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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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 primaeval woods.
That part of the mediaeval 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 primaeval 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
Caesar 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 Athene 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 [Greek text]--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. Muller 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 Ate 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 AEschylus 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 [Greek text]--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 thymele 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 AEschylus; 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 _OEdipus 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
AEschylus.
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 Athene
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 Athene--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. Athene 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 Athene 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.
_Athene_.
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.
_Athene_.
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 _OEdipus 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 crisped 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
Athene, 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 aesthetic
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, aesthetic, 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. [Greek text]
meant both the physically beautiful and the morally good; [Greek text]
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 Here--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, aesthetic, 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 Athene, 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 Mycale. 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 Athene, 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 Athene 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 Athene 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 Athene.
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 aesthetic 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 Americanae_. 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: