Lectures Delivered in America in 1874

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 1 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.