watch over their flocks and herds by day and by night, under the eternal
ice and snow of the heaven-reaching mountains, should worship the
light—all that was Deva (light) was to them sacred and symbolical of the
Godhead—and so the Deus of the Latins was originally Light, and when we
talk of “divine,” “divinity,” we are looking back to the worship of our
ancestors when they prayed to the Sun, the Fire, the Sky, the Dawn, which
were the givers of all good things. Sometimes they are invoked under the
names of Varuna, Mitra, Indra. “In one hymn Agni (fire) is called the
ruler of the universe, the lord of men, the wise king, the father, the
brother, the son, the friend of men.... In another hymn, Indra is said
to be greater than all; the Gods, it is said, do not reach Thee, Indra,
nor men; Thou overcomest all creatures in strength. Another God, Soma,
is called the King of the World, the King of Heaven and Earth, the
Conqueror of all. And what more could human language achieve in trying to
express the idea of a divine and supreme power, than what another poet
says of another God, Varuna: ‘Thou art Lord of all, of Heaven and earth;
thou art the King of all, of those who are Gods and of those who are
men?’”
How beautiful is the following litany:
“In the beginning there arose the golden child. He was the one born Lord
of all that is. He established the earth and this sky; who is the God to
Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
“He who gives life, He who gives strength, Whose command all the bright
Gods revere; Whose shadow is immortality; Whose shadow is death; Who is
the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
“He who through His power is the one King of the breathing and awakening
world; He who governs all, man and beast; who is the God to Whom we shall
offer our sacrifice?
“He Whose greatness these snowy mountains, Whose greatness the seas
proclaim with the distant river; He Whose regions are, as it were, His
two arms; who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
“He through Whom the sky is bright and the earth firm—He through Whom the
heaven was ’stablished, nay, the highest heaven—He who measured out the
light in the air; who is the God to Whom we shall offer sacrifice?
“He to Whom heaven and earth, standing firm by His will, look up
trembling inwardly—He over Whom the rising sun shines forth; who is the
God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
“Wherever the mighty waterclouds went, where they placed the seed and lit
the fire, thence arose He who is the sole life of the bright Gods; who is
the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
“He who by His might looked even over the waterclouds, the clouds which
gave strength and lit the sacrifice, He who alone is God above all Gods;
who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
“May He not destroy us—He, the creator of the earth; or He, the
righteous, who created the Heaven—He also created the bright and mighty
waters; who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?”
Well might Max Müller, who has unearthed them, redeem his dispraise of
the hymns by saying: “Hidden in this rubbish there are precious stones!”
Right well do the hymns, or, at any rate, those which he admits to be
“precious stones,” deserve their title Rig Veda, the knowledge of Praise.
Nothing can be finer, more masculine, than a propitiatory hymn to the
Maruts, the Storm Gods, of which he gives us a translation: “They make
the rocks to tremble, they tear asunder the kings of the forest. Come
on, Maruts, like madmen, ye Gods, with your whole tribe.” No wonder
men, whose lives had to face the terrors of the icy wilderness, sought
the favour of the unruly forces whose rage meant death to them and to
their herds and flocks. A hymn to Agni (fire), “the son of strength, the
conqueror of horses, the highborn,” is less striking, but the zenith of
the Vedic poetry is reached, as it seems to me, in a prayer addressed to
Ushas, the Dawn. What a picture it suggests of the old herdsman in those
frozen solitudes, falling on his knees when the stars grow pale before
the first glimmer of light that stretches along the eastern horizon,
thankfully to worship the radiant Goddess who puts to flight the dark
shadows of the night and its unseen dangers. Listen to his song of praise:
“She shines upon us, like a young wife, rousing every living being to go
to his work. When the fire had to be kindled by men, she made the light
by striking down darkness.”
“She rose up, spreading far and wide, and moving everywhere. She grew in
brightness, wearing her brilliant garment. The mother of the cows (the
mornings), the leader of the days, she shone gold-coloured, lovely to
behold.”
“She, the fortunate, who brings the eye of the Gods, who leads the white
and lovely steed (of the sun), the Dawn, was seen revealed by her rays,
with brilliant treasures, following every one.
“Thou who art a blessing where thou art near, drive far away the
unfriendly; make the pasture wide, give us safety! Scatter the enemy,
bring riches! Raise up wealth to the worshipper, thou mighty Dawn.”
“Shine for us with thy best rays, thou bright Dawn, thou who lengthenest
our life, thou the love of all, who givest us food, who givest us wealth
in cows, horses and chariots.”
“Thou daughter of the sky, thou highborn Dawn, whom the Vasishthas
magnify with songs, give us riches high and wide; all ye Gods protect us
always with your blessings.”[8]
So the old shepherd prays, and the Goddess, answering to his call,
spreads her rosy mantle over the sky, and tinges the snowy peaks and
ridges of the ice-bound mountains: the sun rises in his glory, and the
peace of a new day is born to the world.
The piety of the old Aryans admits of no doubt. We are told that the
consciousness of sin is a prominent feature in their religion. The poet
of the Veda searches eagerly for his sin, and finds it not in his will
but in his condition, which even in his dreams holds up evil before his
eyes, and at last he turns to his God, the God of Grace who enlightens
the simple. He believes in the power of the gods to take away from
man the heavy burden of his sins. “Varuna is merciful to him who has
committed.”
One more point should be noticed in any attempt, however slight, to give
a sketch of the religion of the Veda. Max Müller tells us that it knows
of no idols. This is the more remarkable when we think of the innumerable
idols of savage and revengeful Gods by which Indian, Chinese and Japanese
temples are degraded; all the nightmares of later monks who knew nothing
of the pure and clean-minded Aryans, whose Gods, as Oldenberg tells us,
in contrast to others, were bright and friendly beings without malice,
cruelty and deceit.
It has been well said that the highest value of the sacred poems of the
Aryans is historic, and that value has been revealed by the comparatively
recent study of Sanskrit. That is in the school in which we learn who
the Aryans were, what was the manner of their lives, their religion and
their thoughts; and we can, in a measure, trace much of what, after many
centuries, led to the development of a Hindu school of metaphysics, in
comparison with which the much vaunted Pythagoreans and Greek thinkers
were as babes and sucklings. The very name Arya tells us that this
ancient people was a race of husbandmen and tillers of the soil, the
root _ar_ from which the word is derived being found again in the Latin
_arare_, to plough, _aratrum_, a plough, and in the Greek ἄροτρον; and
when we talk of our “daughters,” it is well that we should remember
that our ancestors on the Steppes, many thousand years ago, themselves
invented the word “duhitar,” the milk-maid, the very word with which we
Europeans, in one shape or another, caress our women-children. The hymns
and prayers of the Vedas abound in allusions to the herds and flocks of
these old farmers, whose best friends—and therefore the objects of their
adoration—were the sun, the stars, the rains of heaven; just as their
enemies—therefore to be propitiated—were the storms, the snow and the
cruel winds: these were—the life-givers and death-givers. The life of the
lonely watcher of the Steppes was of its essence one of contemplation,
reflection and introspection.
Let me give one pregnant quotation from Max Müller’s “History of Ancient
Sanskrit Literature”: “At the first dawn of traditional history we see
these Aryan tribes migrating across the snow of the Himalaya southward
toward the Seven Rivers (the Indus, the five rivers of the Punjab and the
Sarasvati), and ever since India has been called their home. That before
that time they had been living in more northern regions, within the same
precincts, with the ancestors of the Greeks, the Italians, Slavonians,
Germans, the Celts, is a fact as firmly established as that the Normans
of William the Conqueror were the Northmen of Scandinavia. The evidence
of language is irrefragable, and it is the only evidence worth listening
to with regard to ante-historical periods. It would have been impossible
to discover any traces of relationship between the swarthy natives of
India and their conquerors, whether Alexander or Clive, but for the
testimony borne by language.” (“Sanskrit Literature,” pp. 12, 13.)
To the learned Jew—a Semite, to the Hungarian, the Finn, or the Basque,
who are Turanian settlers in Europe, the history of the Aryans is an
interesting study, linguistic or racial. To us true Europeans, to us
true Aryans, it has a far greater significance. It has all the charm of
an inquiry into a piece of remote family history—all the glamour of a
pedigree, not to be measured by a few puny centuries, but reaching far
away into the clouds of incalculable æons.
Talking idly in a garden, we can do no more than touch the mere fringe
of a mighty problem, even though it should be suggested by the great
silent Buddha. For instance, we have summoned as witness the one word
“daughter,” when there are so many others that we use a dozen times a day
which are equally strong links in the long chain of evidence by which we
prove our descent. But no matter—we have started the clue: let who will
pick it up. It will reward him.
THE COMMUNE
My Pegasus is not always inclined to take long flights. Sometimes when
a lazy fit is upon him he will venture no more than a trip across the
Channel, carrying me to Germany, Italy, Switzerland—perhaps landing me no
further off than some place in France. But of that beloved country I have
so many recollections, some gay, some sad, that I crave to go no further.
One such trip is very short but very tragic. Forty-six years have passed
since the episode of which I write, but the scenes of those few days
are graven so deeply in my mind that no lapse of time can ever efface
them. They haunt me like the pathetic thoughts which are aroused by the
solitary little pink slipper of the Princesse de Lamballe in the Musée
Cluny. Thoughts are such obstinate vagabonds that they must needs choose
their own road, and not even the Buddha, in his Veluvana, can drive them
eastward unless such be their will.
The final tragedy of 1871 (from a repetition of the horror of which,
may Heaven preserve France and ourselves!) is no doubt in these days
eclipsed by the brutal outrages upon which _Kultur_ is ever improving.
What will forty-five more years do? That mechanical invention and
chemical discoveries should come into play is, I suppose, inevitable.
The strange thing is that the whole coarse-fibred soul of the German
seems to be infected by the very potentialities of all these ghastly
new discoveries, which seem to urge him on to new cruelties and new
crimes. In 1870 he knew how to spare. Witness Paris. Now it is otherwise.
Still, to us who lived in those days what will always be known as the
Franco-German war remains as a poignantly painful memory; though the
ravages of war and the carnage were terrible, it was the parricidal fury
of anarchy and its monads which made men’s blood run cold.
The Commune, that hideous catastrophe which reversed the unnatural, crime
of Saturn—the children murdering and devouring their own parent—ended
tragically with the month of May, 1871. One morning I got a note from
the Duke of Sutherland, saying that he had received information that the
first train would be allowed into Paris the next day, and suggesting that
we should go over and see whether we could be of any use. We started the
following morning—the Duke, George Crawley, Wright, the Duke’s secretary,
and myself; but the train was stopped at Creil that afternoon, and we had
to stay there rather miserably for the night. The place was swarming
with Prussian soldiery, scowling and truculent-looking, clanking their
spurs defiantly all about the station and town. The people returned their
evil looks with interest, but it was of no use—they were the masters. _Væ
victis!_ It is a terrible sight to see a great people trampled on and
tortured by the savagery of a victorious army; but when that army is a
Prussian army—ask the Belgians.
There was no difficulty the next day; the train started early, and we
were in Paris betimes. There were not many cabs at the station, but there
was no great competition, so we were soon suited. I got on the box by the
driver, as I was curious to hear what he had to say of the siege and the
Commune. Strange to say, he, like every Parisian with whom I talked, was
far more bitter against the Commune than against the Prussians. After
all, men said, the Prussians spared our monuments; the Commune destroyed
them. When we arrived arrests were taking place all over the town, and
there was still some shooting of men in the streets, though we did not
see it. Full of pathetic suggestion were the little heaps of clothes
piled up in the squares and at the corners of streets.
There were some uniforms, but mostly they were made up of humble blouses
and the civilian caps of what we should call street arabs—the _titis_ of
old Paris. The owners, as the cabman said, were all rotting in the Fosse
Commune; he himself was full of belated valour. “If there had only been
ten men like me,” he protested, “ten determined stalwarts, a horror like
the Commune would have been impossible.” I asked him what he did. “Mon
Dieu! Monsieur! Que pouvais-je faire contre tous ces brigands? J’étais
tout seul. Je me suis refugié dans la cave.”
The next day a worthy shopkeeper held just the same language. Ten
men such as himself could have held the Rue de la Paix and kept the
Communards at bay. He tried to persuade his neighbours, but they would
not join with him, so, regretfully, he, too, hid in the cellar. It was
strange to listen to these bourgeois who had shown such courage and
determination and endurance during the siege, when the Prussians were
battering them out of existence. They could face the Prussians gallantly;
before the Commune they quailed.
The Rue de Rivoli was a piteous sight. The Ministère des Finances was
burnt and gutted; the roof had fallen in, the windows were all gaping,
and out of one of them there was a bit of charred blind fluttering
dismally in the light summer air like the ghost of a flag. The Tuileries
were nothing but a pile of charred stones, hardly the skeleton of a
palace left; but the Louvre was luckily to all intents and purposes
unharmed. It was enough to make a man weep to see the havoc, the ruins,
and everywhere the signs of murder and violence. The Communards and
pétroleuses had done their work thoroughly.
We dropped the luggage at the hotel, dismissed the cabman, still fully
convinced of the potentiality of his own valour, and started forth for a
morning stroll on foot.
When we came to the Place Vendôme, the great column, the bronze record
of the past glories of the French army, was lying prone on a bed of
straw, torn down by the sacrilege of Gustave Courbet, the Ministre des
Beaux-Arts under the Commune. It had been badly smashed, and some small
fragments had been carried away as souvenirs, but many of these were,
I was told, recovered. As we drew near to look at the cruel misdeed, a
_peloton_ of soldiers came along with a civilian in their midst, whom
they were carrying off to a guard-room hard by. It was Courbet himself,
whom I knew well by sight. I was not the only man to recognize him. An
elderly gentleman with a little boy of about fourteen years was passing
by. When he saw the prisoner he dashed forward, and before the guards
could stop him, knocked off Courbet’s hat, shouting out: “Au moins,
scélérat, tu te découvriras devant la colonne que tu as fait tomber.”
Courbet, dazed by this fury of explosive patriotism, picked up his hat
and said nothing, while the gentleman, well pleased with himself, walked
on with his little son, and the guard grinned satisfaction, but took no
further notice.
[Illustration: GUSTAVE COURBET.
_From a painting by himself in the Louvre._
[_To face p. 82._]
I had often seen Courbet in former days at the Café Royal, where he
used to go for his midday meal. As he was something of a _sommité_, a
celebrity in art as elsewhere for all his rebellious proclivities, the
maître d’hôtel used to receive him with the greatest ceremony, bowing
to the ground and rubbing his hands: “Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet. Que
pourrai-je offrir à Monsieur ce matin. J’ai un Chateaubriand qui est de
toute confiance,” etc., etc., etc. Courbet would sit down with majestic
condescension, like a true anarchist, deigning to be waited upon with all
the adulation which was due to him.
Well, it so happened that after the little scene which I have described
in the Place Vendôme, we went on to the Café Royal, where we were
received with effusive welcome by the maître d’hôtel. Like everybody
else, he began talking about the recent tragedies and inveighing against
the Commune. I told him of the arrest of Courbet, his old patron, and he
at once launched out into the most violent abuse of him. “Oh! Monsieur,
ne me parlez pas de ce sale communeux! Si jamais il ose remettre les
pieds ici c’est à moi qu’il aura affaire!” I asked him why he used the
word “communeux,” I thought the word was communard. “Oui, Monsieur,” he
replied sententiously, “mais on dit _crapule_, _crapuleux_, _commune_,
_communeux_, c’est plus méritant.” Courbet was sentenced to six months’
imprisonment, and was condemned, moreover, to pay a very heavy fine
for the fall of the column—none too severe a punishment in all the
circumstances of the case.
Some time after the expiration of the six months I was again in Paris,
and went to the Café Royal for luncheon. Who should come in a few minutes
later but the great Courbet. Up rushed the maître d’hôtel to meet him,
and I anticipated a first-rate row. Not a bit of it! To my amazement
I heard the old welcome: “Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet! Qu’est-ce-qu’on
peut vous offrir ce matin?” etc. The old story, the old refrain, the
obsequious bows, the festive rubbing of hands. I could not resist
reminding my friend of what he had said a few months before. Ah! he said,
that was all so long ago! “D’ailleurs,” he added, “il ne faut pas oublier
qu’il a été ministre, et on ne sais jamais ce qui peut arriver!”
Old Lady Edward Thynne used to tell a capital story of Courbet, whom she
met a few years before 1870 at some artistic gathering in Paris. He had
been airing his political views for some minutes, when to draw him out
she said: “But then it seems that all this while I have been talking
with a real red republican.” “Rouge, Madame,” was the answer, “dites,
plutôt, violet,” and then he went off again at score. “But why,” she
asked, “do you say that you want to pull down the Tuileries?” “Madame,
parce que tant que cette sacrée maison durera il y aura toujours des
coquins qui voudront venir y demeurer.”
Another notable arrest was that of Paschal Grousset, the so-called
Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was caught disguised as a woman in the
Rue Condorcet, which created a great sensation. Sir Edward Malet, who as
second secretary of the British Embassy, had been obliged to have some
dealings with him, told me that he was really a very pleasant little
man, who was always civil and obliging to foreigners. “Not a bad little
fellow,” Malet used to say. I saw him some years later in London, when
he was correspondent of I forget which of the French newspapers, and he
came to me at the Office of Works to ask for an admission to a volunteer
review which the Queen was to hold in Hyde Park. He was so agreeable that
I quite understood Malet’s verdict on him.
In the evening we went to dine at Voisin’s, where I had heard that the
members of the Government of the Commune had been dining and breakfasting
every day during their short lease of power. Good old Bellanger, the
famous _sommelier_, was delighted to see us. I asked after a certain
old chambertin—had he any left? “Pour Monsieur il y en aura toujours,”
was the answer. But I said, “I wonder that your late patrons did not
drink it all up!” “Ah! Monsieur, si vous croyez que j’allais donner de ce
vin là à ces charapans! Monsieur, lorsque j’ai su qu’ils allaient venir
ici je suis descendu dans la cave et j’ai changé toutes les étiquettes.
Ils croyaient boire les meilleurs crus—s’ils avaient su ce que je leur
servais! Mais j’étais sûr de mon affaire! Est-ce qu’ils s’y connaissaient
ces animaux-là?” And then he went on grumbling: “Ah! mais non, non! Du
chambertin—jamais de la vie!” Truly there is a comic element in every
tragedy, and a grave-digger in every Hamlet.
* * * * *
Of all the crimes and cruelties which disgraced the Commune, none excited
greater horror than the murder of Monseigneur Darboy, the Archbishop
of Paris, and the priests who with him and many others were seized as
hostages. The flames of the Tuileries and other monuments, the hell-fire
orgies of the mob and the pétroleuses drunken with the lust of blood
and incendiarism—when the very firemen pumped petrol instead of water
on to the burning buildings—were almost forgotten in the execration
of that sacrilege. Upwards of sixty hostages, all innocent peaceable
men, against no one of whom could any misdeed be alleged, were put to
death. They were imprisoned in La Roquette, and on the 24th of May the
Archbishop and the Abbé de Guerry, the Curé of the Madeleine, with
Monsieur Bonjean, the president of the Cour de Cassation, and three
Jesuit priests (Fathers Ducondray, Allard and Clair), after a sham trial,
were led into the courtyard of the prison and shot. The Archbishop, who
was the second of the victims to suffer, met his death like the hero and
Christian martyr that he was. He stepped to the front, and praying to God
for the forgiveness of his murderers, gave them his pastoral blessing.
Two of the firing party, less hardened than the others, knelt down and
asked his pardon. When the butchery was over the ruffians stripped the
Archbishop’s honoured body, and that no degradation might be wanting,
carted it off to be thrown like the carrion of a malefactor into the
Fosse Commune. Even decent burial was to be denied to him.
After the last desperate fight at the cemetery of Père la Chaise, in
which men and women fought like tigers and tigresses, neither giving
nor asking for quarter, all mad to kill, and kill, and kill, the body
was recovered and carried to the archiepiscopal palace, where it lay in
state, with those of the other priests. All Paris flocked to do homage
to one of God’s saints, and take a last look at the beloved old man.
Those who could afford it were in deep mourning, but all were weeping
from the richest down to the poorest and humblest, as I saw them march
past the body. The Archbishop, lying mitred and robed, looked like a
waxen image. There was no sign of pain in his face, no trace of the cruel
sorrow and long suspense by which his last days must have been racked; on
it was written only that divine peace which passeth all understanding.
The hour-glass had been turned and the sands of the Commune had run out.
The prison of La Roquette, the scene of so many horrors, was now in
the hands of the Versaillais, and the cells of the hostages were more
fitly tenanted by the murderers who but a few days before, when to be
respectable was a deadly crime, had ruled Paris with a rod of terror.
Passing by the prison, after leaving the Archbishop’s palace, we saw
that the great gates were open, and a crowd was gathered outside eagerly
watching and craning necks to see what was going on within. I asked what
the people were waiting for? A batch of prisoners was to be led out to
the fortifications to be shot. Next to me was standing a rather pretty
young girl of about fifteen or sixteen years, nicely but very simply
dressed, evidently the daughter of well-to-do bourgeois parents. In
charge of her was a bonne, an elderly woman wearing a linen cap, and the
typical tartan fichu pinned across her breast.