Historical Lectures and Essays

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 could 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 house-carle, proud of his name Biorn the Bear, and the ubiquitous Smith or Smythe, the Smiter, whose forefather, whether he be now 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 doomTo shape and use.

But how did these wild Vikings become Christian men?  It is a long story.  So stanch 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 blood-stained 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 escape 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 re-awakened 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,3 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 stayed 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 thirty 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 good 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 fairAnd slender maiden loves to careFor 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 whirlWent through me, and I feel the dartSits, 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 man 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.

CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF-THE LORD 4

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.  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; the 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 2400 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, say 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 mouths 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 war-like 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 fastnessess 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 awhile, 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.