I wish in this first lecture to give you some general conception of the
causes which urged our Teutonic race to attack and destroy Rome. I shall
take for this one lecture no special text-book: but suppose you all to be
acquainted with the Germania of Tacitus, and with the 9th Chapter of
Gibbon. And I shall begin, if you will allow me, by a parable, a myth, a
saga, such as the men of whom I am going to tell you loved; and if it
seem to any of you childish, bear in mind that what is childish need not
therefore be shallow. I know that it is not history. These lectures
will not be, in the popular sense, history at all. But I beg you to bear
in mind that I am not here to teach you history. No man can do that. I
am here to teach you how to teach yourselves history. I will give you
the scaffolding as well as I can; you must build the house.
Fancy to yourself a great Troll-garden, such as our forefathers dreamed
of often fifteen hundred years ago;--a fairy palace, with a fairy garden;
and all around the primaeval wood. Inside the Trolls dwell, cunning and
wicked, watching their fairy treasures, working at their magic forges,
making and making always things rare and strange; and outside, the forest
is full of children; such children as the world had never seen before,
but children still: children in frankness, and purity, and
affectionateness, and tenderness of conscience, and devout awe of the
unseen; and children too in fancy, and silliness, and ignorance, and
caprice, and jealousy, and quarrelsomeness, and love of excitement and
adventure, and the mere sport of overflowing animal health. They play
unharmed among the forest beasts, and conquer them in their play; but the
forest is too dull and too poor for them; and they wander to the walls of
the Troll-garden, and wonder what is inside. One can conceive easily for
oneself what from that moment would begin to happen. Some of the more
adventurous clamber in. Some, too, the Trolls steal and carry off into
their palace. Most never return: but here and there one escapes out
again, and tells how the Trolls killed all his comrades: but tells too,
of the wonders he has seen inside, of shoes of swiftness, and swords of
sharpness, and caps of darkness; of charmed harps, charmed jewels, and
above all of the charmed wine: and after all, the Trolls were very kind
to him--see what fine clothes they have given him--and he struts about
awhile among his companions; and then returns, and not alone. The Trolls
have bewitched him, as they will bewitch more. So the fame of the Troll-
garden spreads; and more and more steal in, boys and maidens, and tempt
their comrades over the wall, and tell of the jewels, and the dresses,
and the wine, the joyous maddening wine, which equals men with gods; and
forget to tell how the Trolls have bought them, soul as well as body, and
taught them to be vain, and lustful, and slavish; and tempted them, too
often, to sins which have no name.
But their better nature flashes out at times. They will not be the
slaves and brutes in human form, which the evil Trolls would have them;
and they rebel, and escape, and tell of the horrors of that fair foul
place. And then arises a noble indignation, and war between the Trolls
and the forest-children. But still the Trolls can tempt and bribe the
greedier or the more vain; and still the wonders inside haunt their
minds; till it becomes a fixed idea among them all, to conquer the garden
for themselves and bedizen themselves in the fine clothes, and drink
their fill of the wine. Again and again they break in: but the Trolls
drive them out, rebuild their walls, keep off those outside by those whom
they hold enslaved within; till the boys grow to be youths, and the
youths men: and still the Troll-garden is not conquered, and still it
shall be. And the Trolls have grown old and weak, and their walls are
crumbling away. Perhaps they may succeed this time--perhaps next.
And at last they do succeed--the fairy walls are breached, the fairy
palace stormed--and the Trolls are crouching at their feet, and now all
will be theirs, gold, jewels, dresses, arms, all that the Troll
possesses--except his cunning.
For as each struggles into the charmed ground, the spell of the place
falls on him. He drinks the wine, and it maddens him. He fills his arms
with precious trumpery, and another snatches it from his grasp. Each
envies the youth before him, each cries--Why had I not the luck to enter
first? And the Trolls set them against each other, and split them into
parties, each mad with excitement, and jealousy, and wine, till, they
scarce know how, each falls upon his fellow, and all upon those who are
crowding in from the forest, and they fight and fight, up and down the
palace halls, till their triumph has become a very feast of the Lapithae,
and the Trolls look on, and laugh a wicked laugh, as they tar them on to
the unnatural fight, till the gardens are all trampled, the finery torn,
the halls dismantled, and each pavement slippery with brothers' blood.
And then, when the wine is gone out of them, the survivors come to their
senses, and stare shamefully and sadly round. What an ugly, desolate,
tottering ruin the fairy palace has become! Have they spoilt it
themselves? or have the Trolls bewitched it? And all the fairy
treasure--what has become of it? no man knows. Have they thrown it away
in their quarrel? have the cunningest hidden it? have the Trolls flown
away with it, to the fairy land beyond the Eastern mountains? who can
tell? Nothing is left but recrimination and remorse. And they wander
back again into the forest, away from the doleful ruin, carrion-strewn,
to sulk each apart over some petty spoil which he has saved from the
general wreck, hating and dreading each the sound of his neighbour's
footstep.
What will become of the forest children, unless some kind saint or hermit
comes among them, to bind them in the holy bonds of brotherhood and law?
This is my saga, gentlemen; and it is a true one withal. For it is
neither more nor less than the story of the Teutonic tribes, and how they
overthrew the Empire of Rome.
Menzel, who though he may not rank very high as a historian, has at least
a true German heart, opens his history with a striking passage.
'The sages of the East were teaching wisdom beneath the palms; the
merchants of Tyre and Carthage were weighing their heavy anchors, and
spreading their purple sails for far seas; the Greek was making the earth
fair by his art, and the Roman founding his colossal empire of force,
while the Teuton sat, yet a child, unknown and naked among the forest
beasts: and yet unharmed and in his sport he lorded it over them; for the
child was of a royal race, and destined to win glory for all time to
come.'
To the strange and complicated education which God appointed for this
race; and by which he has fitted it to become, at least for many
centuries henceforth, the ruling race of the world, I wish to call your
attention in my future lectures. To-day, I wish to impress strongly on
your minds this childishness of our forefathers. For good or for evil
they were great boys; very noble boys; very often very naughty boys--as
boys with the strength of men might well be. Try to conceive such to
yourselves, and you have the old Markman, Allman, Goth, Lombard, Saxon,
Frank. And the notion may be more than a mere metaphor. Races, like
individuals, it has been often said, may have their childhood, their
youth, their manhood, their old age, and natural death. It is but a
theory--perhaps nothing more. But at least, our race had its childhood.
Their virtues, and their sad failings, and failures, I can understand on
no other theory. The nearest type which we can see now is I fancy, the
English sailor, or the English navvy. A great, simple, honest, baby--full
of power and fun, very coarse and plain spoken at times: but if treated
like a human being, most affectionate, susceptible, even sentimental and
superstitious; fond of gambling, brute excitement, childish amusements in
the intervals of enormous exertion; quarrelsome among themselves, as boys
are, and with a spirit of wild independence which seems to be strength;
but which, till it be disciplined into loyal obedience and
self-sacrifice, is mere weakness; and beneath all a deep practical
shrewdness, an indomitable perseverance, when once roused by need. Such
a spirit as we see to this day in the English sailor--that is the nearest
analogue I can find now. One gets hints here and there of what manner of
men they were, from the evil day, when, one hundred and two years before
Christ, the Kempers and Teutons, ranging over the Alps toward Italy,
300,000 armed men and 15,000 mailed knights with broad sword and lances,
and in their helmets the same bulls'-horns, wings, and feathers, which
one sees now in the crests of German princes, stumbled upon Marius and
his Romans, and were destroyed utterly, first the men, then the women,
who like true women as they were, rather than give up their honour to the
Romans, hung themselves on the horns of the waggon-oxen, and were
trampled to death beneath their feet; and then the very dogs, who fought
on when men and women were all slain--from that fatal day, down to the
glorious one, when, five hundred years after, Alaric stood beneath the
walls of Rome, and to their despairing boast of the Roman numbers,
answered, 'Come out to us then, the thicker the hay, the easier
mowed,'--for five hundred years, I say, the hints of their character are
all those of a boy-nature.
They were cruel at times: but so are boys--much more cruel than grown
men, I hardly know why--perhaps because they have not felt suffering so
much themselves, and know not how hard it is to bear. There were
varieties of character among them. The Franks were always false, vain,
capricious, selfish, taking part with the Romans whenever their interest
or vanity was at stake--the worst of all Teutons, though by no means the
weakest--and a miserable business they made of it in France, for some
five hundred years. The Goths, Salvian says, were the most ignavi of all
of them; great lazy lourdans; apt to be cruel, too, the Visigoths at
least, as their Spanish descendants proved to the horror of the world:
but men of honour withal, as those old Spaniards were. The Saxons were
famed for cruelty--I know not why, for our branch of the Saxons has been,
from the beginning of history, the least cruel people in Europe; but they
had the reputation--as the Vandals had also--of being the most pure;
Castitate venerandi. And among the uncivilized people coldness and
cruelty go often together. The less passionate and sensitive the nature,
the less open to pity. The Caribs of the West Indies were famed for
both, in contrast to the profligate and gentle inhabitants of Cuba and
Hispaniola; and in double contrast to the Red Indian tribes of North
America, who combined, from our first acquaintance with them, the two
vices of cruelty and profligacy, to an extent which has done more to
extirpate them than all the fire-water of the white man.
But we must be careful how we compare our forefathers with these, or any
other savages. Those who, like Gibbon, have tried to draw a parallel
between the Red Indian and the Primaeval Teuton, have done so at the
expense of facts. First, they have overlooked the broad fact, that while
the Red Indians have been, ever since we have known them, a decreasing
race, the Teutons have been a rapidly increasing one; in spite of war,
and famine, and all the ills of a precarious forest life, proving their
youthful strength and vitality by a reproduction unparalleled, as far as
I know, in history, save perhaps by that noble and young race, the
Russian. These writers have not known that the Teuton had his definite
laws, more simple, doubtless, in the time of Tacitus than in that of
Justinian, but still founded on abstract principles so deep and broad
that they form the groundwork of our English laws and constitution; that
the Teuton creed concerning the unseen world, and divine beings, was of a
loftiness and purity as far above the silly legends of Hiawatha as the
Teuton morals were above those of a Sioux or a Comanche. Let any one
read honest accounts of the Red Indians; let him read Catlin, James,
Lewis and Clarke, Shoolbred; and first and best of all, the old 'Travaile
in Virginia,' published by the Hakluyt Society: and then let him read the
Germania of Tacitus, and judge for himself. For my part, I believe that
if Gibbon was right, and if our forefathers in the German forests had
been like Powhattan's people as we found them in the Virginian forests,
the Romans would not have been long in civilizing us off the face of the
earth.
No. All the notes which Tacitus gives us are notes of a young and strong
race; unconscious of its own capabilities, but possessing such
capabilities that the observant Romans saw at once with dread and awe
that they were face to face with such a people as they had never met
before; that in their hands, sooner or later, might be the fate of Rome.
Mad Caracalla, aping the Teuton dress and hair, listening in dread to the
songs of the Allman Alrunas, telling the Teutons that they ought to come
over the Rhine and destroy the empire, and then, murdering the
interpreters, lest they should repeat his words, was but babbling out in
an insane shape the thought which was brooding in the most far-seeing
Roman minds. He felt that they could have done the deed; and he felt
rightly, madman as he was. They could have done it then, if physical
power and courage were all that was needed, in the days of the Allman
war. They could have done it a few years before, when the Markmen fought
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus; on the day when the Caesar, at the advice of
his augurs, sent two lions to swim across the Danube as a test of
victory; and the simple Markmen took them for big dogs, and killed them
with their clubs. From that day, indeed, the Teutons began to conquer
slowly, but surely. Though Antoninus beat the Markmen on the Danube, and
recovered 100,000 Roman prisoners, yet it was only by the help of the
Vandals; from that day the empire was doomed, and the Teutons only kept
at bay by bribing one tribe to fight another, or by enlisting their more
adventurous spirits into the Roman legions, to fight against men of their
own blood;--a short-sighted and suicidal policy; for by that very method
they were teaching the Teuton all he needed, the discipline and the
military science of the Roman.
But the Teutons might have done it a hundred years before that, when Rome
was in a death agony, and Vitellius and Vespasian were struggling for the
purple, and Civilis and the fair Velleda, like Barak and Deborah of old,
raised the Teuton tribes. They might have done it before that again,
when Hermann slew Varus and his legions in the Teutoburger Wald; or
before that again, when the Kempers and Teutons burst over the Alps, to
madden themselves with the fatal wines of the rich south. And why did
the Teutons _not_ do it? Because they were boys fighting against cunning
men. Boiorich, the young Kemper, riding down to Marius' camp, to bid him
fix the place and time of battle--for the Teuton thought it mean to use
surprises and stratagems, or to conquer save in fair and open fight--is
the type of the Teuton hero; and one which had no chance in a struggle
with the cool, false, politic Roman, grown grey in the experience of the
forum and of the camp, and still as physically brave as his young enemy.
Because, too, there was no unity among them; no feeling that they were
brethren of one blood. Had the Teuton tribes, at any one of the great
crises I have mentioned, and at many a crisis afterwards, united for but
three years, under the feeling of a common blood, language, interest,
destiny, Rome would have perished. But they could not learn that lesson.
They could not put aside their boyish quarrels.
They never learnt the lesson till after their final victory, when the
Gospel of Christ--of a Being to whom they all owed equal allegiance, in
whose sight they were all morally equal--came to unite them into a
Christendom.
And it was well that they did not learn it sooner. Well for them and for
the world, that they did not unite on any false ground of interest or
ambition, but had to wait for the true ground of unity, the knowledge of
the God-man, King of all nations upon earth.
Had they destroyed Rome sooner, what would not they have lost? What
would not the world have lost? Christianity would have been stifled in
its very cradle; and with Christianity all chance--be sure of it--of
their own progress. Roman law, order, and discipline, the very things
which they needed to acquire by a contact of five hundred years, would
have been swept away. All classic literature and classic art, which they
learnt to admire with an almost superstitious awe, would have perished
likewise. Greek philosophy, the germs of physical science, and all that
we owe to the ancients, would have perished; and we should have truly had
an invasion of the barbarians, followed by truly dark ages, in which
Europe would have had to begin all anew, without the help of the
generations which had gone before.
Therefore it was well as it was, and God was just and merciful to them
and to the human race. They had a glorious destiny, and glorious powers
wherewith to fulfil it: but they had, as every man and people has, before
whom there is a noble future, to be educated by suffering. There was
before them a terrible experience of sorrow and disappointment, sin and
blood, by which they gained the first consciousness of what they could do
and what they could not. Like Adam of old, like every man unto this day,
they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and were driven
out of the paradise of unconsciousness; had to begin again sadder and
wiser men, and eat their bread in the sweat of their brow; and so to
rise, after their fall, into a nobler, wiser, more artificial, and
therefore more truly human and divine life, than that from which they had
at first fallen, when they left their German wilds.
One does not, of course, mean the parallel to fit in all details. The
fall of the Teuton from the noble simplicity in which Tacitus beheld and
honoured him, was a work of four centuries; perhaps it was going on in
Tacitus' own time. But the culminating point was the century which saw
Italy conquered, and Rome sacked, by Visigoth, by Ostrogoth, by Vandal,
till nothing was left save fever-haunted ruins. Then the ignorant and
greedy child, who had been grasping so long after the fair apples of
Sodom, clutched them once and for all, and found them turn to ashes in
his hands.
Yes--it is thus that I wish you to look at the Invasion of the
Barbarians, Immigration of the Teutons, or whatsoever name you may call
it. Before looking at questions of migration, of ethnology, of laws, and
of classes, look first at the thing itself; and see with sacred pity--and
awe, one of the saddest and grandest tragedies ever performed on earth.
Poor souls! And they were so simple withal. One pities them, as one
pities a child who steals apples, and makes himself sick with them after
all. It is not the enormous loss of life which is to me the most tragic
part of the story; it is that very simplicity of the Teutons. Bloodshed
is a bad thing, certainly; but after all nature is prodigal of human
life--killing her twenty thousand and her fifty thousand by a single
earthquake; and as for death in battle--I sometimes am tempted to think,
having sat by many death beds, that our old forefathers may have been
right, and that death in battle may be a not unenviable method of passing
out of this troublesome world. Besides, we have no right to blame those
old Teutons, while we are killing every year more of her Majesty's
subjects by preventible disease, than ever they killed in their bloodiest
battle. Let us think of that, and mend that, ere we blame the old German
heroes. No, there are more pitiful tragedies than any battlefield can
shew; and first among them, surely, is the disappointment of young hopes,
the degradation of young souls.
One pities them, I say. And they pitied themselves. Remorse, shame,
sadness, mark the few legends and songs of the days which followed the
fall of Rome. They had done a great work. They had destroyed a mighty
tyranny; they had parted between them the spoils wrung from all the
nations; they had rid the earth of a mighty man-devouring ogre, whose
hands had been stretched out for centuries over all the earth, dragging
all virgins to his den, butchering and torturing thousands for his sport;
foul, too, with crimes for which their language, like our own (thank God)
has scarcely found a name. Babylon the Great, drunken with the blood of
the saints, had fallen at last before the simple foresters of the north:
but if it looks a triumph to us, it looked not such to them. They could
only think how they had stained their hands in their brothers' blood.
They had got the fatal Nibelungen hoard: but it had vanished between
their hands, and left them to kill each other, till none was left.
You know the Nibelungen Lied? That expresses, I believe, the key-note of
the old Teuton's heart, after his work was done. Siegfried murdered by
his brother-in-law; fair Chriemhild turned into an avenging fury; the
heroes hewing each other down, they scarce know why, in Hunnish Etzel's
hall, till Hagen and Gunther stand alone; Dietrich of Bern going in, to
bind the last surviving heroes; Chriemhild shaking Hagen's gory head in
Gunther's face, himself hewed down by the old Hildebrand, till nothing is
left but stark corpses and vain tears:--while all the while the
Nibelungen hoard, the cause of all the woe, lies drowned in the deep
Rhine until the judgment day.--What is all this, but the true tale of the
fall of Rome, of the mad quarrels of the conquering Teutons? The names
are confused, mythic; the dates and places all awry: but the tale is
true--too true. Mutato nomine fabula narratur. Even so they went on,
killing, till none were left. Deeds as strange, horrible, fratricidal,
were done, again and again, not only between Frank and Goth, Lombard and
Gepid, but between Lombard and Lombard, Frank and Frank. Yes, they were
drunk with each other's blood, those elder brethren of ours. Let us
thank God that we did not share their booty, and perish, like them, from
the touch of the fatal Nibelungen hoard. Happy for us Englishmen, that
we were forced to seek our adventures here, in this lonely isle; to turn
aside from the great stream of Teutonic immigration; and settle here,
each man on his forest-clearing, to till the ground in comparative peace,
keeping unbroken the old Teutonic laws, unstained the old Teutonic faith
and virtue, cursed neither with poverty nor riches, but fed with food
sufficient for us. To us, indeed, after long centuries, peace brought
sloth, and sloth foreign invaders and bitter woes: but better so, than
that we should have cast away alike our virtue and our lives, in that mad
quarrel over the fairy gold of Rome.