiden loves to care + For blooming youths. Few care for me, + With Fenri’s gold meal I can’t fee; + +and so forth, improvising after the old Norse fashion. + +Then Thormod got up and went to the fire, and stood and warmed himself. +And the nurse-girl said to him, ‘Go out man, and bring some of the +split-firewood which lies outside the door.’ He went out and brought an +armful of wood and threw it down. Then the nurse-girl looked him in the +face and said, ‘Dreadful pale is this man. Why art thou so?’ Then sang +Thormod— + + Thou wonderest, sweet bloom, at me, + A man so hideous to see. + The arrow-drift o’ertook me, girl, + A fine-ground arrow in the whirl + Went through me, and I feel the dart + Sits, lovely lass, too near my heart. + +The girl said, ‘Let me see thy wound.’ Then Thormod sat down, and the +girl saw his wounds, and that which was in his side, and saw that there +was a piece of iron in it; but could not tell where it had gone. In a +stone pot she had leeks and other herbs, and boiled them, and gave the +wounded men of it to eat. But Thormod said, ‘Take it away; I have no +appetite now for my broth.’ Then she took a great pair of tongs and +tried to pull out the iron; but the wound was swelled, and there was too +little to lay hold of. Now said Thormod, ‘Cut in so deep that thou canst +get at the iron, and give me the tongs.’ She did as he said. Then took +Thormod the gold bracelet off his hand and gave it the nurse-girl, and +bade her do with it what she liked. + +‘It is a good man’s gift,’ said he. ‘King Olaf gave me the ring this +morning.’ + +Then Thormod took the tongs and pulled the iron out. But on the iron was +a barb, on which hung flesh from the heart, some red, some white. When +he saw that, he said, ‘The king has fed us well. I am fat, even to the +heart’s roots.’ And so leant back and was dead. + +I shall not insult your intelligence by any comment or even epithet of my +own. I shall but ask you was not this man your kinsman? Does not the +story sound, allowing for all change of manners as well as of time and +place, like a scene out of your own Bret Harte or Colonel John Hay’s +writings; a scene of the dry humour the rough heroism of your own far +West? Yes, as long as you have your _Jem Bludsos_ and _Tom Flynns of +Virginia City_, the old Norse blood is surely not extinct, the old Norse +spirit is not dead. + + + + +LECTURE IV. +THE SERVANT OF THE LORD. + + +I wish to speak to you to-night about one of those old despotic empires +which were in every case the earliest known form of civilisation. Were I +minded to play the cynic or the mountebank, I should choose some corrupt +and effete despotism, already grown weak and ridiculous by its decay—as +did at last the Roman and then the Byzantine Empire—and, after raising a +laugh at the expense of the old system say, See what a superior people +you are now,—how impossible, under free and enlightened institutions, is +anything so base and so absurd as went on, even in despotic France before +the Revolution of 1793. Well that would be on the whole true, thank God; +but what need is there to say it? + +Let us keep our scorn for our own weaknesses, our blame for our own sins, +certain that we shall gain more instruction, though not more amusement, +by hunting out the good which is in anything than by hunting out its +evil. For me, true to that which I proposed in my last lecture, I have +chosen, not the worst, but the best despotism which I could find in +history, founded and ruled by a truly heroic personage, one whose name +has become a proverb and a legend, that so I might lift up your minds, +even by the contemplation of an old Eastern empire, to see that it, too, +could be a work and ordinance of God, and its hero the servant of the +Lord. For we are almost bound to call Cyrus, the founder of the Persian +Empire, by this august title for two reasons—First, because the Hebrew +Scriptures call him so; and next, because he proved himself to be such by +his actions and their consequences—at least in the eyes of those who +believe, as I do, in a far-seeing and far-reaching Providence, by which +all human history is— + + Bound by gold chains unto the throne of God. + +His work was very different from any that need be done, or can be done, +in these our days. But while we thank God that such work is now as +unnecessary as impossible; we may thank God likewise that, when such work +was necessary and possible, a man was raised up to do it; and to do it, +as all accounts assert, better, perhaps, than it had ever been done +before or since. + +True, the old conquerors, who absorbed nation after nation, tribe after +tribe, and founded empires on their ruins, are now, I trust, about to be +replaced, throughout the world, as here and in Britain at home, by free +self-governed peoples— + + The old order changeth, giving place to the new; + And God fulfils Himself in many ways, + Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. + +And that custom of conquest and empire and transplantation did more than +once corrupt the world. And yet in it, too, God may have more than once +fulfilled his own designs, as He did, if Scripture is to be believed, in +Cyrus, well surnamed the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire some +2,400 years ago. For these empires, it must be remembered, did at least +that which the Roman Empire did among a scattered number of savage +tribes, or separate little races, hating and murdering each other, +speaking different tongues, and worshipping different gods, and losing +utterly the sense of a common humanity, till they looked on the people +who dwelt in the next valley as fiends, to be sacrificed, if caught, to +their own fiends at home. Among such as these, empires did introduce +order, law, common speech, common interest, the notion of nationality and +humanity. They, as it were, hammered together the fragments of the human +race till they had moulded them into one. They did it cruelly, clumsily, +ill: but was there ever work done on earth, however noble, which was +not—alas, alas!—done somewhat ill? + +Let me talk to you a little about the old hero. He and his hardy +Persians should be specially interesting to us. For in them first does +our race, the Aryan race, appear in authentic history. In them first did +our race give promise of being the conquering and civilising race of the +future world. And to the conquests of Cyrus—so strangely are all great +times and great movements of the human family linked to each other—to his +conquests, humanly speaking, is owing the fact that you are here, and I +am speaking to you at this moment. + +It is an oft-told story: but so grand a one that I must sketch it for +you, however clumsily, once more. + +In that mountain province called Farsistan, north-east of what we now +call Persia, the dwelling place of the Persians, there dwelt, in the +sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, a hardy tribe, of the purest +blood of Iran, a branch of the same race as the Celtic, Teutonic, Greek, +and Hindoo, and speaking a tongue akin to theirs. They had wandered +thither, said their legends, out of the far north-east, from off some +lofty plateau of Central Asia, driven out by the increasing cold, which +left them but two months of summer to ten of winter. + +They despised at first—would that they had despised always!—the luxurious +life of the dwellers in the plains, and the effeminate customs of the +Medes—a branch of their own race who had conquered and intermarried with +the Turanian, or Finnish tribes; and adopted much of their creed, as well +as of their morals, throughout their vast but short-lived Median Empire. +‘Soft countries,’ said Cyrus himself—so runs the tale—‘gave birth to +small men. No region produced at once delightful fruits and men of a +warlike spirit.’ Letters were to them, probably then unknown. They +borrowed them in after years, as they borrowed their art, from +Babylonians, Assyrians, and other Semitic nations whom they conquered. +From the age of five to that of twenty, their lads were instructed but in +two things—to speak the truth and to shoot with the bow. To ride was the +third necessary art, introduced, according to Xenophon, after they had +descended from their mountain fastnesses to conquer the whole East. + +Their creed was simple enough. Ahura Mazda—Ormuzd, as he has been called +since—was the one eternal Creator, the source of all light and life and +good. He spake his word, and it accomplished the creation of heaven, +before the water, before the earth, before the cow, before the tree, +before the fire, before man the truthful, before the Devas and beasts of +prey, before the whole existing universe; before every good thing created +by Ahura Mazda and springing from Truth. + +He needed no sacrifices of blood. He was to be worshipped only with +prayers, with offerings of the inspiring juice of the now unknown herb +Homa, and by the preservation of the sacred fire, which, understand, was +not he, but the symbol—as was light and the sun—of the good spirit—of +Ahura Mazda. They had no images of the gods, these old Persians; no +temples, no altars, so says Herodotus, and considered the use of them a +sign of folly. They were, as has been well said of them, the Puritans of +the old world. When they descended from their mountain fastnesses, they +became the iconoclasts of the old world; and the later Isaiah, out of the +depths of national shame, captivity and exile, saw in them +brother-spirits, the chosen of the Lord, whose hero Cyrus, the Lord was +holding by his right hand, till all the foul superstitions and foul +effeminacies of the rotten Semitic peoples of the East, and even of Egypt +itself, should be crushed, though alas! only for a while, by men who felt +that they had a commission from the God of light and truth and purity, to +sweep out all that with the besom of destruction. + +But that was a later inspiration. In earlier, and it may be happier, +times, the duty of the good man was to strive against all evil, disorder, +uselessness, incompetence in their more simple forms. ‘He therefore is a +holy man,’ says Ormuzd in the Zend-avesta, ‘who has built a dwelling on +the earth, in which he maintains fire, cattle, his wife, his children, +and flocks and herds; he who makes the earth produce barley, he who +cultivates the fruits of the soil, cultivates purity; he advances the law +of Ahura Mazda as much as if he had offered a hundred sacrifices.’ + +To reclaim the waste, to till the land, to make a corner of the earth +better than they found it, was to these men to rescue a bit of Ormuzd’s +world out of the usurped dominion of Ahriman; to rescue it from the +spirit of evil and disorder for its rightful owner, the Spirit of Order +and of Good. + +For they believed in an evil spirit, these old Persians. Evil was not +for them a lower form of good. With their intense sense of the +difference between right and wrong it could be nothing less than hateful; +to be attacked, exterminated, as a personal enemy, till it became to them +at last impersonate and a person. + +Zarathustra, the mystery of evil, weighed heavily on them and on their +great prophet, Zoroaster—splendour of gold, as I am told his name +signifies—who lived, no man knows clearly when or clearly where, but who +lived and lives for ever, for his works follow him. He, too, tried to +solve for his people the mystery of evil; and if he did not succeed, who +has succeeded yet? Warring against Ormuzd, Ahura Mazda, was Ahriman, +Angra Mainyus, literally the being of an evil mind, the ill-conditioned +being. He was labouring perpetually to spoil the good work of Ormuzd +alike in nature and in man. He was the cause of the fall of man, the +tempter, the author of misery and death; he was eternal and uncreate as +Ormuzd was. But that, perhaps, was a corruption of the purer and older +Zoroastrian creed. With it, if Ahriman were eternal in the past, he +would not be eternal in the future. Somehow, somewhen, somewhere, in the +day when three prophets—the increasing light, the increasing truth, and +the existing truth—should arise and give to mankind the last three books +of the Zend-avesta, and convert all mankind to the pure creed, then evil +should be conquered, the creation become pure again, and Ahriman vanish +for ever; and, meanwhile, every good man was to fight valiantly for +Ormuzd, his true lord, against Ahriman and all his works. + +Men who held such a creed, and could speak truth and draw the bow, what +might they not do when the hour and the man arrived? They were not a +_big_ nation. No; but they were a great nation, even while they were +eating barley-bread and paying tribute to their conquerors the Medes, in +the sterile valleys of Farsistan. + +And at last the hour and the man came. The story is half +legendary—differently told by different authors. Herodotus has one tale, +Xenophon another. The first, at least, had ample means of information. +Astyages is the old shah of the Median Empire, then at the height of its +seeming might and splendour and effeminacy. He has married his daughter, +the princess Mandane, to Cambyses, seemingly a vassal-king or prince of +the pure Persian blood. One night the old man is troubled with a dream. +He sees a vine spring from his daughter, which overshadows all Asia. He +sends for the Magi to interpret; and they tell him that Mandane will have +a son who will reign in his stead. Having sons of his own, and fearing +for the succession, he sends for Mandane, and, when her child is born, +gives it to Harpagus, one of his courtiers, to be slain. The courtier +relents, and hands it over to a herdsman, to be exposed on the mountains. +The herdsman relents in turn, and brings the babe up as his own child. + +When the boy, who goes by the name of Agradates, is grown, he is at play +with the other herd-boys, and they choose him for a mimic king. Some he +makes his guards, some he bids build houses, some carry his messages. +The son of a Mede of rank refuses, and Agradates has him seized by his +guards and chastised with the whip. The ancestral instincts of command +and discipline are showing early in the lad. + +The young gentleman complains to his father, the father to the old king, +who of course sends for the herdsman and his boy. The boy answers in a +tone so exactly like that in which Xenophon’s Cyrus would have answered, +that I must believe that both Xenophon’s Cyrus and Herodotus’ Cyrus (like +Xenophon’s Socrates and Plato’s Socrates) are real pictures of a real +character; and that Herodotus’ story, though Xenophon says nothing of it, +is true. + +He has done nothing, the noble boy says, but what was just. He had been +chosen king in play, because the boys thought him most fit. The boy whom +he had chastised was one of those who chose him. All the rest obeyed: +but he would not, till at last he got his due reward. ‘If I deserve +punishment for that,’ says the boy, ‘I am ready to submit.’ + +The old king looks keenly and wonderingly at the young king, whose +features seem somewhat like his own. Likely enough in those days, when +an Iranian noble or prince would have a quite different cast of +complexion and of face from a Turanian herdsman. A suspicion crosses +him; and by threats of torture he gets the truth from the trembling +herdsman. + +To the poor wretch’s rapture the old king lets him go unharmed. He has a +more exquisite revenge to take, and sends for Harpagus, who likewise +confesses the truth. The wily old tyrant has naught but gentle words. +It is best as it is. He has been very sorry himself for the child, and +Mandane’s reproaches had gone to his heart. ‘Let Harpagus go home and +send his son to be a companion to the new-found prince. To-night there +will be great sacrifices in honour of the child’s safety, and Harpagus is +to be a guest at the banquet.’ + +Harpagus comes; and after eating his fill, is asked how he likes the +king’s meat? He gives the usual answer; and a covered basket is put +before him, out of which he is to take—in Median fashion—what he likes. +He finds in it the head and hands and feet of his own son. Like a true +Eastern he shows no signs of horror. The king asks him if he knew what +flesh he had been eating. He answers that he knew perfectly. That +whatever the king did pleased him. + +Like an Eastern courtier, he knew how to dissemble, but not to forgive, +and bided his time. The Magi, to their credit, told Astyages that his +dream had been fulfilled, that Cyrus—as we must now call the foundling +prince—had fulfilled it by becoming a king in play, and the boy is let to +go back to his father and his hardy Persian life. But Harpagus does not +leave him alone, nor perhaps, do his own thoughts. He has wrongs to +avenge on his grandfather. And it seems not altogether impossible to the +young mountaineer. + +He has seen enough of Median luxury to despise it and those who indulge +in it. He has seen his own grandfather with his cheeks rouged, his +eyelids stained with antimony, living a womanlike life, shut up from all +his subjects in the recesses of a vast seraglio. + +He calls together the mountain rulers; makes friends with Tigranes, an +Armenian prince, a vassal of the Mede, who has his wrongs likewise to +avenge. And the two little armies of foot-soldiers—the Persians had no +cavalry—defeat the innumerable horsemen of the Mede, take the old king, +keep him in honourable captivity, and so change, one legend says, in a +single battle, the fortunes of the whole East. + +And then begins that series of conquests of which we know hardly +anything, save the fact that they were made. The young mountaineer and +his playmates, whom he makes his generals and satraps, sweep onward +towards the West, teaching their men the art of riding, till the Persian +cavalry becomes more famous than the Median had been. They gather to +them, as a snow-ball gathers in rolling, the picked youth of every tribe +whom they overcome. They knit these tribes to them in loyalty and +affection by that righteousness—that truthfulness and justice—for which +Isaiah in his grandest lyric strains has made them illustrious to all +time; which Xenophon has celebrated in like manner in that exquisite book +of his—the _Cyropædia_. The great Lydian kingdom of Crœsus—Asia Minor as +we call it now—goes down before them. Babylon itself goes down, after +that world-famed siege which ended in Belshazzar’s feast; and when Cyrus +died—still in the prime of life, the legends seem to say—he left a +coherent and well-organised empire, which stretched from the +Mediterranean to Hindostan. + +So runs the tale, which to me, I confess, sounds probable and rational +enough. It may not do so to you; for it has not to many learned men. +They are inclined to ‘relegate it into the region of myth;’ in plain +English, to call old Herodotus a liar, or at least a dupe. What means +those wise men can have at this distance of more than 2000 years, of +knowing more about the matter than Herodotus, who lived within 100 years +of Cyrus, I for myself, cannot discover. And I say this without the +least wish to disparage these hypercritical persons. For there are—and +more there ought to be, as long as lies and superstitions remain on this +earth—a class of thinkers who hold in just suspicion all stories which +savour of the sensational, the romantic, even the dramatic. They know +the terrible uses to which appeals to the fancy and the emotions have +been applied, and are still applied to enslave the intellects, the +consciences, the very bodies of men and women. They dread so much from +experience the abuse of that formula, that a thing is so beautiful it +must be true, that they are inclined to reply, ‘Rather let us say boldly, +it is so beautiful that it cannot be true. Let us mistrust, or even +refuse to believe _à priori_, and at first sight, all startling, +sensational, even poetic tales, and accept nothing as history, which is +not as dull as the ledger of a dry goods’ store.’ But I think that +experience, both in nature and in society, are against that ditch-water +philosophy. The weather, being governed by laws, ought always to be +equable and normal, and yet you have whirlwinds, droughts, thunderstorms. +The share-market, being governed by laws, ought to be always equable and +normal, and yet you have startling transactions, startling panics, +startling disclosures, and a whole sensational romance of commercial +crime and folly. Which of us has lived to be fifty years old, without +having witnessed in private life sensation tragedies, alas! sometimes too +fearful to be told, or at least sensational romances, which we shall take +care not to tell, because we shall not be believed? Let the ditch-water +philosophy say what it will, human life is not a ditch, but a wild and +roaring river, flooding its banks, and eating out new channels with many +a landslip. It is a strange world, and man, a strange animal, guided, it +is true, usually by most commonplace motives; but, for that reason, ready +and glad at times to escape from them and their dulness and baseness; to +give vent, if but for a moment, in wild freedom, to that demoniac +element, which, as Goethe says, underlies his nature and all nature; and +to prefer for an hour, to the normal and respectable ditch-water, a +bottle of champagne or even a carouse on fire-water, let the consequences +be what they may. + +How else shall we explain such a phenomenon as those old crusades? Were +they undertaken for any purpose, commercial or other? Certainly not for +lightening an overburdened population. Nay, is not the history of your +own Mormons, and their exodus into the far West, one of the most +startling instances which the world has seen for several centuries, of +the unexpected and incalculable forces which lie hid in man? Believe me, +man’s passions, heated to igniting point, rather than his prudence cooled +down to freezing point, are the normal causes of all great human +movement. And a truer law of social science than any that political +economists are wont to lay down, is that old ‘Dov’ é la Donna’ of the +Italian judge, who used to ask, as a preliminary to every case, civil or +criminal, which was brought before him, ‘Dov’ é la Donna?’ ‘Where is the +lady?’ certain, like a wise old gentleman, that a woman was most probably +at the bottom of the matter. + +Strangeness? Romance? Did any of you ever read—if you have not you +should read—Archbishop Whately’s _Historic Doubts about the Emperor +Napoleon the First_? Therein the learned and witty Archbishop proved, as +early as 1819, by fair use of the criticism of Mr. Hume and the Sceptic +School, that the whole history of the great Napoleon ought to be treated +by wise men as a myth and a romance, that there is little or no evidence +of his having existed at all; and that the story of his strange successes +and strange defeats was probably invented by our Government in order to +pander to the vanity of the English nation. + +I will say this, which Archbishop Whately, in a late edition, +foreshadows, wittily enough—that if one or two thousand years hence, when +the history of the late Emperor Napoleon the Third, his rise and fall, +shall come to be subjected to critical analysis by future Philistine +historians of New Zealand or Australia, it will be proved by them to be +utterly mythical, incredible, monstrous—and that all the more, the more +the actual facts remain to puzzle their unimaginative brains. What will +they make, two thousand years hence, of the landing at Boulogne with the +tame eagle? Will not that, and stranger facts still, but just as true, +be relegated to the region of myth, with the dream of Astyages, and the +young and princely herdsman playing at king over his fellow-slaves? + +But enough of this. To me, these bits of romance often seem the truest, +as well as the most important, portions of history. + +When old Herodotus tells me how, King Astyages having guarded the +frontier, Harpagus sent a hunter to young Cyrus with a fresh-killed hare, +telling him to open it in private; and how, sewn up in it was the letter, +telling him that the time to rebel was come, I am inclined to say, That +must be true. So beneath the dignity of history, so quaint and +unexpected, it is all the more likely _not_ to have been invented. + +So with that other story—How young Cyrus giving out that his grandfather +had made him general of the Persians, summoned them all, each man with a +sickle in his hand, into a prairie full of thorns, and bade them clear it +in one day; and how when they, like loyal men, had finished, he bade them +bathe, and next day he took them into a great meadow and feasted them +with corn and wine, and all that his father’s farm would yield, and asked +them which day they liked best; and, when they answered as was to be +expected, how he opened his parable and told them, ‘Choose, then, to work +for the Persians like slaves, or to be free with me.’ + +Such a tale sounds to me true. It has the very savour of the parables of +the Old Testament; as have, surely, the dreams of the old Sultan, with +which the tale begins. Do they not put us in mind of the dreams of +Nebuchadnezzar, in the Book of Daniel? + +Such stories are actually so beautiful that they are very likely to be +true. Understand me, I only say likely; the ditch-water view of history +is not all wrong. Its advocates are right in saying great historic +changes are not produced simply by one great person, by one remarkable +event. They have been preparing, perhaps, for centuries. They are the +result of numberless forces, acting according to laws, which might have +been foreseen, and will be foreseen, when the science of History is more +perfectly understood. + +For instance, Cyrus could not have conquered the Median Empire at a +single blow, if first that empire had not been utterly rotten; and next, +if he and his handful of Persians had not been tempered and sharpened, by +long hardihood, to the finest cutting edge. + +Yes, there were all the materials for the catastrophe—the cannon, the +powder, the shot. But to say that the Persians must have conquered the +Medes, even if Cyrus had never lived, is to say, as too many philosophers +seem to me to say, that, given cannon, powder, and shot, it will fire +itself off some day if we only leave it alone long enough. + +It may be so. But our usual experience of Nature and Fact is, that +spontaneous combustion is a rare and exceptional phenomenon; that if a +cannon is to be fired, someone must arise and pull the trigger. And I +believe that in Society and Politics, when a great event is ready to be +done, someone must come and do it—do it, perhaps, half unwittingly, by +some single rash act—like that first fatal shot fired at Fort +Sumter—which makes, as by an electric spark, a whole nation flash into +enduring flame. + +But to return to Cyrus and his Persians. + +I know not whether the _Cyropædia_ is much read in your schools and +universities. But it is one of the books which I should like to see, +either in a translation or its own exquisite Greek, in the hands of every +young man. It is not all fact. It is but a historic romance. But it is +better than history. It is an ideal book, like Sidney’s _Arcadia_ or +Spenser’s _Fairy Queen_—the ideal self-education of an ideal hero. And +the moral of the book—ponder it well, all young men who have the chance +or the hope of exercising authority among your fellow-men, the noble and +most Christian moral of that heathen book is this: that the path to solid +and beneficent influence over our fellow-men lies, not through brute +force, not through cupidity, but through the highest morality; through +justice, truthfulness, humanity, self-denial, modesty, courtesy, and all +which makes man or woman lovely in the eyes of mortals or of God. + +Yes, the _Cyropædia_ is a noble book, about a noble personage. But I +cannot forget that there are nobler words by far concerning that same +noble personage, in the magnificent series of Hebrew Lyrics, which +begins, ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith the Lord’—in which the +inspired poet, watching the rise of Cyrus and his Puritans, and the fall +of Babylon, and the idolatries of the East, and the coming deliverance of +his own countrymen, speaks of the Persian hero in words so grand that +they have been often enough applied, and with all fitness, to one greater +than Cyrus, and than all men:— + + Who raised up the righteous man from the East, + And called him to attend his steps? + Who subdued nations at his presence, + And gave him dominion over kings? + And made them like the dust before his sword, + And the driven stubble before his bow? + He pursueth them, he passeth in safety, + By a way never trodden before by his feet. + Who hath performed and made these things, + Calling the generations from the beginning? + I, Jehovah, the first and the last, I am the same. + + Behold my servant, whom I will uphold; + My chosen, in whom my soul delighteth; + I will make my spirit rest upon him, + And he shall publish judgment to the nations. + He shall not cry aloud, nor clamour, + Nor cause his voice to be heard in the streets. + The bruised reed he shall not break, + And the smoking flax he shall not quench. + He shall publish justice, and establish it. + His force shall not be abated, nor broken, + Until he has firmly seated justice in the earth, + And the distant nations shall wait for his Law. + Thus saith the God, even Jehovah, + Who created the heavens, and stretched them out; + Who spread abroad the earth, and its produce, + I, Jehovah, have called thee for a righteous end, + And I will take hold of thy hand, and preserve thee, + And I will give thee for a covenant to the people, + And for a light to the nations; + To open the eyes of the blind, + To bring the captives out of prison, + And from the dungeon those who dwell in darkness. + I am Jehovah—that is my name; + And my glory will I not give to another, + Nor my praise to the graven idols. + + Who saith to Cyrus—Thou art my shepherd, + And he shall fulfil all my pleasure: + Who saith to Jerusalem—Thou shalt be built; + And to the Temple—Thou shalt be founded. + Thus saith Jehovah to his anointed, + To Cyrus whom I hold fast by his right hand, + That I may subdue nations under him, + And loose the loins of kings; + That I may open before him the two-leaved doors, + And the gates shall not be shut; + I will go before thee + And bring the mountains low. + The gates of brass will I break in sunder, + And the bars of iron hew down. + And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, + And the hoards hid deep in secret places, + That thou mayest know that I am Jehovah. + I have surnamed thee, though thou knowest not me. + I am Jehovah and none else: + Beside me there is no God. + I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me, + That they may know from the rising of the sun, + And from the west, that there is none beside me; + I am Jehovah, and none else; + Forming light, and creating darkness; + Forming peace, and creating evil. + I, Jehovah, make all these. + +This is the Hebrew prophet’s conception of the great Puritan of the Old +World who went forth with such a commission as this, to destroy the idols +of the East, while + + The isles saw that, and feared, + And the ends of the earth were afraid; + They drew near, they came together; + Everyone helped his neighbour, + And said to his brother, Be of good courage. + + The carver encouraged the smith, + He that smoothed with the hammer + Him that smote on the anvil; + Saying of the solder, It is good; + And fixing the idol with nails, lest it be moved; + +But all in vain; for as the poet goes on— + + Bel bowed down, and Nebo stooped; + Their idols were upon the cattle, + A burden to the weary beast. + They stoop, they bow down together; + They could not deliver their own charge; + Themselves are gone into captivity. + +And what, to return, what was the end of the great Cyrus and of his +empire? + +Alas, alas! as with all human glory, the end was not as the beginning. + +We are scarce bound to believe positively the story how Cyrus made one +war too many, and was cut off in the Scythian deserts, falling before the +arrows of mere savages; and how their queen, Tomyris, poured blood down +the throat of the dead corpse, with the words, ‘Glut thyself with the +gore for which thou hast thirsted.’ But it may be true—for Xenophon +states it expressly, and with detail—that Cyrus, from the very time of +his triumph, became an Eastern despot, a sultan or a shah, living apart +from his people in mysterious splendour, in the vast fortified palace +which he built for himself; and imitating and causing his nobles and +satraps to imitate, in all but vice and effeminacy, the very Medes whom +he had conquered. And of this there is no doubt—that his sons and their +empire ran rapidly through that same vicious circle of corruption to +which all despotisms are doomed, and became within 250 years, even as the +Medes, the Chaldeans, the Lydians, whom they had conquered, children no +longer of Ahura Mazda, but of Ahriman, of darkness and not of light, to +be conquered by Alexander and his Greeks even more rapidly and more +shamefully than they had conquered the East. + +This is the short epic of the Persian Empire, ending alas! as all human +epics are wont to end, sadly, if not shamefully. + +But let me ask you, Did I say too much, when I said, that to these +Persians we owe that we are here to-night? + +I do not say that without them we should not have been here. God, I +presume, when He is minded to do anything has more than one way of doing +it. + +But that we are to-night the last link in a chain of causes and effects +which reaches as far back as the emigration of the Persians southward +from the plateau of Pamir, we cannot doubt. + +For see. By the fall of Babylon and its empire the Jews were freed from +their captivity—large numbers of them at least—and sent home to their own +Jerusalem. What motives prompted Cyrus, and Darius after him, to do that +deed? + +Those who like to impute the lowest motives may say if they will, that +Daniel and the later Isaiah found it politic to worship the rising sun, +and flatter the Persian conquerors: and that Cyrus and Darius in turn +were glad to see Jerusalem rebuilt, as an impregnable frontier fortress +between them and Egypt. Be it so; I, who wish to talk of things noble, +pure, lovely and of good report, would rather point you once more to the +magnificent poetry of the later Isaiah which commences at the 40th +chapter of the Book of Isaiah, and say—There, upon the very face of the +document, stands written the fact that the sympathy between the faithful +Persian and the faithful Jew—the two Puritans of the Old World, the two +haters of lies, idolatries, superstitions—was actually as intense as it +ought to have been, as it must have been. + +Be that as it may, the return of the Jews to Jerusalem preserved for us +the Old Testament, while it restored to them a national centre, a sacred +city, like that of Delphi to the Greeks, Rome to the Romans, Mecca to the +Muslim, loyalty to which prevented their being utterly absorbed by the +more civilised Eastern races among whom they had been scattered abroad as +colonies of captives. + +Then another, and a seemingly needful link of cause and effect ensued: +Alexander of Macedon destroyed the Persian Empire, and the East became +Greek, and Alexandria, rather than Jerusalem, became the head-quarters of +Jewish learning. But for that very cause, the Scriptures were not left +inaccessible to the mass of mankind, like the old Pehlevi liturgies of +the Zend-avesta, or the old Sanscrit Vedas, in an obsolete and hieratic +tongue, but were translated into, and continued in, the then all but +world-wide Hellenic speech, which was to the ancient world what French is +to the modern. + +Then the East became Roman, without losing its Greek speech. And under +the wide domination of that later Roman Empire—which had subdued and +organised the whole known world, save the Parthian descendants of those +old Persians, and our old Teutonic forefathers, in their German forests +and on their Scandinavian shores—that Divine book was carried far and +wide, East and West, and South, from the heart of Abyssinia to the +mountains of Armenia, and to the isles of the ocean, beyond Britain +itself to Ireland and to the Hebrides. + +And that book—so strangely coinciding with the old creed of the earlier +Persians—that book, long misunderstood, long overlain by the dust, and +overgrown by the parasitic fungi of centuries, that book it was which +sent to these trans-Atlantic shores the founders of your great nation. +That book gave them their instinct of freedom, tempered by reverence for +Law. That book gave them their hatred of idolatry; and made them not +only say but act upon their own words, with these old Persians and with +the Jewish prophets alike, Sacrifice and burnt-offering thou wouldst not; +then said we, Lo, we come. In the volume of the book it is written of +us, that we come to do thy will, O God. Yes, long and fantastic is the +chain of causes and effects, which links you here to the old heroes who +came down from Central Asia, because the land had grown so wondrous cold, +that there were ten months of winter to two of summer; and when simply +after warmth and life, and food for them and for their flocks, they +wandered forth to found and help to found a spiritual kingdom. + +And even in their migration, far back in these dim and mystic ages, have +we found the earliest link of the long chain? Not so. What if the +legend of the change of climate be the dim recollection of an enormous +physical fact? What if it, and the gradual depopulation of the whole +north of Asia be owing, as geologists now suspect, to the slow and +age-long uprise of the whole of Siberia, thrusting the warm Arctic sea +further and further to the northward, and placing between it and the +Highlands of Thibet an ever-increasing breadth of icy land, destroying +animals, and driving whole races southward, in search of the summer and +the sun? + +What if the first link in the chain, as yet conceivable by man, should be +the cosmic changes in the distribution of land and water, which filled +the mouths of the Siberian rivers with frozen carcases of woolly mammoth +and rhinoceros; and those again, doubt it not, of other revolutions, +reaching back and back, and on and on, into the infinite unknown. Why +not? For so are all human destinies + + Bound with gold chains unto the throne of God. + + + + +LECTURE V. +ANCIENT CIVILISATION. + + +There is a theory abroad in the world just now about the origin of the +human race, which has so many patent and powerful physiological facts to +support it that we must not lightly say that it is absurd or impossible; +and that is, that man’s mortal body and brain were derived from some +animal and ape-like creature. Of that I am not going to speak now. My +subject is—How this creature called man, from whatever source derived, +became civilised, rational, and moral. And I am sorry to say there is +tacked on by many to the first theory, another which does not follow from +it, and which has really nothing to do with it, and it is this—that man, +with all his wonderful and mysterious aspirations, always unfulfilled yet +always precious, at once his torment and his joy, his very hope of +everlasting life—that man, I say, developed himself, unassisted, out of a +state of primæval brutishness, simply by calculations of pleasure and +pain, by observing what actions would pay in the long run and what would +not; and so learnt to conquer his selfishness by a more refined and +extended selfishness, and exchanged his brutality for worldliness, and +then, in a few instances, his worldliness for next-worldliness. I hope I +need not say that I do not believe this theory. If I did, I could not be +a Christian, I think, nor a philosopher either. At least, if I thought +that human civilisation had sprung from such a dunghill as that, I +should, in honour to my race, say nothing about it, here or elsewhere. + +Why talk of the shame of our ancestors? I want to talk of their honour +and glory. I want to talk, if I talk at all, about great times, about +noble epochs, noble movements, noble deeds, and noble folk; about times +in which the human race—it may be through many mistakes, alas! and sin, +and sorrow and bloodshed—struggled up one step higher on those great +stairs which, as we hope, lead upward towards the far-off city of God; +the perfect polity, the perfect civilisation, the perfect religion, which +is eternal in the heavens. + +Of great men, then, and noble deeds I want to speak. I am bound to do so +first, in courtesy to my hearers. For in choosing such a subject I took +for granted a nobleness and greatness of mind in them which can +appreciate and enjoy the contemplation of that which is lofty and heroic, +and that which is useful indeed, though not to the purses merely or the +mouths of men, but to their intellects and spirits; that highest +philosophy which, though she can (as has been sneeringly said of her) +bake no bread, can at least do this—and she alone—make men worthy to eat +the bread which God has given them. + +I am bound to speak on such subjects, because I have never yet met, or +read of, the human company who did not require, now and then at least, +being reminded of such times and such personages—of whatsoever things are +just, pure, true, lovely, and of good report, if there be any manhood and +any praise to think, as St. Paul bids us all, of such things, that we may +keep up in our minds as much as possible a lofty standard, a pure ideal, +instead of sinking to the mere selfish standard which judges all things, +even those of the world to come, by profit and by loss, and into that +sordid frame of mind in which a man grows to believe that the world is +constructed of bricks and timber, and kept going by the price of stocks. + +We are all tempted, and the easier and more prosperous we are, the more +we are tempted, to fall into that sordid and shallow frame of mind. +Sordid even when its projects are most daring, its outward luxuries most +refined; and shallow, even when most acute, when priding itself most on +its knowledge of human nature, and of the secret springs which, so it +dreams, move the actions and make the history of nations and of men. All +are tempted that way, even the noblest-hearted. _Adhæsit pavimento +venter_, says the old psalmist. I am growing like the snake, crawling in +the dust, and eating the dust in which I crawl. I try to lift up my eyes +to the heavens, to the true, the beautiful, the good, the eternal +nobleness which was before all time, and shall be still when time has +past away. But to lift up myself is what I cannot do. Who will help me? +Who will quicken me? as our old English tongue has it. Who will give me +life? The true, pure, lofty human life which I did _not_ inherit from +the primæval ape, which the ape-nature in me is for ever trying to +stifle, and make me that which I know too well I could so easily become—a +cunninger and more dainty-featured brute? Death itself, which seems at +times so fair, is fair because even it may raise me up and deliver me +from the burden of this animal and mortal body— + + ’Tis life, not death, for which I pant; + ’Tis life, whereof my nerves are scant; + More life, and fuller, that I want. + +Man? I am a man not by reason of my bones and muscles, nerves and brain, +which I have in common with apes and dogs and horses. I am a man—thou +art a man or woman—not because we have a flesh—God forbid! but because +there is a spirit in us, a divine spark and ray, which nature did not +give, and which nature cannot take away. And therefore, while I live on +earth, I will live to the spirit, not to the flesh, that I may be, +indeed, a _man_; and this same gross flesh, this animal ape-nature in me, +shall be the very element in me which I will renounce, defy, despise; at +least, if I am minded to be, not a merely higher savage, but a truly +higher civilised man. Civilisation with me shall mean, not more wealth, +more finery, more self-indulgence—even more æsthetic and artistic luxury; +but more virtue, more knowledge, more self-control, even though I earn +scanty bread by heavy toil; and when I compare the Cæsar of Rome or the +great king, whether of Egypt, Babylon, or Persia, with the hermit of the +_Thebaid_, starving in his frock of camel’s hair, with his soul fixed on +the ineffable glories of the unseen, and striving, however wildly and +fantastically, to become an angel and not an ape, I will say the hermit, +and not the Cæsar, is the civilised man. + +There are plenty of histories of civilisation and theories of +civilisation abroad in the world just now, and which profess to show you +how the primæval savage has, or at least may have, become the civilised +man. For my part, with all due and careful consideration, I confess I +attach very little value to any of them: and for this simple reason that +we have no facts. The facts are lost. + +Of course, if you assume a proposition as certainly true, it is easy +enough to prove that proposition to be true, at least to your own +satisfaction. If you assert with the old proverb, that you may make a +silk purse out of a sow’s ear, you will be stupider than I dare suppose +anyone here to be, if you cannot invent for yourselves all the +intermediate stages of the transformation, however startling. And, +indeed, if modern philosophers had stuck more closely to this old +proverb, and its defining verb ‘make,’ and tried to show how some person +or persons—let them be who they may—men, angels, or gods—made the sow’s +ear into the silk purse, and the savage into the sage—they might have +pleaded that they were still trying to keep their feet upon the firm +ground of actual experience. But while their theory is, that the sow’s +ear grew into a silk purse of itself, and yet unconsciously and without +any intention of so bettering itself in life; why, I think that those who +have studied the history which lies behind them, and the poor human +nature which is struggling, and sinning, and sorrowing and failing around +them, and which seems on the greater part of this planet going downwards +and not upwards, and by no means bettering itself, save in the increase +of opera-houses, liquor-bars, and gambling-tables, and that which +pertaineth thereto; then we, I think, may be excused if we say with the +old Stoics—ἐπέχω—I withhold my judgment. I know nothing about the matter +yet; and you, O my imaginative, though learned friends, know I suspect +very little either. + + Eldest of things, Divine Equality: + +so sang poor Shelley, and with a certain truth. For, if, as I believe, +the human race sprang from a single pair, there must have been among +their individual descendants an equality far greater than any which has +been known on earth during historic times. But that equality was at +best, the infantile innocence of the primary race, which faded away in +the race as quickly, alas! as it does in the individual child. +Divine—therefore it was one of the first blessings which man lost; one of +the last, I fear, to which he will return; that to which civilisation, +even at its best yet known, has not yet attained, save here and there for +short periods; but towards which it is striving as an ideal goal, and, as +I trust, not in vain. + +The eldest of things which we see actually as history, is not equality, +but an already developed hideous inequality, trying to perpetuate itself, +and yet by a most divine and gracious law, destroying itself by the very +means which it uses to keep itself alive. + +‘There were giants in the earth in those days, And Nimrod began to be a +mighty one in the earth’— + + A mighty hunter; and his game was man. + +No; it is not equality which we see through the dim mists of bygone ages. + +What we do see, is—I know not whether you will think me superstitious or +old-fashioned, but so I hold—very much what the earlier books of the +Bible show us under symbolic laws. Greek histories, Roman histories, +Egyptian histories, Eastern histories, inscriptions, national epics, +legends, fragments of legends—in the New World as in the Old—all tell the +same story. Not the story without an end, but the story without a +beginning. As in the Hindoo cosmogony, the world stands on an elephant, +and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on—what? No man knows. +I do not know. I only assert deliberately; waiting, as Napoleon says, +till the world come round to me, that the tortoise does not stand—as is +held by certain anthropologists, some honoured by me, some personally +dear to me—upon the savages who chipped flints and fed on mammoth and +reindeer in North-western Europe, shortly after the age of ice, a few +hundred thousand years ago. These sturdy little fellows—the kinsmen +probably of the Esquimaux and Lapps—could have been but the +avant-couriers, or more probably the fugitives from the true mass of +mankind—spreading northward from the Tropics, into climes becoming, after +the long catastrophe of the age of ice, once more genial enough to +support men who knew what decent comfort was, and were strong enough to +get the same, by all means fair or foul. No. The tortoise of the human +race does not stand on a savage. The savage may stand on an ape-like +creature. I do not say that he does not. I do not say that he does. I +do not know; and no man knows. But at least I say that the civilised man +and his world stand not upon creatures like to any savage now known upon +the earth. For first, it seems to be most unlikely; and next, and more +important to an inductive philosopher, there is no proof of it. I see no +savages becoming really civilised men—that is—not merely men who will ape +the outside of our so-called civilisation, even absorb a few of our +ideas; not merely that; but truly civilised men who will think for +themselves, invent for themselves, act for themselves; and when the +sacred lamp of light and truth has been passed into their hands, carry it +on unextinguished, and transmit it to their successors without running +back every moment to get it relighted by those from whom they received +it: and who are bound—remember that—patiently and lovingly to relight it +for them; to give freely to all their fellow-men of that which God has +given to them and to their ancestors; and let God, not man, be judge of +how much the Red Indian or the Polynesian, the Caffre or the Chinese, is +capable of receiving and of using. + +Moreover, in history there is no record, absolutely no record, as far as +I am aware, of any savage tribe civilising itself. It is a bold saying. +I stand by my assertion: most happy to find myself confuted, even in a +single instance; for my being wrong would give me, what I can have no +objection to possess, a higher opinion than I have now, of the unassisted +capabilities of my fellow-men. + +But civilisation must have begun somewhen, somewhere, with some person, +or some family, or some nation; and how did it begin? + +I have said already that I do not know. But I have had my dream—like the +philosopher—and as I have not been ashamed to tell it elsewhere, I shall +not be ashamed to tell it here. And it is this:— + +What if the beginnings of true civilisation in this unique, abnormal, +diseased, unsatisfied, incomprehensible, and truly miraculous and +supernatural race we call man, had been literally, and in actual fact, +miraculous and supernatural likewise? What if that be the true key to +the mystery of humanity and its origin? What if the few first chapters +of the most ancient and most sacred book should point, under whatever +symbols, to the actual and the only possible origin of civilisation, the +education of a man, or a family by beings of some higher race than man? +What if the old Puritan doctrine of Election should be even of a deeper +and wider application than divines have been wont to think? What if +individuals, if peoples, have been chosen out from time to time for a +special illumination, that they might be the lights of the earth, and the +salt of the world? What if they have, each in their turn, abused that +divine teaching to make themselves the tyrants, instead of the ministers, +of the less enlightened? To increase the inequalities of nature by their +own selfishness, instead of decreasing them, into the equality of grace, +by their own self-sacrifice? What if the Bible after all was right, and +even more right than we were taught to think? + +So runs my dream. If, after I have confessed to it, you think me still +worth listening to, in this enlightened 19th century, I will go on. + +At all events, what we see at the beginning of all known and half-known +history, is not savagery, but high civilisation, at least of an outward +and material kind. Do you demur? Then recollect, I pray you, that the +three oldest peoples known to history on this planet are Egypt, China, +Hindostan. The first glimpses of the world are always like those which +the book of Genesis gives us; like those which your own continent gives +us. As it was 400 years ago in America, so it was in North Africa and in +Asia 4,000 years ago, or 40,000 for aught I know. Nay, if anyone should +ask—And why not 400,000 years ago, on Miocene continents long sunk +beneath the Tropic sea? I for one have no rejoinder save—We have no +proofs as yet. + +There loom up, out of the darkness of legend, into the as yet dim dawn of +history, what the old Arabs call Races of pre-Adamite Sultans—colossal +monarchies, with fixed and often elaborate laws, customs, creeds; with +aristocracies, priesthoods—seemingly always of a superior and conquering +race; with a mass of common folk, whether free or half-free, composed of +older conquered races; of imported slaves, too, and their descendants. + +But whence comes the royal race, the aristocracy, the priesthood? You +enquire, and you find that they usually know not themselves. They are +usually—I had almost dared to say, always—foreigners. They have crossed +the neighbouring mountains. They have come by sea, like Dido to +Carthage, like Manco Cassae and Mama Bello to America, and they have +sometimes forgotten when. At least they are wiser, stronger, fairer, +than the aborigines. They are to them—as Jacques Cartier was to the +Indians of Canada—as gods. They are not sure that they are not descended +from gods. They are the Children of the Sun, or what not. The children +of light, who ray out such light as they have, upon the darkness of their +subjects. They are at first, probably, civilisers, not conquerors. For, +if tradition is worth anything—and we have nothing else to go upon—they +are at first few in number. They come as settlers, or even as single +sages. It is, in all tradition, not the many who influence the few, but +the few who influence the many. + +So aristocracies, in the true sense, are formed. But the higher calling +is soon forgotten. The purer light is soon darkened in pride and +selfishness, luxury and lust; as in Genesis, the sons of God see the +daughters of men, that they are fair; and they take them wives of all +that they choose. And so a mixed race springs up and increases, without +detriment at first to the commonwealth. For, by a well-known law of +heredity, the cross between two races, probably far apart, produces at +first a progeny possessing the forces, and, alas! probably the vices of +both. And when the sons of God go in to the daughters of men, there are +giants in the earth in those days, men of renown. The Roman empire, +remember, was never stronger than when the old Patrician blood had +mingled itself with that of every nation round the Mediterranean. + +But it does not last. Selfishness, luxury, ferocity, spread from above, +as well as from below. The just aristocracy of virtue and wisdom becomes +an unjust one of mere power and privilege; that again, one of mere +wealth, corrupting and corrupt; and is destroyed, not by the people from +below, but by the monarch from above. The hereditary bondsmen may know + + Who would be free, + Himself must strike the blow. + +But they dare not, know not how. The king must do it for them. He must +become the State. ‘Better one tyrant,’ as Voltaire said, ‘than many.’ +Better stand in fear of one lion far away, than of many wolves, each in +the nearest wood. And so arise those truly monstrous Eastern despotisms, +of which modern Persia is, thank God, the only remaining specimen; for +Turkey and Egypt are too amenable of late years to the influence of the +free nations to be counted as despotisms pure and simple—despotisms in +which men, instead of worshipping a God-man, worship the hideous +counterfeit, a _Man-god_—a poor human being endowed by public opinion +with the powers of deity, while he is the slave of all the weaknesses of +humanity. But such, as an historic fact, has been the last stage of +every civilisation—even that of Rome, which ripened itself upon this +earth the last in ancient times, and, I had almost said, until this very +day, except among the men who speak Teutonic tongues, and who have +preserved through all temptations, and reasserted through all dangers, +the free ideas which have been our sacred heritage ever since Tacitus +beheld us, with respect and awe, among our German forests, and saw in us +the future masters of the Roman Empire. + +Yes, it is very sad, the past history of mankind. But shall we despise +those who went before us, and on whose accumulated labours we now stand? + +Shall we not reverence our spiritual ancestors? Shall we not show our +reverence by copying them, at least whenever, as in those old Persians, +we see in them manliness and truthfulness, hatred of idolatries, and +devotion to the God of light and life and good? And shall we not feel +pity, instead of contempt, for their ruder forms of government, their +ignorances, excesses, failures—so excusable in men who, with little or no +previous teaching, were trying to solve for themselves for the first time +the deepest social and political problems of humanity. + +Yes, those old despotisms, we trust, are dead and never to revive. But +their corpses are the corpses, not of our enemies, but of our friends and +predecessors, slain in the world-old fight of Ormuzd against +Ahriman—light against darkness, order against disorder. Confusedly they +fought, and sometimes ill: but their corpses piled the breach and filled +the trench for us, and over their corpses we step on to what should be to +us an easy victory—what may be to us, yet, a shameful ruin. + +For if we be, as we are wont to boast, the salt of the earth and the +light of the world, what if the salt should lose its savour? What if the +light which is in us should become darkness? For myself, when I look +upon the responsibilities of the free nations of modern times, so far +from boasting of that liberty in which I delight—and to keep which I +freely, too, could die—I rather say, in fear and trembling, God help us +on whom He has laid so heavy a burden as to make us free; responsible, +each individual of us, not only to ourselves, but to Him and all mankind. +For if we fall we shall fall I know not whither, and I dare not think. + +How those old despotisms, the mighty empires of old time, fell, we know, +and we can easily explain. Corrupt, luxurious, effeminate, eaten out by +universal selfishness and mutual fear, they had at last no organic +coherence. The moral anarchy within showed through, at last burst +through, the painted skin of prescriptive order which held them together. +Some braver and abler, and usually more virtuous people, often some +little, hardy, homely mountain tribe, saw that the fruit was ripe for +gathering; and, caring nought for superior numbers—and saying with German +Alaric when the Romans boasted of their numbers, ‘The thicker the hay the +easier it is mowed—struck one brave blow at the huge inflated wind-bag—as +Cyrus and his handful of Persians struck at the Medes; as Alexander and +his handful of Greeks struck afterwards at the Persians—and behold, it +collapsed upon the spot. And then the victors took the place of the +conquered; and became in their turn an aristocracy, and then a despotism; +and in their turn rotted down and perished. And so the vicious circle +repeated itself, age after age, from Egypt and Assyria to Mexico and +Peru. + +And therefore, we, free peoples as we are, have need to watch, and +sternly watch, ourselves. Equality of some kind or other is, as I said, +our natural and seemingly inevitable goal. But which equality? For +there are two—a true one and a false; a noble and a base; a healthful and +a ruinous. There is the truly divine equality, and there is the brute +equality of sheep and oxen, and of flies and worms. There is the +equality which is founded on mutual envy. The equality which respects +others, and the equality which asserts itself. The equality which longs +to raise all alike, and the equality which desires to pull down all +alike. The equality which says—Thou art as good as I, and it may be +better too, in the sight of God. And the equality which says—I am as +good as thou, and will therefore see if I cannot master thee. + +Side by side, in the heart of every free man, and every free people, are +the two instincts struggling for the mastery, called by the same name, +but bearing the same relation to each other as Marsyas to Apollo, the +Satyr to the God. Marsyas and Apollo, the base and the noble, are, as in +the old Greek legend, contending for the prize. And the prize is no less +an one than all free people of this planet. + +In proportion as that nobler idea conquers, and men unite in the equality +of mutual respect and mutual service, they move one step further towards +realising on earth that Kingdom of God of which it is written—‘The +despots of the nations exercise dominion over them, and they that +exercise authority over them are called benefactors. But he that will be +great among you let him be the servant of all.’ + +And in proportion as that base idea conquers, and selfishness, not +self-sacrifice, is the ruling spirit of a State, men move on, one step +forward towards realising that kingdom of the devil upon earth, ‘Every +man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.’ Only, alas! in that +evil equality of envy and hate, there is no hindmost, and the devil takes +them all alike. + +And so is a period of discontent, revolution, internecine anarchy, +followed by a tyranny endured, as in old Rome, by men once free, because +tyranny will at least do for them, what they were too lazy and greedy and +envious to do for themselves. + + And all because they have forgot + What ’tis to be a man—to curb and spurn + The tyrant in us: the ignobler self + Which boasts, not loathes, its likeness to the brute; + And owns no good save ease, no ill save pain, + No purpose, save its share in that wild war + In which, through countless ages, living things + Compete in internecine greed. Ah, loving God, + Are we as creeping things, which have no lord? + That we are brutes, great God, we know too well; + Apes daintier-featured; silly birds, who flaunt + Their plumes, unheeding of the fowler’s step; + Spiders, who catch with paper, not with webs; + Tigers, who slay with cannon and sharp steel, + Instead of teeth and claws:—all these we are. + Are we no more than these, save in degree? + Mere fools of nature, puppets of strong lusts, + Taking the sword, to perish by the sword + Upon the universal battle-field, + Even as the things upon the moor outside? + + The heath eats up green grass and delicate herbs; + The pines eat up the heath; the grub the pine; + The finch the grub; the hawk the silly finch; + And man, the mightiest of all beasts of prey, + Eats what he lists. The strong eat up the weak; + The many eat the few; great nations, small; + And he who cometh in the name of all + Shall, greediest, triumph by the greed of all, + And, armed by his own victims, eat up all. + While ever out of the eternal heavens + Looks patient down the great magnanimous God, + Who, Master of all worlds, did sacrifice + All to Himself? Nay: but Himself to all; + Who taught mankind, on that first Christmas Day, + What ’tis to be a man—to give, not take; + To serve, not rule; to nourish, not devour; + To lift, not crush; if need, to die, not live. + +‘He that cometh in the name of all’—the popular military despot—the +‘saviour of his country’—he is our internecine enemy on both sides of the +Atlantic, whenever he arises—the inaugurator of that Imperialism, that +Cæsarism into which Rome sank, when not her liberties merely, but her +virtues, were decaying out of her—the sink into which all wicked States, +whether republics or monarchies, are sure to fall, simply because men +must eat and drink for to-morrow they die. The Military and Bureaucratic +Despotism which keeps the many quiet, as in old Rome, by _panem et +Circenses_—bread and games—or if need be, Pilgrimages; that the few may +make money, eat, drink, and be merry, as long as it can last. That, let +it ape as it may—as did the Cæsars of old Rome at first—as another +Emperor did even in our own days—the forms of dead freedom, really +upholds an artificial luxury by brute force; and consecrates the basest +of all aristocracies, the aristocracy of the money bag, by the divine +sanction of the bayonet. + +That at all risks, even at the price of precious blood, the free peoples +of the earth must ward off from them; for, makeshift and stop-gap as it +is, it does not even succeed in what it tries to do. It does not last. +Have we not seen that it does not, cannot last? How can it last. This +falsehood, like all falsehoods, must collapse at one touch of Ithuriel’s +spear of truth and fact. And— + +‘Then saw I the end of these men. Namely, how Thou dost set them in +slippery places, and casteth them down. + +‘Suddenly do they perish, and come to a fearful end. Yea, like as a +dream when one awaketh, so shalt Thou make their image to vanish out of +the city.’ + +Have we not seen that too, though, thank God, neither in England nor in +the United States? + +And then? What then? None knows, and none can know. + +The future of France and Spain, the future of the Tropical Republics of +Spanish America, is utterly blank and dark; not to be prophesied, I hold, +by mortal man, simply because we have no like cases in the history of the +past whereby to judge the tendencies of the present. Will they revive? +Under the genial influences of free institutions will the good seed which +is in them take root downwards, and bear fruit upwards? and make them all +what that fair France has been, in spite of all her faults, so often in +past years—a joy and an inspiration to all the nations round? Shall it +be thus? God grant it may; but He, and He alone, can tell. We only +stand by, watching, if we be wise, with pity and with fear, the working +out of a tremendous new social problem, which must affect the future of +the whole civilised world. + +For if the agonising old nations fail to regenerate themselves, what can +befall? What, when even Imperialism has been tried and failed, as fail +it must? What but that lower depth within the lowest deep? + + That last dread mood + Of sated lust, and dull decrepitude. + No law, no art, no faith, no hope, no God. + When round the freezing founts of life in peevish ring, + Crouched on the bare-worn sod, + Babbling about the unreturning spring, + And whining for dead creeds, which cannot save, + The toothless nations shiver to their grave. + +And we, who think we stand, let us take heed lest we fall. Let us +accept, in modesty and in awe, the responsibility of our freedom, and +remember that that freedom can be preserved only in one old-fashioned +way. Let us remember that the one condition of a true democracy is the +same as the one condition of a true aristocracy, namely, virtue. Let us +teach our children, as grand old Lilly taught our forefathers 300 years +ago—‘It is virtue, gentlemen, yea, virtue that maketh gentlemen; that +maketh the poor rich, the subject a king, the lowborn noble, the deformed +beautiful. These things neither the whirling wheel of fortune can +overturn, nor the deceitful cavillings of worldlings separate, neither +sickness abate, nor age abolish.’ + +Yes. Let us teach our children thus on both sides of the Atlantic. For +if they—which God forbid—should grow corrupt and weak by their own sins, +there is no hardier race now left on earth to conquer our descendants and +bring them back to reason, as those old Jews were brought, by bitter +shame and woe. And all that is before them and the whole civilised +world, would be long centuries of anarchy such as the world has not seen +for ages—a true Ragnarok, a twilight of the very gods, an age such as the +wise woman foretold in the old Voluspà. + + When brethren shall be + Each other’s bane, + And sisters’ sons rend + The ties of kin. + Hard will be that age, + An age of bad women, + An axe-age, a sword-age, + Shields oft cleft in twain, + A storm-age, a wolf-age, + Ere earth meet its doom. + +So sang, 2,000 years ago, perhaps, the great unnamed prophetess of our +own race, of what might be, if we should fail mankind and our own calling +and election. + +God grant that day may never come. But God grant, also, that if that day +does come, then may come true also what that wise Vala sang, of the day +when gods, and men, and earth should be burnt up with fire. + + When slaked Surtur’s flame is, + Still the man and the maiden, + Hight Valour and Life, + Shall keep themselves hid + In the wood of remembrance. + The dew of the dawning + For food it shall serve them; + From them spring new peoples. + +New peoples. For after all is said, the ideal form of human society is +democracy. + +A nation—and, were it even possible, a whole world—of free men, lifting +free foreheads to God and Nature; calling no man master—for one is their +master, even God; knowing and obeying their duties towards the Maker of +the Universe, and therefore to each other, and that not from fear, nor +calculation of profit or loss, but because they loved and liked it, and +had seen the beauty of righteousness and trust and peace; because the law +of God was in their hearts, and needing at last, it may be, neither king +nor priest, for each man and each woman, in their place, were kings and +priests to God. Such a nation—such a society. What nobler conception of +mortal existence can we form? Would not that be, indeed, the kingdom of +God come on earth? + +And tell me not that that is impossible—too fair a dream to be ever +realised. All that makes it impossible is the selfishness, passions, +weaknesses, of those who would be blest were they masters of themselves, +and therefore of circumstances; who are miserable because, not being +masters of themselves, they try to master circumstance, to pull down iron +walls with weak and clumsy hands, and forget that he who would be free +from tyrants must first be free from his worst tyrant, self. + +But tell me not that the dream is impossible. It is so beautiful that it +must be true. If not now, nor centuries hence, yet still hereafter. God +would never, as I hold, have inspired man with that rich imagination had +he not meant to translate, some day, that imagination into fact. + +The very greatness of the idea, beyond what a single mind or generation +can grasp, will ensure failure on failure,—follies, fanaticisms, +disappointments, even crimes, bloodshed, hasty furies, as of children +baulked of their holiday. + +But it will be at last fulfilled, filled full, and perfected; not perhaps +here, or among our peoples, or any people which now exist on earth: but +in some future civilisation—it may be in far lands beyond the sea—when +all that you and we have made and done shall be as the forest-grown +mounds of the old nameless civilisers of the Mississippi valley. + + * * * * * + + LONDON: PRINTED BY + SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE + AND PARLIAMENT STREET + + + + +Footnotes: + + +{71} Black, translator of Mallett’s _Northern Antiquities_, +Supplementary Chapter I., and Rafn’s _Antiquitates Americanæ_. + +{91} On the Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz. + + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LECTURES DELIVERED IN AMERICA IN +1874*** + + +******* This file should be named 30944-0.txt or 30944-0.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/3/0/9/4/30944 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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