There are countries whose boundaries have not been fixed by armies or
treaties, nor their ways marked out by trade. The dreams of men have
made them. Their substance is reality, yet their effect is vision. By a
sort of conspiracy of wish, to which men of imaginative mind have been
parties and all others have yielded assent, these countries have been
supposed to be different from what any was or could be. It has been
easy enough to create the illusion, for one’s view of another land is
always more or less a symbolic drawing.
_Ophir_
The geographical table in the tenth chapter of Genesis tells a straight
tale which men debated for something more than two thousand years and
only in the present century have accepted at its face value. In one
phrase the Scriptures link Ophir and Havilah, and then add that “their
dwelling was from Mesha, as thou goest unto Sephar, a mount of the
East.” Where was Ophir? Perhaps the learned men of Alexandria were the
first to ask the question. What was Ophir? This question nobody thought
of putting, and it was vital.
Ophir was a magic word which let no man rest once he had heard it. The
spell of gold was in it. Even as they wrote, it seemed to intoxicate
the Jewish prophets, poets, and chroniclers. Isaiah speaks of the
“golden wedge of Ophir.” It is said of wisdom in the Book of Job that
it cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx or
the sapphire. “Then shalt thou lay up gold as dust, and the gold of
Ophir as the stones of the brooks,” says another passage Oriental in
its opulence of suggestion.
From Ophir came the fleet of Solomon and Hiram of Tyre, fetching gold,
four hundred and twenty talents, and sandalwood. The arrival of the
treasure fleet is associated in the narrative, for some reason one may
only guess, with the coming to Jerusalem of the Queen of Sheba. The two
incidents constitute the most gorgeous episode in Jewish history.
Sheba’s queen comes to visit Solomon with a very great train, with
camels that bear spices, and very much gold and precious stones. She
sees the meat of his table, the sitting of his servants, and the
attendance of his ministers. She proves him with hard questions, and
pride dies in her. The report she has heard in her own land of his
wealth and wisdom was a true report, she declares, but the half had not
been told. Then she goes back, and her camels take across the deserts
gifts richer than they had brought. Gold of Ophir travels north, and
south again, and legend follows it.
Two other place-names appear on this piece of Hebrew brocade. One is
Ezion-geber, Solomon’s port on the Red Sea in the land of Edom. The
other is Tharshish, where the king had ships. Once in three years
came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold and silver, ivory and apes
and peacocks. There was nothing in these imports that one might eat
or drink or use for shelter or raiment. The commodities were typical
of ancient commerce in their magnificence, their vain show, and their
uselessness--and the cargo has freighted the imagination of men ever
since. There was contraband in the ships of Tharshish. Among the
elephants’ teeth and peacocks was stowed away the spirit of the East.
Where was Tharshish? Where was Ophir? Where was Havilah, mentioned
rarely, but in a significant context?
It was long thought that Tharshish was the Carthaginian port of
Tartessus beyond the Pillars, where now is the Spanish port of Cadiz.
But Spain had few apes, little gold, and no ivory. The text of Genesis
seemed to point to the Arabian coast as the seat of Ophir. But Araby
had no elephants and its gold came from elsewhere. Ophir was sought
also in the African spiceland of Punt, in the Midian country of
northern Arabia, and at the mouth of the Indus in Hindostan. Once in
every three years came the fleet, so said the text; and into this was
read the meaning, not of periodic sailings, but of voyages that covered
three years. Ophir, therefore, must lie in the far East, and men sought
it in the Malay Peninsula, in that Golden Chersonese where were ivory
and apes and peacocks, as well as precious metals.
For one splendid century it was Portugese instinct to advance steadily,
to see clearly, and to do great things easily--the legacy, perhaps,
of that incomparable spirit, Prince Henry the Navigator. Within the
century after his death, his countrymen had gone around Africa, opened
a sea route to the Indies, and made the coveted Spice Islands their
own. Also, they had discovered Ophir, or rather almost discovered it.
What they found was the missing port of Tharshish, and Havilah, the
land which scriptural writers linked with Ophir, and dismissed.
A Portugese squadron, outbound for the Indies in 1505, put in at the
little African port of Sofala on the Mozambique Channel, looking east
toward Madagascar. Learning that the Arabs, or Moors, as they called
them, were trafficking here for gold brought down to the coast from the
interior, its captains said that this must be Ophir. It has taken four
centuries to show how near this casual judgment was to the truth. The
gold of Ophir reached the Indian Ocean through the African port once
named Tharshish and now called Sofala, and came from the Mashona and
Matabele region between the lower Zambesi and the Limpopo rivers in
what is now Rhodesia. It was Hottentot gold, not gold of Araby.
What was Ophir? When at length this question was asked, the Scripture
texts, which pointed eastward toward Arabian regions where gold was
not, slowly yielded their paradox. Ophir was not a country at all.
It was a port, perhaps the greatest of the ancient world. Here the
products of India, of Africa, and of the Eastern Mediterranean were
interchanged. The gold of ancient Rhodesia (Havilah) became gold of
Ophir, just as figs of the Levant become Smyrna figs and the white
grapes of Spain become Malaga grapes, when freighted on ships outbound
from those ports.
In the days of its decline Ophir was known to Ptolemy, the Alexandrian
geographer, as the Sapphar Metropolis; to Arrian, the Greek geographer,
as Portus Nobilis, and to the Romans as Moscha. It lay where Genesis
places it: “and their dwelling was from Mesha, as thou goest unto
Sephar a mount of the east.” There, under the shadow of Mount Sephar,
nearly opposite the island of Socotra and about midway along the
southern coast of Arabia, its ruins lie around a silted inlet of the
sea. Mesha, or Moscha, signifies a wharf or landing place, and was
at the inlet’s mouth. Ophir stood at the head of the inlet. The name
signifies simply The City, The Metropolis, as the Roman used the single
word _urbs_ to designate his capital.
This was the great mart of Himyaritic civilization. The Himyarites were
the settled folk of southern Arabia--the Minæans and their successors,
the Sabæans. It may be that their civilization was the earliest in the
world, still older than the Egyptian and Chaldean. There is reason to
believe that the carrying trade of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean
was in their hands for a greater part of the period during which it
has been assumed that the Phœnicians controlled it. The merchants of
Tyre and Sidon were brief interlopers in a sea-borne commerce which
for thousands of years had been the monopoly of the Sabæan Arabs.
That the latter worked the mines of ancient Rhodesia in the land they
called Havilah is the simple and unavoidable inference from facts which
nevertheless required about a generation of archæological research to
establish, and which the geographer, A. H. Keane, has summarized in
his striking monograph. The Himyaritic inscriptions in southern Arabia
and the inscriptions on the extensive ruins of ancient gold workings
between the Zambesi and the Limpopo were made by the same people.
The going of Solomon’s ships and the ships of his Tyrian ally to Ophir
and on to Tharshish, and the coming of Sabæa’s queen to Jerusalem, were
what they are represented to be, brilliant and exotic incidents in the
troubled march of Jewish history. This traffic covered only about a
century, and millenniums of Arab commerce between Ophir and Tharshish
envelop it. After that century Israel and Phœnicia disappear from the
Indian Ocean, and the South Arab takes up the gold trade anew. At this
task the Portuguese found him.
The Jew was the prosperous visitor of an hour at the port of the
Sabæans. Perhaps their queen made a return call to learn why he had
come and whence the gold in his wallet. The answer was not in Solomon
himself; truly, indeed, the half was never told her. It was David whose
conquest of Edom had given Israel temporary control of important trade
routes. The wealth of Solomon was in part a transportation charge, and
in part a police tax upon “the traffick of the spice merchants and all
the kings of Arabia.” They paid it rather than have their caravans
plundered on the roads the Jew controlled. The gold that Israel and
Phœnicia brought from Tharshish direct, like the gold which Spain
brought from Peru, was not obtained in trade exchanges. It was wrung
from slave labor, Hottentots and Bushmen--whose present physiognomy and
complexion show an Asiatic strain--toiling for taskmasters, as since
they have toiled, under the sjambok.
Ezion-geber, the Jewish port, lay at the head of the Red Sea. Tharshish
lay nearly six thousand miles to the south as coasting vessels made
it, and voyages were probably by way of some port in the west of
Madagascar, where Semitic influences have been discovered. Midway
between Tharshish and Ezion-geber, and midway between the east and west
of antiquity, lay Ophir. The age-long vision of a golden land lifts
from its name. In its stead loom the shadowy outlines of a mighty port,
with strange ships at anchor, and clinking bags and odorous bales upon
the wharves, and hawk-faced merchants at their traffic, where now are
ruins and the oblivious sea.
_Lotus-land_
The country of the lotus-eaters was a promontory jutting out into the
Mediterranean Sea from the land of the Gindanes. Whoso tastes the fruit
of the lotus, Homer said, forgets his native shore, his family, and his
friends. In an age that avows a world-weariness to which the wandering
Greeks were strangers, this brief glimpse of a land released from
remembrance has been an arresting thing.
Later poets expanded the Odyssey legend, wrote new significances into
it, and sometimes provided it with a different ending, as in the fine
poem of Tennyson. The Victorian gives no hint that the companions of
Ulysses fled from Lotus-land. It seemed to them better to stay there.
They had traveled unto fatigue, and their island homes were still
far beyond the wave. Dear as were the last embraces of their wives,
it was likely that themselves were now all but forgotten, that their
sons had inherited them, and that their deeds before Troy were sung
by minstrels as things of long ago. Why return like ghosts to trouble
joy? So the mariners burst into choric song declaring the delights of
long rest and dreamful ease and mild-minded melancholy upon a slumbrous
shore. Then the rhythm changes to carry their resolve:
We have had enough of action, and of motion we,
Rolled to starboard, rolled to larboard, when the surge was seething
free,
Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.
Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.
In the Homeric story the lotus strand was a halting place for Ulysses
and his men on the way from the Ciconian coast to their adventure with
the giant Polyphemus. Their momentary pause in the enchanted Libyan
land is the slightest episode in the Odyssey. After nine days of stormy
faring they anchor by a fragrant beach and go ashore for water and a
feast. Three of their number wander farther and hospitable natives bid
them eat the fruit of their trees. Having eaten, a spell of oblivion
falls on them and they would travel no more; but their comrades bind
them and carry them aboard the ships, and hastily the company sails
away.
Herodotus locates the land of the lotus-eaters in the Syrtic district
of the North African coast, whence a caravan route leads to Egypt.
This people, he says, live entirely on the fruit of the lotus tree.
The fruit is about the size of the lentisk berry, and in sweetness
resembles the date. The lotophagi even succeed in obtaining from it a
sort of wine. Rawlinson, who identifies the lotus with the rhamnus,
asserts, however, that it looks and tastes “rather like a bad crab
apple.”
There has been controversy as to what the ancients meant by the lotus.
Some writers said it was a kind of clover, the poa of Strabo. The lotus
of Egypt and India is a water lily whose roots and seeds are eaten by
the poor. Pliny says that the lotus of Homer was a tree “the size of a
pear tree, though Cornelius Nepos calls it low.” The latter describes
its fruit as yellow, the size of a bean, and sweet and pleasant to
the taste. It was pounded into a paste and stored for food, and a wine
like mead was made from it. In the district where Ulysses anchored,
and which has been identified with the modern Jerba, the tree still
flourishes; Arabs eat its fruit and make a wine of it. Its commercial
name is jujube, and in the Mediterranean countries it is prized as a
winter dessert fruit.
If there were poppy dreams in the orchards of Africa, the secret of
them passed with the wine the ancients brewed there. The longing for
forgetfulness remains. Those who have come by it honestly through toil
have found, as Ulysses did, that lotus-land is a port of call upon
struggling seas.
_The Incense Country_
The world commerce of ancient times was in four commodities--gold,
amber, precious stones, and incense. With transportation by pack,
caravan, and small coasting craft, nothing of greater bulk or less
intrinsic worth could be carried far at a profit. The first three of
these commodities were come upon more or less by accident. Incense was
the root, bark, gum, seeds, dried leaves, or flowers of various trees,
shrubs, and plants, and was gathered at stated seasons of the year.
The business had the element of certainty, so far as anything could be
certain in ages when land and water travel were pursuits of hazard,
when there was little law upon the desert and none upon the sea. The
incense trade was therefore the great trade of antiquity. By it the
nations of the east, west and south first came to know one another.
How important was this traffic Pliny bears witness in his _Natural
History_. Page after page, chapter after chapter, book after book are
devoted to the incense, perfumes, and unguents of the East. It is an
impatient, although a faithful, testimony. The Latin writer groans over
the enormous prices the precious gums command, recites how they are
sophisticated in the Alexandrian warehouses with resin, turpentine,
and Cyprian wax, lists the nine substances with which Indian nard
is imitated, and rails at the superstition which uses scents for
sacrifice, the sinful luxury which drenches the body with them, and
even mingles them in the wines of the table. Consider, he says, the
vast number of funerals celebrated every year throughout the world,
the heaps of incense piled up in honor of the dead, the quantities
offered to the gods. Is anybody the better off? It seems to Pliny
that the immortal ones were kinder to men when a salted cake was the
best they could hope to find on their altars. At the very lowest the
Indians, Seres, and Arabians took from the empire one hundred million
sesterces every year--“so dearly do we pay for our luxury and our
women.”
Not content with the prodigality of nature, Pliny continues, luxury has
seen fit to combine all pleasant odors into a single whole, and hence
have come unguents. The Persians quite soak themselves in these blended
perfumes, to conceal from themselves that they live in dirt. There are
Romans who go still further, for they plaster themselves with unguents.
Some of them, and Nero of the number, even sprinkle therewith the soles
of their feet. On festival days the very eagles on battle standards,
thick with the dust of the camps, are anointed. Pearls and jewels have
a value that lasts, but scents die as soon as they are born. To what
good is this all, Pliny asks again.
Few others put this question. For the living, for the dead, and for
the very gods, there must be a savor of satisfaction. Gums were burned
to purify the air of dwellings, to mask the odors of burnt sacrifice,
to disguise the intimations of mortality when the bodies of the dead
smoked on funeral pyres. Their use to these ends was the primitive
sanitary science of the East. In the rites of embalming, their fumes
reanimated mummy and mortuary statue and nourished the souls of the
departed on the journey to the spirit-land. The gods above were fed by
the smoke of sacrifice and their favor was flattered for the projects
of men. So it befell in Egypt, and the pages of Herodotus are in
evidence that the whole country had become a vast drug shop.
Musk came from the highlands of China, and from India, gum benzoin
from Java, sandalwood from the Golden Chersonese, cloves from Eastern
islands unknown. Balm of Gilead, the most precious of odoriferous
substances, came from Judea, and according to Pliny battles had been
fought over it between Jews and Romans. There were other spicy roots,
leaves, and petals that grew in desert gardens or mountain parks of
the East; the geography of scents was wide and vague and little known.
But the true incense land of the ancients had definite bounds. It
lay on both sides of the promontory known variously as the Aromatic
Cape and as the Cape of Spices and now as Cape Guardafui, where the
continent of Africa juts farthest into the Indian Ocean. This land had
two provinces--Punt, which is the modern Somaliland, and Sabæa, which
is southern Arabia.
Cinnamon and cassia were taken from Punt, and some frankincense, the
“true incense,” as the name signifies and as the Christian altars
of Europe afterward came to know it. From Sabæa were taken large
quantities of frankincense, as well as myrrh and ladanum. The latter
country had credit also in the ancient world for a long list of balms
that came from elsewhere. The secret, never more than half known, was
that Sabæa imported odorous things as well as grew them. It brought
them in from more eastern countries and sent them forth on its ships,
or on the camels that traveled the incense route northward to Petra,
whence they were dispensed to the Mediterranean peoples. The incense
land was the center of world commerce, which was above all a traffic
in sweet savors, and the countries commanding the southern approach to
the Red Sea had the same significant relation to it that now belongs to
Suez, the northern approach to that sea.
The air of incense-land was as heavy with traditions as it was reported
to be with odors. The desert hemmed in both Punt and Sabæa, and its
mysteries stole in with the sands. The rites of a dim religion were
wrapped around the harvest of the precious gums. Merchant subtleties
spread afar the stories of more than mortal perils to be met by those
who entered the places of fragrance. The effect of these fables was to
enhance prices and confirm the Arab monopoly. To the ancient world the
land of incense was an enchanting, and yet a forbidding and a forbidden
land.
Its enchantments were felt even at a distance. The whole country of
Arabia, says Herodotus, is scented with spices, and exhales an odor
marvelously sweet. Diodorus declares that even before the mariner
sights this coast its delights come out to meet him upon the sea. The
breezes of spring waft to him the fragrant breath of trees and shrubs,
and keener satisfactions than he may have elsewhere, for these are
no old and stored aromatics, but fresh from new-blown flowers. Pliny
is skeptical, yet repeats the story with further detail. Under the
rays of the noonday sun, he says, the entire peninsula gives forth an
indescribable perfume, the blend of many beguiling odors. Thus it was,
while still far out, the fleet of Alexander knew it was nearing Araby
the Happy.
The languors of incense floated through the towns and villages of Sabæa
and enveloped its lofty capital. Timbers and floors of the houses
were of sweet-scented woods, and fagots of frankincense and sticks of
myrrh, burning in the fireplaces, gave them a perpetual fragrance of
sacrifice. To counteract these bland but debilitating suavities the
Arabians of the south brought the gum of storax down from Syria. This
they burned in goat skins and found its pungent smell a reviving thing.
Saba, the country’s capital, was a dream-city of spices and gold. From
a steep which commanded the surrounding lands its temples and palaces
reared their roofs amid delightful groves. The trade of countless
centuries had drawn vast riches to the incense metropolis. The houses
of the merchants were resplendent with precious metals and precious
stones. Reclining upon couches inlaid with silver, they drank from
gem-studded goblets of gold. The camels padding northward, and the
ships faring north, east, and south, brought back the wherewithal to
sustain a life of sensual magnificence. Chief among the voluptuaries
was the Sabæan king. From his seat of judgment in a gorgeous palace he
determined all disputes with the authority of an absolute sovereign.
Yet his own freedom of movement was restrained by the priestly class.
He was a prisoner of the palace, and, should he venture outside its
scented courts and shaded gardens, the rabble assailed him with stones
and drove him back to them. So an oracle had prescribed.
Over the gathering of incense, and its coming and going in the land
of the Sabæans, priestly tradition had flung a mantle rich in fable
and somber with fear. Eight days’ journey to the northeast from the
capital, in a district a hundred miles long by fifty miles wide, stood
the sacred groves in a soil of milky white a little inclining to red.
Thither at the time of the rising of the Dog Star, when the heat was
most intense, went the Arabians to make incisions in the trees. The
unctuous foam which gathered on the bark was permitted to remain and
harden; nor was it removed until autumn. The gum which assumed the
form of globular drops was called male incense. More esteemed were the
pieces where two drops had adhered into the semblance of breasts, which
were called female incense.
By inherited right the harvest was the privilege of three thousand
families. Their persons were deemed to be holy. While pruning the
trees and gathering the gum they must receive no pollution either by
intercourse with women or by coming in contact with the dead. They
carried their produce to the capital upon camels by an appointed road
and were admitted at a single gate. It was death to deviate from this
road.
Various deductions were made from the camel loads to pay for carriage,
the service of the temples, the expenses of the state, and the
transportation taxes laid by other countries through which the overland
caravans were to pass. The entertainment of strangers at the capital
was provided for out of a tithe taken from frankincense. In its journey
of more than a thousand miles northward from Saba to Petra in the land
of the Nabatheans, successive peoples, beginning with the Minæans,
received the freight and passed it on. Mecca and Medina, afterward
holy places of Islam, were stations on the incense route. It was a
drowsy traffic that went up and down this ancient road. The suns of
the desert, falling upon the bales, drew from them that which made the
carriers nod upon their beasts in a dream of delight. They revived
themselves, legend continues, by inhaling the pungent fumes of bitumen
and goat’s-beard.
There were other than ritual terrors in gathering frankincense and the
related substances. Herodotus heard the story that the groves were
infested by small winged serpents of the same sort that invade Egypt.
These clung to every branch, but if one burned gum storax under the
tree they were dislodged; a like report had it that in Malabar great
serpents coiled themselves about the sandalwood trees.
The cinnamon and cassia which the Sabæans imported from Punt, on the
African side of the Gulf of Aden, or themselves gathered there, were
harvested with difficulty and peril, and only after the consent of the
god had been given. The entrails of forty-four oxen, goats, and rams
were offered up, nothing could be done before sunrise or after sunset,
and when the harvest was made a priest set aside the god’s portion with
the point of a spear. A third portion was devoted to the sun, and this
burst at once into flame.
There were great birds which collected sticks of cinnamon for their
nests, which were fastened with mud to a sheer face of rock that foot
of man could not climb. Sometimes these nests were broken down by means
of leaden arrows. Sometimes the merchants, like the diamond-seekers in
the Sindbad tale, placed large pieces of meat on the ground, and their
weight caused the nests to fall when the mother birds bore the meat
aloft to their young. The Arabians, returning, collected the cinnamon.
Cassia grew on the marshy shores of a lake where were a number of
winged animals much resembling bats, which screeched horribly and were
very valiant. The Arabians covered their bodies and faces with the
hides of oxen, leaving only holes for their eyes. While they gathered
the bark they were kept busy shielding their eyes from assault from the
air.
There was still a long journey for these aromatic stuffs before
they reached the marts of Arabia, at least when the people of Punt
themselves made it. They put forth over vast tracts of sea upon rafts
which were neither steered by rudder nor impelled by oar or sail. At
the time of the winter equinox they went to sea on a wind from the
southeast, and when they doubled the promontory of Arabia the northeast
wind met them and took them from gulf to gulf. They skirted shores
where forests, set afire by the heat of the sun, were blazing. It might
be five years before their rafts, laden with copper, cloths, bracelets,
and necklaces, were hauled up again on the beaches of Somaliland.
There may have been a memory of musk in stories told about cassia
and about ladanum. The ends of cassia branches of the length of two
fingers were cut off and sewn in fresh skins of cattle. When the skins
putrified, maggots ate away the woody parts but left the bark, which
was too bitter to invite their attack. As to the ladanum of northern
Arabia, Herodotus remarks that, although found in a most inodorous
place, it is the sweetest-scented of all substances. Goats gathered
it. These animals cropped the sprouting shoots of mastic branches when
they were swollen with a juice of remarkable sweetness. Drops thereof
were wiped up by their unlucky beards, and became clotted with dust and
dry from the sun. Men with shears collected it, and that was why the
Romans found goats’ hairs therein.
Out of such stories were framed the geography, polity, and ritual of
the land of incense. What came of them was a monopoly, a mystery, a
spell that was slow to pass. In the smoke of altars one may almost
glimpse the temples of this dim domain, and in the tinkle of the
censing bell hear the bells of camels along an ancient path.
_Gog and Magog of the North_
The pastures of High Asia were the range of Gog and Magog. The Caucasus
was their prison home. Sometimes these formidable races were pictured
as roving the steppes and deserts of the north, sometimes as swinging
back and forth against the walls of mountain valleys, where the policy
of Alexander or divine compassion for the rest of mankind had confined
them. Always they were seeking a way out, and sometime they would find
it, and the world would shudder down in ruin under their tread.
These races were the nightmare vision of two thousand years. There are
words the very sound of which evokes the myths of fear. Such are Gog
and Magog, with their harsh internal echo and inhuman suggestion. They
were associated with the terrors of Scythia, known and unknown--the
incursions of dwarfish, shrill-voiced nomads upon the civilizations of
the south, the sense of vast desolate spaces where prodigious things
had their beginning. These misgivings, made definite by biblical
imagery and by the literal statements of the Koran, grew into legends
which were enriched by contributions from classic fable and shared by
the Jewish, Christian, and Moslem worlds.
Magog was a son of Japheth, says Genesis. In the book of _Ezekiel_ it
is declared that the Lord will bring Gog with his horses and horsemen
out of the north, and Persia, Ethiopia and Libya with them. They shall
ascend and come like a storm and like a cloud shall cover the land.
They shall think an evil thought, to take a spoil and to take a prey.
But the fury of the Lord shall come up in His face and there shall be
a great shaking in the land of Israel. Gog shall fall upon the open
field, and a fire will be sent upon Magog and among them that dwell
carelessly in the isles. The wreckage of their shields and staves shall
burn for seven years, and Gog shall have a place of graves in Israel,
the valley of the passengers on the east of the sea.
The burden of prophecy is taken up anew in _Revelation_. When the
thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed from his prison and
shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of
the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle. They shall
compass the camp of the saints about, and fire will come down out of
heaven to devour them.
The Koran buttressed biblical prophecy with a historical narrative.
It concerns the journeys of Doul-Karnain, the Lord of the Two Horns,
a personage variously identified with Alexander, Julius Cæsar and
Augustus, but by the east believed to be Alexander. When he went forth
with his army he marched to the going down of the sun and found it set
in a miry fount. He marched to the farthest east and found a people
oppressed by the heat. Then he marched north and in a valley between
two mountains he found a people who told him that Gog and Magog laid
waste their land. “Build us, O Doul-Karnain,” they begged, “a rampart
between us and them.” He bade them bring him blocks of iron, and when
he had filled the space between the mountains, he caused them to blow
upon the wall with bellows, and heated it fiery hot, and poured molten
brass upon it. Gog and Magog could not scale it, nor were they able to
dig through it.
Ezekiel wrote when the memory of an invasion of Scythian horsemen
was still fresh in Asia the Less, and he drew his imagery from it;
to him, and to John after him, Gog and Magog were symbols of earthly
power opposed to Jehovah. But the Semitic world, Jew and Arab alike,
scanned the vigorous picture of a nation from the steppes riding over
the world, and saw in it inspired prophecy of a Mongol devastation
of civilization. So Josephus thought: Gog and Magog were Scythian
peoples. Thrice and four times, on the immense canvases of Asia and
eastern Europe, the fading colors of the Ezekiel vision took on the
freshness of actuality--and the restoring brush was wielded in turn by
Genghis Khan, Othman, Tamerlane and Akbar. Thus history has been kind
to men of literal minds; but it has seen a misshapen fable grow up
in its shadow. The north had been the home of the monstrous races of
classic myth, and all their bestial and godless traits were merged in
the Tartar tradition.
[Illustration: “BUILD US, O DOUL-KARNAIN,” THEY BEGGED, “A RAMPART
BETWEEN US AND THEM”]
Bald, deformed anthropophagi mustered behind the barrier of the
Scythian mountains. Gog was the Turkish race, Magog was the Mongol.
The campaigns of Alexander had left legends that persist to this day
in Central Asia, and these were gathered up in the accumulating myth.
Alexander had also left earthworks and monuments of his marches in
those regions, and these became memorials of the terrible peoples of
Ezekiel. At first the two races were placed a little to the north of
Palestine, but tradition moved them farther to the north and east to
bring them within the Alexander cycle. As Eden was at the end of the
east, so Gog and Magog were in the farther north, “in Scythia beyond
the Caucasus and near the Caspian Sea,” says St. Jerome, writing in an
age when that sea was thought to be a gulf of the Arctic Ocean.
Confused reports about the Chinese wall grew into a fable of Iskander’s
wall, which at one time was deemed to be in the Far East, and again
was identified with the fortifications which the Sassanid kings had
built in the passes of the Caucasus, fragments of which are still to
be seen at Derbent. It seemed most fitting that the Caucasus with its
towering peaks, its broken valleys, and its remnants of diverse peoples
should be the mountain prison of these predestined scourges of mankind.
There also were to be found the Ten Lost Tribes, who had joined them.
Maundeville merges the two traditions and connects them with a third;
Gog and Magog and their Jewish associates all paid tribute to the queen
of Amazonia. According to Ricold of Monte Croce, they could not with
patience hear Alexander’s name.
There was a legend that both races escaped, guided by an owl and a hare
over their mountain walls; wherefore the Tartars wear owl feathers
in honor of their deliverance. But Astrakhan has the story that they
are prisoned still in remote valleys of the Caucasus, where twelve
trumpets, blown by the winds, keep them in terror against the day when
they shall break forth and destroy the world.
_Prester John’s Kingdom_
When the Christian world was hard put to hold its own in its crusading
adventure in the Holy Land, word came to it that it had an ally in
the rear of Islam. Somewhere in the remote east, on the farther side
of Persia and Armenia, there was a king and priest who ruled over a
Christian people. He had taken the field with a great army, defeated
the Moslem kings of Media and Persia, seized their capital of Ecbatana,
and marched to the relief of Jerusalem. Without boats to cross the
Tigris, he had gone north into colder lands, intending to cross upon
the ice and reach the holy city by a roundabout road. But the winters
proved too mild, and after waiting several years he had gone home again.
Thus the Europe of the twelfth century heard the story of Prester
John. In one form or another it was repeated by Otto of Freisingen, by
Maimonides, and by Benjamin of Tudela. In the travels of the latter,
John is a Jewish king reigning in gorgeous state over a Jewish nation
of the deserts. Popular tradition had it that the royal Christian of
Asia had addressed a letter to the Pope of Rome and to the Greek and
Roman emperors. Its recital of splendors and prodigies was a challenge
to the spirit of wonder.
“I, Presbyter Joannes, the Lord of Lords, surpass all under heaven
in virtue, in riches and in power,” runs the letter. “In the three
Indies our Magnificence rules, and our land extends beyond India; it
reaches towards the sunrise over the wastes, and it trends towards
deserted Babylon near the tower of Babel. Seventy-two provinces, of
which only a few are Christian, serve us. Each has its own king but all
are tributary to us. Our land streams with honey, and is overflowing
with milk. In one region grows no poisonous herb, nor does a querulous
frog ever quack in it, no scorpion exists, nor does the serpent glide
amongst the grass, nor can any poisonous animals exist in it or injure
any one. With us no one lies, for he who speaks a lie is thenceforth
regarded as dead.”
The royal letter writer recites that in his dominions is the earthly
paradise, claims as his subjects all the peoples of prodigy, and
describes in detail his human menagerie in the Caucasus. The accursed
fifteen nations imprisoned there eat their foes, only desisting at
Prester John’s word. They will “burst forth at the end of the world,
in the time of Antichrist, and overrun all the abodes of the Saints as
well as the great city Rome, which, by the way, we are prepared to give
our son who will be born, along with all Italy, Germany, the two Gauls,
Britain and Scotland.”
Whether this letter was ever received or no, Pope Alexander III did
dispatch to Prester John a letter which, between the lines, reads like
the reply to an irritating missive. It asserted the papal claims to
universal dominion and demanded that the priest-king recognize them.
The messenger who bore it eastward in 1177 was never heard of again.
Meanwhile the pagan Mongols had broken into Europe and it became papal
policy to conciliate their good will and if possible win them over
as allies of the Cross against the Crescent. The monkish envoys who
penetrated the heart of Asia found a power as vast as that claimed for
the Christian monarch, but it was in the hands of the sons of Genghis
Khan; and there was no Prester John.
This was a Nestorian fable, said Rubruquis; “about nothing they make a
great fuss.” As to their King John, “I traversed his pastures and no
one knew anything about him.” Rubruquis speaks of Ung-Khan, prince of
a province in Mongolia southeast of Lake Baikal. According to Marco
Polo, who entered Asia in the same generation, this was Prester John.
The Christian chief of a Hunnish tribe, he was defeated and slain by
Genghis Khan. The legend faded out of the consciousness of the west,
only to be revived and domiciled in Abyssinia when Europe learned of
the power of its sovereigns and that they were Christians of the Coptic
faith.
The tale of this Asiatic priest-king who wanted to put his armies at
the disposal of the hard-beset Christians of the west has the irony
and pathos of allegory. Without purporting to do so, it tells the
story of a great eastern adventure of the church which the Greek and
Roman communions had almost forgotten. The Nestorians had been cast
into outer darkness in one of the schisms of the Eastern Empire in the
unhappy sixth century, when, as Gibbon says, Christians were “more
solicitous to explore the nature, than to practice the laws, of their
founder.” The offense of Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, was
that he called Mary the Mother of Jesus and not the Mother of God,
and contended that in Christ the divine and human natures subsisted
independently of each other. He was excommunicated, and died in exile.
His followers, driven from the empire, went forth into Asia and
established an empire of the spirit wide as that afterward claimed for
the Prester John of legend. They founded churches in Persia, Bokhara,
Siam, and Sumatra. They penetrated India and contended with Buddhism
in Tibet. They won millions of followers in Cathay, where their
religion was tolerated under an imperial edict of the seventh century
as “virtuous, mysterious, and pacific.” From Palestine to China they
held the field for the Christian faith, and their communicants were
more numerous than those of either the Greek or Roman church. There
are places in Asia which have not seen a Christian missionary since
the Nestorians passed, as soon they did. In Kurdistan and Persia their
faith survives in the affections of perhaps three hundred thousand
worshipers.
It was the weakness of this faith that it nowhere had a country of
its own, and therefore no powerful central hierarchy sleepless in its
cause. For better or worse it was never able to draw the sword; it
spread itself only by persuasion and the tolerance of pagan countries
whose princes followed other cults. It must be that some dreamy
Nestorian monk, familiar with the west and its ways, and pondering what
his church had done in Asia and might have done had the fates been
kinder, wrote in the days of its decline the letter which gave it the
country it lacked and set forth its spiritual dominion in terms the
west would understand.
_The Witch Realm of Lapland_
In the dark ages a tradition arose that there was a witch nation in
the north of Europe. Its citizens were the Lapps, whose descendants
still fish, hunt and pasture their reindeer in the wilder districts
of Norway, Sweden, Russia, and Finland. They are the most timid and
inoffensive of men. They seem never to have had government of their
own, but have been overtaxed, exploited, and at times enslaved by
stronger neighbors. Swarthy, dwarfish, and shrill-spoken, with broad
heads, upturned noses, and bandy legs, they may be the survivors of
the small, dark race that once overspread the continent. Such a people
would need supernatural powers to overcome their manifold handicaps,
and with these legend endowed them.
Their sinister reputation came to them because of their gnome-like
aspect, because they were still in the stone age of culture, and
perhaps because they were pagans after the remainder of Europe had
become Christian. Their magic drums were the terror of settled lands.
They could make themselves invisible. They could raise the winds. “They
tye three knottes on a strynge hangying at a whyp,” wrote Richard Eden
in 1577. “When they lose one of these they rayse tollerable wynds.
When they lose another the wynd is more vehement; but by losing the
thyrd they rayse playne tempests as in old time they were accustomed
to rayse thunder and lyghtnyng.” Tales of ships which went too near to
Lapland and were heard of no more were rife among the seafaring states.
Yet Ivan the Terrible sent for Lapp magicians to read the portent of a
comet, and the Norse princess Gunhild lived in their country to learn
its lore.
Much of the superstition of the neighbor Finns has entered into the
Lapland tradition. Their magic songs picture their small cousins
as living in almost legendary lands--Lapland itself, a dark, vague
northern country where the people wore tall hats and spoke in whining,
mumbling voices: Turja Fells, with its wonder-working maidens; and
Pohjola, “home of the north,” where the old woman, Louhiatar, “the
blind whore of Pohjola,” queened it in a realm that had neither sun nor
moon. These songs have much to say of hazy headlands and spells wrought
upon them and on the main. A furious old wife sweeps the sea, with a
cloth of sparks on her head, and on her shoulders a cloak of foam.
Four maidens of the air mow grass on a cloudy cape in a foggy island.
The sharp maiden Terhetar sifts the mist on a shrouded promontory. A
wood spirit shrieks at people and fills the forest with murk when they
wander there.
In the Orkney and Shetland islands, the Lapps were known as Finn-folk.
Sometimes they crossed the North Sea and, hiding their identity,
appeared among the islanders, with whom they intermarried; skilled
persons, however, detected them by their wrinkled visages and the odd
blemishes upon their skins. The visitors knew the language of birds
and beasts, into which, indeed, they could transform themselves; and
with impunity they rode the tricky water-horse. They could control the
weather, predict the future, cure diseases of men and cattle. It was
a slight task for them to make the passage from the continent. Most
people believed they swam across--for either they were seals who took
human form, or men who could take the seal form. Sometimes when fisher
folk harpooned a large seal they found a strange little man struggling
in the waves.
These credulous island tales carry the legend of a witch nation of the
north almost into the twentieth century.
_The Spice Islands_
The ninth edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ forgot to mention
the Moluccas. A standard atlas of the world published in the United
States neglects to describe them. A day’s sail to the southeast from
the large Philippine island of Mindanao brings one to them, but
American travelers do not make this trip. Only a strait, to the right
and to the left, separates the group from New Guinea and Celebes, and
narrow are the seas between it and Java to the south; yet these are
names of consequence in modern geography, while it is a name all but
unknown. There is magic, modern magic, in the tropic islands of the
Pacific. These islands do not share it, though they lie on both sides
of the Line in the fairest of summer seas.
They have another name, the Spice Islands. For the space of two
centuries men who followed the great waters thought of them and of
little else. It was spices that Columbus sought when he sailed west
from Palos in 1492 and the man who discovered sassafras in America had
honors comparable to his own. It was an eastern route to the spice
regions that engaged Portuguese endeavor and conducted the ships of da
Gama into the Indian Ocean in 1497. It was a western route to the Spice
Islands that Magellan sought in his voyage around the world a score of
years afterward. The royal grant to del Cano, who brought one ship
home from that expedition, was conditioned on the annual payment of
two cinnamon sticks, three nutmegs, and twelve cloves; and the coat of
arms which he was licensed to bear had the effigies of two Malay kings
holding spice branches; to have gone around the world seemed to Spain
a lesser thing than to have discovered a route to these islands. To
reach them was the object of the attempts to open a northeast passage
around Asia and a northwest passage around America. To determine their
ownership was the subject of two papal bulls and a dynastic agreement
between the royalties of Spain and Portugal; and they fell at last as a
prize of war to Holland.
In the age of discovery India and China were small words compared
with the Spice Islands. The place this forgotten group once held in
the imagination of men is one of the great illusions of commercial
geography.
Nor was it all illusion. If the world trade of antiquity was mainly
in incense, the world trade of the Middle Ages was mainly in spices,
and for a similar cause--with the primitive transportation of the
period, less valuable and more bulky things could not be carried far
at a profit. Nowadays the meats, grains, vegetables, and fruits of
all climes travel long distances to the dinner table, and men’s diet
has both variety and quality. In former times the range of eatables
was small, the quality poor. The service of spices was to improve
and diversify the flavors of viands, to disguise the shortcomings of
mediæval cookery as well as mediæval larders. The salt-fish diet of
European winters created the spice trade with the east.
When the Turkish seizure of Egypt in 1521 closed the southern overland
route to the east the same year that both the Portuguese and the
Spanish reached the Moluccas, the stage was set for the romance of
spice. Passing from unknown sources through various hands, it had
reached the west at a tenfold price. Here was opportunity to deal
direct in what all Europe wanted.
It was known that these were not the only spice lands. Cassia grew in
Somaliland and cinnamon in Ceylon, and both were used in food as well
as incense. The ginger root came from a reed of Cochin-China. Benjamin
of Tudela, Ibn Batuta, and Friar Odoric had described the pepper
“forests” of Malabar, and Marignolli had even told of pepper wars
between Jews and Christians. Through the Chinese port of Amoy, so Polo
thought, there passed a hundred times as much pepper as came to all
Christendom. But somehow the Moluccas, whence came cloves, nutmegs, and
mace--the husks of nutmegs--seemed to be the kingdom of spicery.
They had won this distinction centuries before the first western
ship entered those seas. Although the islands have an area of only
twenty-five thousand square miles and a population of less than four
hundred thousand persons, their two sultanates of Tidor and Ternate
achieved dominion at about the same time as the Italian republics of
Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, which in power they paralleled; and the one
group of states, no less than the other, lived on the spice trade.
The colonial empire of the Moluccas extended over the neighboring
archipelagoes and penetrated the continent; their trading settlements
dotted the wide spaces of Malaysia. Java was their export market, and
there Polo saw the testimonials of their power in a spice trade that
seemed to him to account for the greater part of the world’s supply of
aromatic and pungent vegetable substances. They had already entered
into a political decline when the Europeans came, and this eastern
venture of the Portuguese executed for them the same decree of fate
that it was to do for the maritime states of the Mediterranean.
When Serrano reached the Moluccas he wrote to his friend, Magellan:
“I have discovered yet another new world, larger and richer than that
found by Vasco da Gama.” The caravels of Portugal went no farther, and
the nation took such pains as it could that none others should go so
far. It was Portuguese policy in the spice trade, as it had been Arab
policy in the incense trade, that the sources of supply should remain
unknown. Always the unknown is magnified. Robert Thorne, writing from
the Spanish court in 1527, declared that the islands abounded not
only in cloves, nutmegs, mace, and cinnamon, but in “Golde, Rubies,
Diamondes, Balasses, Garnates, Jacincts, and other stones and pearles.”
The precious commodities he thought the simple natives would part with
on equal terms for the lead, tin, and iron of the north; and, measure
for measure, they would traffic their spices for corn, their diamonds
for pieces of glass.
In these islands fable found another home. Here, it was said, were men
having spurs on their ankles like cocks, horned hogs, hens that laid
their eggs several feet under ground, oysters so large that the shells
were used as baptismal fonts for children, crabs with claws so strong
that they could break the iron of a pick-ax, stones which grew like
fish and out of which men made lime, and a river well stored with finny
creatures and yet so hot that it scalded the unwary bather. Drake,
refitting here in his voyage around the world, saw “an infinite swarme
of fiery wormes flying at night making such a shew and light as if
every twigge or tree had been a burning candle.” Also he saw bats as
big as hens and crayfish that dug holes like conies, and one of which
was a meal for four hungry men.
These decorations of fancy can add but little to the great theme of
forgotten islands once the goal of the world’s desire.
There was another curious chapter written when Dutch succeeded
Portuguese. It was such a chapter as monopoly writes, and it comes
down into the nineteenth century. The ships of Holland cruised in the
surrounding seas, cutting down spice groves wherever they found them.
Before they were exported, all nutmegs were treated with fire and lime,
so that no plantations could be started elsewhere--but pigeons carried
them to other islands and mother cloves were taken away in hollow
bamboos, and the produce of home orchards multiplied, and the world
spice trade dwindled in relative importance as the food of mankind
became more varied.
Dampier tells of an island where the ground under the trees was
carpeted with cloves several inches thick, left there to decay. Another
traveler tells of seeing three heaps of nutmegs burning at one time,
each of which would have filled a church. So the Dutch East India
Company reduced supplies in striving to maintain prices. The spicy
odors that floated over the seas surrounding the Araby of fable became,
on occasion, a fact of the Molucca group. It was the incense neither of
nature nor of religion, but of a dying commerce.
The nutmegs of to-day are grown mainly in the island of Penang in the
British East Indies and in the island of Grenada in the British West
Indies, while cloves come from the African island of Zanzibar.
_Arcadia_
Arcadia is at once a country and a province of the imagination.
The real Arcadia is a mountainous plateau some forty miles square in
the central part of the Peloponnessus of Greece. Its chief exports in
the old time were asses. Its inhabitants were--and are--gruff-spoken
herdsmen and peasants, equally scornful of letters and politics. They
seldom went outside their own valleys, and few strangers came among
them. They had no central government and no relations with the other
states of Greece, and they wanted to be let alone. Yet they were
willing to fight--for pay; and sometimes they had to fight because
Sparta was their neighbor and they were on a war track. When Arcadia
took the field in force as the ally of another state, almost always it
espoused the wrong side. In the quarrels of the Greek republics, and
in the series of wars in which Pompey, Julius Cæsar, Mark Antony, and
Augustus figured, it shared the hard lot of the vanquished. Although it
lay remote and its spirit was aloof, the plateau had at least its share
of the troubles of the world.
The Arcadia of poetry occupies the same boundaries, but has had a
different history. All that the poets have done has been to stress
certain facts and forget the others. This land, as it seemed to them,
stood like a fortress of rustic innocence above the turmoil of politics
and the bustle of maritime trade that was ancient Greece. At each of
the corners of the plateau, like bastions, rose a group of mountain
peaks, from which, on a fair morning, one might see the whole of
Arcadia, the neighbor states of the coastal plains, and beyond them
the Mediterranean. Great groves of gnarled oaks grew upon the mountain
sides, there were pine forests, and in the open fields stood the
graceful plane tree, beloved of the classic world. Though the Arcadians
were unlettered, pastoral song had its birth among them, before the
inspiration of Theocritus gave it a home in Sicily. Pan was their
tutelar deity, and it seemed to the rustics sometimes that they could
hear the plaintive music of his pipes as the goat-god reclined under
the plane tree. In this artless land, myth has it, Hermes strung cords
across the shell of a giant tortoise and made the harp.
Arcadia was equally skilled at the harp and the flute, and to these
the shepherds sang their simple lays. Aside from their love of music,
they seemed to the Greeks of the towns men of ignorant rusticity, and
they figure as simpletons--“acorn eaters”--in the Middle Comedy. The
Romans copied this as they did everything else in Greek drama, and the
dull Arcadian of the stage moved Latin audiences to laughter; “Arcades
ambo,” both sweet innocents, is a phrase of the period. But the Romans
caught also the spirit of their rustic song, and the Arkady of poetry
was born in the Virgilian bucolics. Its outlines are disclosed in
the Tenth _Eclogue_, in passages which tell of browsing goats, and
clover-rifling bees, and bubbling springs where dark-blue violets
blow, and, animating the scene, the vintagers of mellow grapes and Pan
himself, red with elderberries and with cinnabar. “Arcadians, none but
ye can sing!” exclaims the poet.
On this delicate outline the Renaissance laid the rich colorings of its
fancy. The rugged, troubled mountain land became the one land in all
the world of simple peace and rustic innocence and wistful charm of
things ideal. Sanazzaro’s Arcadian pastoral went through sixty editions
in a century. France, Spain, England, and Holland, following Italy, all
made their excursions into Arkady. There was a succession of romantic
sketches wherein lyrics declaring the loves of swains and bewailing the
death of virgins are interspersed with dialogues that tell in prose
the poetry of pastoral life. The classic work of this school is the
_Arcadia_ of Sir Philip Sidney. There, and not in the Morea, the Arkady
that is a province of the imagination may best be explored.
It is a tale of knightly youths and dainty maidens and one sentence
will declare its quality. When Pamela disrobed for the bath and set
foot in a stream “the touch of cold water made a pretty kind of
shrugging come over her body, like the twinkling of the fairest of the
fixed stars.”
Here, says Sidney, the very shepherds have their fancies lifted to
so high conceits as the learned of other nations are content both to
borrow their names and imitate their cunning. The hills garnish their
proud delights with stately trees, the humble estate of valleys is
comforted with the refreshing of rivers, and the thickets declare the
cheerful disposition of well-tuned birds. Sheep pasture with sober
security and by them are pretty lambs whose bleating oratory craves the
dam’s comfort. The herd girls sing their lays, while on the uplands
pipes the shepherd boy “as though he shall never be old.”
This is vision, all of it, sunshine and haze working their spell upon a
rocky hillside. There are wolves in the sheepfolds of life.
_Bohemia_
Bohemia is a subtler Arcadia, another province of youth and love and
dreams; but youth passes thence, and love is a brief madness, and the
dream may fail of fulfillment. Like Arcadia, the Bohemia that is a
state of mind has its reality in a mountain-girdled land, but, unlike
Arcadia, it has shifted on the map, refusing to be confined by any
boundaries known to geography.
Now even the name of it, with its music and implications of poetry,
is lost to geography, and in its stead is the harshly named
Czecho-Slovakia. Wherefore the Bohemians of art and literature, and
unregulated impulse and fantasy, have no homeland they can call their
own. This is a fitting thing. In a sense there never was a Bohemia,
although there was always the fortress land which nature placed at the
headwaters of the Elbe on the borders of Germany. The Celtic tribe
whence it was named is only a shadow in history, and the Bohemians who
fought with Poles and Germans, who wanted to be Protestant, who started
the Thirty Years’ War, who were a dukedom, and a kingdom, and a part of
the Holy Roman Empire, were Slavs who called themselves Czechs.
Their literature is older than the German, their university at Prague
was one of the earliest centers of European culture, their capital is
the westernmost outpost of the east in Europe, their patriotism is a
proverb, and their glass fabrics, their beer, and their beet sugar
are staples of world commerce. Upon this people and their hill-walled
home the name of Bohemia and the traditions of “the gayest and most
melancholy country of the world” fit but loosely. Whence the Bohemia
that is a haunting word on the lips of youth?
Shakespeare budded it, and the gypsies, and Frenchmen who knew too
little, and Frenchmen who may have known too much. _Winter’s Tale_ gave
Bohemia a seacoast and centuries of critics a chance to say its author
nodded. Yet under the puissant Ottokar the country did have coasts on
both the north and south of Europe. The scene of the play is near the
head of the Adriatic. The Bohemia it pictures, instead of lying inland,
is probably the maritime province of Istria, and historically the
background is correctly named.
From _Winter’s Tale_ the Bohemians of the studio and pothouse got
themselves a coast, a glamour, and their First Citizen. “Places remote
enough are in Bohemia,” the poet says. Here again is shepherd’s love,
and a prince whose courtship of a “queen of curds and cream” is timed
by the flowers as they pass--“daffodils that come before the swallow
dares, and take the winds of March with beauty,” and violets dim, pale
primroses, bold ox-lips and the flower de luce. “The fanned snow that’s
bolted by the northern blasts” is far away.
On this scene of Arkady enters a figure in no wise Arcadian--Autolycus,
earliest Bohemian, citizen of no country and of all. He is a vagabond,
a minstrel, a ballad-monger, a ribbon peddler, a cut-purse. His is
the footpath way, and his revenue, he explains, is the silly cheat.
“Enter Autolycus singing” is the stage direction. Exit Autolycus also,
singing, “A merry heart goes all the day, your sad tires in a mile-a.”
Here is a blood-brother of Villon, and Bohemia is already a province
of his song. It becomes a kingdom with the coming of the gypsies.
Mediæval France called them Bohemians, and thought them such, as other
countries thought them Egyptians. The roadside was their home, the
world was their country, they paid no taxes or rents, and report had it
that they had written the canons of their creed on cabbage leaves which
a donkey found and devoured. They practiced the wandering arts, were
musicians, metal-workers, horse-dealers, bear-leaders, snake-charmers,
herb-venders; their women read palms, and were “pleasaunt dauncers.”
The gypsy philosophy found its first devotees in rogues of old Paris,
who called themselves dukes in Bohemia; Hugo has sketched their lawless
commonwealth in his _Notre Dame_. The Bohemia of artists and dreamers,
like many a country of the map, had ruffians, cheats, and vagrants for
its early colonists. It was left to Murger to fix its frontiers, write
its laws, and treat for its admission into the league of ideal lands.
The results are spread at large in his _Scenes de la Vie de Bohème_.
Much has been written of the whereabouts of this land and of the
conditions by which one becomes a citizen, but the matter is found
entire in Murger’s preface and in Arthur Symons’s introduction to
this preface. “Any man,” says Murger, “who enters the path of Art,
with his art as his sole means of support, is bound to pass by way of
Bohemia.” To Symons, Bohemia is “the sentiment youth has of itself
at the flowering moment of its existence”; the sadness of it is the
consciousness of the flight of youth.
The whereabouts of the country that has been mapped as neighbor both to
Germany and Italy? Murger answers that Bohemia “neither exists nor can
exist anywhere save in Paris.” But that is only Murger’s answer.