*The Project Gutenberg Etext of Historical Lecturers and Essays*
#6 in our series by Charles Kingsley
Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!
Please take a look at the important information in this header.
We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
electronic path open for the next readers. Do not remove this.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
further information is included below. We need your donations.
Historical Lecturers and Essays
by Charles Kingsley
June, 1998 [Etext #1360]
*The Project Gutenberg Etext of Historical Lecturers and Essays*
******This file should be named hstle10.txt or hstle10.zip******
Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, hstle11.txt
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, hstle10a.txt
This etext was prepared from the 1902 MacMillan edition
by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
copyright notice is included. Therefore, we do NOT keep these books
in compliance with any particular paper edition, usually otherwise.
We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
of the official release dates, for time for better editing.
Please note: neither this list nor its contents are final till
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month. A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so. To be sure you have an
up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
in the first week of the next month. Since our ftp program has
a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
new copy has at least one byte more or less.
Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work. The
fifty hours is one conservative estimate for how long it we take
to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc. This
projected audience is one hundred million readers. If our value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-two text
files per month, or 384 more Etexts in 1998 for a total of 1500+
If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the
total should reach over 150 billion Etexts given away.
The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
Files by the December 31, 2001. [10,000 x 100,000,000=Trillion]
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is only 10% of the present number of computer users. 2001
should have at least twice as many computer users as that, so it
will require us reaching less than 5% of the users in 2001.
We need your donations more than ever!
All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/CMU": and are
tax deductible to the extent allowable by law. (CMU = Carnegie-
Mellon University).
For these and other matters, please mail to:
Project Gutenberg
P. O. Box 2782
Champaign, IL 61825
When all other email fails try our Executive Director:
Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
We would prefer to send you this information by email
(Internet, Bitnet, Compuserve, ATTMAIL or MCImail).
******
If you have an FTP program (or emulator), please
FTP directly to the Project Gutenberg archives:
[Mac users, do NOT point and click. . .type]
ftp uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu
login: anonymous
password: your@login
cd etext/etext90 through /etext96
or cd etext/articles [get suggest gut for more information]
dir [to see files]
get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
GET INDEX?00.GUT
for a list of books
and
GET NEW GUT for general information
and
MGET GUT* for newsletters.
**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
(Three Pages)
***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from. If you received this etext on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
Carnegie-Mellon University (the "Project"). Among other
things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works. Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from. If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.
THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.
INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.
DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:
[1] Only give exact copies of it. Among other things, this
requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
etext or this "small print!" statement. You may however,
if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
*EITHER*:
[*] The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
does *not* contain characters other than those
intended by the author of the work, although tilde
(~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
be used to convey punctuation intended by the
author, and additional characters may be used to
indicate hypertext links; OR
[*] The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
form by the program that displays the etext (as is
the case, for instance, with most word processors);
OR
[*] You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
or other equivalent proprietary form).
[2] Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
"Small Print!" statement.
[3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
net profits you derive calculated using the method you
already use to calculate your applicable taxes. If you
don't derive profits, no royalty is due. Royalties are
payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon
University" within the 60 days following each
date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.
WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
you can think of. Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".
*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
Historical Lectures and Essays by Charles Kingsley
Contents:
The First Discovery of America
Cyrus, Servant of the Lord
Ancient Civilisation
Rondelet
Vesalius
Paracelsus
Buchanan
THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA
Let me begin this lecture {1} with a scene in the North Atlantic 863
years since.
"Bjarne Grimolfson was blown with his ship into the Irish Ocean; and
there came worms and the ship began to sink under them. They had a
boat which they had payed with seals' blubber, for that the sea-
worms will not hurt. But when they got into the boat they saw that
it would not hold them all. Then said Bjarne, 'As the boat will
only hold the half of us, my advice is that we should draw lots who
shall go in her; for that will not be unworthy of our manhood.'
This advice seemed so good that none gainsaid it; and they drew
lots. And the lot fell to Bjarne that he should go in the boat with
half his crew. But as he got into the boat, there spake an
Icelander who was in the ship and had followed Bjarne from Iceland,
'Art thou going to leave me here, Bjarne?' Quoth Bjarne, 'So it
must be.' Then said the man, 'Another thing didst thou promise my
father, when I sailed with thee from Iceland, than to desert me
thus. For thou saidst that we both should share the same lot.'
Bjarne said, 'And that we will not do. Get thou down into the boat,
and I will get up into the ship, now I see that thou art so greedy
after life.' So Bjarne went up into the ship, and the man went down
into the boat; and the boat went on its voyage till they came to
Dublin in Ireland. Most men say that Bjarne and his comrades
perished among the worms; for they were never heard of after."
This story may serve as a text for my whole lecture. Not only does
it smack of the sea-breeze and the salt water, like all the finest
old Norse sagas, but it gives a glimpse at least of the nobleness
which underlay the grim and often cruel nature of the Norseman. It
belongs, too, to the culminating epoch, to the beginning of that era
when the Scandinavian peoples had their great times; when the old
fierceness of the worshippers of Thor and Odin was tempered, without
being effeminated, by the Faith of the "White Christ," till the very
men who had been the destroyers of Western Europe became its
civilisers.
It should have, moreover, a special interest to Americans. For--as
American antiquaries are well aware--Bjarne was on his voyage home
from the coast of New England; possibly from that very Mount Hope
Bay which seems to have borne the same name in the time of those old
Norsemen, as afterwards in the days of King Philip, the last sachem
of the Wampanong Indians. He was going back to Greenland, perhaps
for reinforcements, finding, he and his fellow-captain, Thorfinn,
the Esquimaux who then dwelt in that land too strong for them. For
the Norsemen were then on the very edge of discovery, which might
have changed the history not only of this continent but of Europe
likewise. They had found and colonised Iceland and Greenland. They
had found Labrador, and called it Helluland, from its ice-polished
rocks. They had found Nova Scotia seemingly, and called it
Markland, from its woods. They had found New England, and called it
Vinland the Good. A fair land they found it, well wooded, with good
pasturage; so that they had already imported cows, and a bull whose
lowings terrified the Esquimaux. They had found self-sown corn too,
probably maize. The streams were full of salmon. But they had
called the land Vinland, by reason of its grapes. Quaint enough,
and bearing in its very quaintness the stamp of truth, is the story
of the first finding of the wild fox-grapes. How Leif the
Fortunate, almost as soon as he first landed, missed a little
wizened old German servant of his father's, Tyrker by name, and was
much vexed thereat, for he had been brought up on the old man's
knee, and hurrying off to find him met Tyrker coming back twisting
his eyes about--a trick of his--smacking his lips and talking German
to himself in high excitement. And when they get him to talk Norse
again, he says: "I have not been far, but I have news for you. I
have found vines and grapes!" "Is that true, foster-father?" says
Leif. "True it is," says the old German, "for I was brought up
where there was never any lack of them."
The saga--as given by Rafn--had a detailed description of this
quaint personage's appearance; and it would not he amiss if American
wine-growers should employ an American sculptor--and there are great
American sculptors--to render that description into marble, and set
up little Tyrker in some public place, as the Silenus of the New
World.
Thus the first cargoes homeward from Vinland to Greenland had been
of timber and of raisins, and of vine-stocks, which were not like to
thrive.
And more. Beyond Vinland the Good there was said to be another
land, Whiteman's Land--or Ireland the Mickle, as some called it.
For these Norse traders from Limerick had found Ari Marson, and
Ketla of Ruykjanes, supposed to have been long since drowned at sea,
and said that the people had made him and Ketla chiefs, and baptized
Ari. What is all this? and what is this, too, which the Esquimaux
children taken in Markland told the Northmen, of a land beyond them
where the folk wore white clothes, and carried flags on poles? Are
these all dreams? or was some part of that great civilisation, the
relics whereof your antiquarians find in so many parts of the United
States, still in existence some 900 years ago; and were these old
Norse cousins of ours upon the very edge of it? Be that as it may,
how nearly did these fierce Vikings, some of whom seemed to have
sailed far south along the shore, become aware that just beyond them
lay a land of fruits and spices, gold and gems? The adverse current
of the Gulf Stream, it may be, would have long prevented their
getting past the Bahamas into the Gulf of Mexico; but, sooner or
later, some storm must have carried a Greenland viking to San
Domingo or to Cuba; and then, as has been well said, some
Scandinavian dynasty might have sat upon the throne of Mexico.
These stories are well known to antiquarians. They may be found,
almost all of them, in Professor Rafn's "Antiquitates Americanae."
The action in them stands out often so clear and dramatic, that the
internal evidence of historic truth is irresistible. Thorvald, who,
when he saw what seems to be, they say, the bluff head of Alderton
at the south-east end of Boston Bay, said, "Here should I like to
dwell," and, shot by an Esquimaux arrow, bade bury him on that
place, with a cross at his head and a cross at his feet, and call
the place Cross Ness for evermore; Gudrida, the magnificent widow,
who wins hearts and sees strange deeds from Iceland to Greenland,
and Greenland to Vinland and back, and at last, worn out and sad,
goes off on a pilgrimage to Rome; Helgi and Finnbogi, the
Norwegians, who, like our Arctic voyagers in after times, devise all
sorts of sports and games to keep the men in humour during the long
winter at Hope; and last, but not least, the terrible Freydisa, who,
when the Norse are seized with a sudden panic at the Esquimaux and
flee from them, as they had three weeks before fled from Thorfinn's
bellowing bull, turns, when so weak that she cannot escape, single-
handed on the savages, and catching up a slain man's sword, puts
them all to flight with her fierce visage and fierce cries--Freydisa
the Terrible, who, in another voyage, persuades her husband to fall
on Helgi and Finnbogi, when asleep, and murder them and all their
men; and then, when he will not murder the five women too, takes up
an axe and slays them all herself, and getting back to Greenland,
when the dark and unexplained tale comes out, lives unpunished, but
abhorred henceforth. All these folks, I say, are no phantoms, but
realities; at least, if I can judge of internal evidence.
But beyond them, and hovering on the verge of Mythus and Fairyland,
there is a ballad called "Finn the Fair," and how
An upland Earl had twa braw sons,
My story to begin;
The tane was Light Haldane the strong,
The tither was winsome Finn.
and so forth; which was still sung, with other "rimur," or ballads,
in the Faroes, at the end of the last century. Professor Rafn has
inserted it, because it talks of Vinland as a well-known place, and
because the brothers are sent by the princess to slay American
kings; but that Rime has another value. It is of a beauty so
perfect, and yet so like the old Scotch ballads in its heroic
conception of love, and in all its forms and its qualities, that it
is one proof more, to any student of early European poetry, that we
and these old Norsemen are men of the same blood.
If anything more important than is told by Professor Rafn and Mr.
Black {2} be now known to the antiquarians of Massachusetts, let me
entreat them to pardon my ignorance. But let me record my opinion
that, though somewhat too much may have been made in past years of
certain rock-inscriptions, and so forth, on this side of the
Atlantic, there can be no reasonable doubt that our own race landed
and tried to settle on the shore of New England six hundred years
before their kinsmen, and, in many cases, their actual descendants,
the august Pilgrim Fathers of the seventeenth century. And so, as I
said, a Scandinavian dynasty might have been seated now upon the
throne of Mexico. And how was that strange chance lost? First, of
course, by the length and danger of the coasting voyage. It was one
thing to have, like Columbus and Vespucci, Cortes and Pizarro, the
Azores as a halfway port; another to have Greenland, or even
Iceland. It was one thing to run south-west upon Columbus's track,
across the Mar de Damas, the Ladies' Sea, which hardly knows a
storm, with the blazing blue above, the blazing blue below, in an
ever-warming climate, where every breath is life and joy; another to
struggle against the fogs and icebergs, the rocks and currents of
the dreary North Atlantic. No wonder, then, that the knowledge of
Markland, and Vinland, and Whiteman's Land died away in a few
generations, and became but fireside sagas for the winter nights.
But there were other causes, more honourable to the dogged energy of
the Norse. They were in those very years conquering and settling
nearer home as no other people--unless, perhaps, the old Ionian
Greeks--conquered and settled.
Greenland, we have seen, they held--the western side at least--and
held it long and well enough to afford, it is said, 2,600 pounds of
walrus' teeth as yearly tithe to the Pope, besides Peter's pence,
and to build many a convent, and church, and cathedral, with farms
and homesteads round; for one saga speaks of Greenland as producing
wheat of the finest quality. All is ruined now, perhaps by gradual
change of climate.
But they had richer fields of enterprise than Greenland, Iceland,
and the Faroes. Their boldest outlaws at that very time--whether
from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, or Britain--were forming the imperial
life-guard of the Byzantine Emperor, as the once famous Varangers of
Constantinople; and that splendid epoch of their race was just
dawning, of which my lamented friend, the late Sir Edmund Head, says
so well in his preface to Viga Glum's Icelandic Saga, "The Sagas, of
which this tale is one, were composed for the men who have left
their mark in every corner of Europe; and whose language and laws
are at this moment important elements in the speech and institutions
of England, America, and Australia. There is no page of modern
history in which the influence of the Norsemen and their conquests
must not be taken into account--Russia, Constantinople, Greece,
Palestine, Sicily, the coasts of Africa, Southern Italy, France, the
Spanish Peninsula, England, Scotland, Ireland, and every rock and
island round them, have been visited, and most of them at one time
or the other ruled, by the men of Scandinavia. The motto on the
sword of Roger Guiscard was a proud one:
Appulus et Calaber, Siculus mihi servit et Afer.
Every island, says Sir Edmund Head, and truly--for the name of
almost every island on the coast of England, Scotland, and Eastern
Ireland, ends in either EY or AY or OE, a Norse appellative, as is
the word "island" itself--is a mark of its having been, at some time
or other, visited by the Vikings of Scandinavia.
Norway, meanwhile, was convulsed by war; and what perhaps was of
more immediate consequence, Svend Fork-beard, whom we Englishmen
call Sweyn--the renegade from that Christian Faith which had been
forced on him by his German conqueror, the Emperor Otto II.--with
his illustrious son Cnut, whom we call Canute, were just calling
together all the most daring spirits of the Baltic coasts for the
subjugation of England; and when that great feat was performed, the
Scandinavian emigration was paralysed, probably, for a time by the
fearful wars at home. While the king of Sweden, and St. Olaf
Tryggvason, king of Norway, were setting on Denmark during Cnut's
pilgrimage to Rome, and Cnut, sailing with a mighty fleet to Norway,
was driving St. Olaf into Russia, to return and fall in the
fratricidal battle of Stiklestead--during, strangely enough, a total
eclipse of the sun--Vinland was like enough to remain still
uncolonised. After Cnut's short-lived triumph--king as he was of
Denmark, Norway, England, and half Scotland, and what not of Wendish
Folk inside the Baltic--the force of the Norsemen seems to have been
exhausted in their native lands. Once more only, if I remember
right, did "Lochlin," really and hopefully send forth her "mailed
swarm" to conquer a foreign land; and with a result unexpected alike
by them and by their enemies. Had it been otherwise, we might not
have been here this day.
Let me sketch for you once more--though you have heard it,
doubtless, many a time--the tale of that tremendous fortnight which
settled the fate of Britain, and therefore of North America; which
decided--just in those great times when the decision was to be made-
-whether we should be on a par with the other civilised nations of
Europe, like them the "heirs of all the ages," with our share not
only of Roman Christianity and Roman centralisation--a member of the
great comity of European nations, held together in one Christian
bond by the Pope--but heirs also of Roman civilisation, Roman
literature, Roman Law; and therefore, in due time, of Greek
philosophy and art. No less a question than this, it seems to me,
hung in the balance during that fortnight of autumn, 1066.
Poor old Edward the Confessor, holy, weak, and sad, lay in his new
choir of Westminster--where the wicked ceased from troubling, and
the weary were at rest. The crowned ascetic had left no heir
behind. England seemed as a corpse, to which all the eagles might
gather together; and the South-English, in their utter need, had
chosen for their king the ablest, and it may be the justest, man in
Britain--Earl Harold Godwinsson: himself, like half the upper
classes of England then, of the all-dominant Norse blood; for his
mother was a Danish princess. Then out of Norway, with a mighty
host, came Harold Hardraade, taller than all men, the ideal Viking
of his time. Half-brother of the now dead St. Olaf, severely
wounded when he was but fifteen, at Stiklestead, when Olaf fell, he
had warred and plundered on many a coast. He had been away to
Russia to King Jaroslaf; he had been in the Emperor's Varanger guard
at Constantinople--and, it was whispered, had slain a lion there
with his bare hands; he had carved his name and his comrades' in
Runic characters--if you go to Venice you may see them at this day--
on the loins of the great marble lion, which stood in his time not
in Venice but in Athens. And now, king of Norway and conqueror, for
the time, of Denmark, why should he not take England, as Sweyn and
Canute took it sixty years before, when the flower of the English
gentry perished at the fatal battle of Assingdune? If he and his
half-barbarous host had conquered, the civilisation of Britain would
have been thrown back, perhaps, for centuries. But it was not to
be.
England WAS to be conquered by the Norman; but by the civilised, not
the barbaric; by the Norse who had settled, but four generations
before, in the North East of France under Rou, Rollo, Rolf the
Ganger--so-called, they say, because his legs were so long that,
when on horseback, he touched the ground and seemed to gang, or
walk. He and his Norsemen had taken their share of France, and
called it Normandy to this day; and meanwhile, with that docility
and adaptability which marks so often truly great spirits, they had
changed their creed, their language, their habits, and had become,
from heathen and murderous Berserkers, the most truly civilised
people of Europe, and--as was most natural then--the most faithful
allies and servants of the Pope of Rome. So greatly had they
changed, and so fast, that William Duke of Normandy, the great-
great-grandson of Rolf the wild Viking, was perhaps the finest
gentleman, as well as the most cultivated sovereign, and the
greatest statesman and warrior in all Europe.
So Harold of Norway came with all his Vikings to Stamford Bridge by
York; and took, by coming, only that which Harold of England
promised him, namely, "forasmuch as he was taller than any other
man, seven feet of English ground."
The story of that great battle, told with a few inaccuracies, but
told as only great poets tell, you should read, if you have not read
it already, in the "Heimskringla" of Snorri Sturluson, the Homer of
the North:
High feast that day held the birds of the air and
the beasts of the field,
White-tailed erne and sallow glede,
Dusky raven, with horny neb,
And the gray deer the wolf of the wood.
The bones of the slain, men say, whitened the place for fifty years
to come.
And remember, that on the same day on which that fight befell--
September 27, 1066--William, Duke of Normandy, with all his French-
speaking Norsemen, was sailing across the British Channel, under the
protection of a banner consecrated by the Pope, to conquer that
England which the Norse-speaking Normans could not conquer.
And now King Harold showed himself a man. He turned at once from
the North of England to the South. He raised the folk of the
Southern, as he had raised those of the Central and Northern shires;
and in sixteen days--after a march which in those times was a
prodigious feat--he was entrenched upon the fatal down which men
called Heathfield then, and Senlac, but Battle to this day--with
William and his French Normans opposite him on Telham hill.
Then came the battle of Hastings. You all know what befell upon
that day; and how the old weapon was matched against the new--the
English axe against the Norman lance--and beaten only because the
English broke their ranks. If you wish to refresh your memories,
read the tale once more in Mr. Freeman's "History of England," or
Professor Creasy's " Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World," or
even, best of all, the late Lord Lytton's splendid romance of
"Harold." And when you go to England, go, as some of you may have
gone already, to Battle; and there from off the Abbey grounds, or
from Mountjoye behind, look down off what was then "The Heathy
Field," over the long slopes of green pasture and the rich hop-
gardens, where were no hop-gardens then, and the flat tide-marshes
winding between the wooded heights, towards the southern sea; and
imagine for yourselves the feelings of an Englishman as he
contemplates that broad green sloping lawn, on which was decided the
destiny of his native land. Here, right beneath, rode Taillefer up
the slope before them all, singing the song of Roland, tossing his
lance in air and catching it as it fell, with all the Norse
berserker spirit of his ancestors flashing out in him, at the
thought of one fair fight, and then purgatory, or Valhalla--
Taillefer perhaps preferred the latter. Yonder on the left, in that
copse where the red-ochre gully runs, is Sanguelac, the drain of
blood, into which (as the Bayeux tapestry, woven by Matilda's maids,
still shows) the Norman knights fell, horse and man, till the gully
was bridged with writhing bodies for those who rode after. Here,
where you stand--the crest of the hill marks where it must have
been--was the stockade on which depended the fate of England.
Yonder, perhaps, stalked out one English squire or house-carle after
another: tall men with long-handled battle-axes--one specially
terrible, with a wooden helmet which no sword could pierce--who
hewed and hewed down knight on knight, till they themselves were
borne to earth at last. And here, among the trees and ruins of the
garden, kept trim by those who know the treasure which they own,
stood Harold's two standards of the fighting-man and the dragon of
Wessex. And here, close by (for here, for many a century, stood the
high altar of Battle Abbey, where monks sang masses for Harold's
soul), upon this very spot the Swan-neck found her hero-lover's
corpse. "Ah," says many an Englishman--and who will blame him for
it--"how grand to have died beneath that standard on that day!"
Yes, and how right. And yet how right, likewise, that the Norman's
cry of DEXAIE!--"God Help!"--and not the English hurrah, should have
won that day, till William rode up Mountjoye in the afternoon to see
the English army, terrible even in defeat, struggling through copse
and marsh away toward Brede, and, like retreating lions driven into
their native woods, slaying more in the pursuit than they slew even
in the fight.
But so it was to be; for so it ought to have been. You, my American
friends, delight, as I have said already, in seeing the old places
of the old country. Go, I beg you, and look at that old place, and
if you be wise, you will carry back from it one lesson: That God's
thoughts are not as our thoughts; nor His ways as our ways.
It was a fearful time which followed. I cannot but believe that our
forefathers had been, in some way or other, great sinners, or two
such conquests as Canute's and William's would not have fallen on
them within the short space of sixty years. They did not want for
courage, as Stamford Brigg and Hastings showed full well. English
swine, their Norman conquerors called them often enough; but never
English cowards. Their ruinous vice, if we are to trust the records
of the time, was what the old monks called accidia--[Greek text]--
and ranked it as one of the seven deadly sins: a general careless,
sleepy, comfortable habit of mind, which lets all go its way for
good or evil--a habit of mind too often accompanied, as in the case
of the Angle-Danes, with self-indulgence, often coarse enough. Huge
eaters and huger drinkers, fuddled with ale, were the men who went
down at Hastings--though they went down like heroes--before the
staid and sober Norman out of France.
But those were fearful times. As long as William lived, ruthless as
he was to all rebels, he kept order and did justice with a strong
and steady hand; for he brought with him from Normandy the instincts
of a truly great statesman. And in his sons' time matters grew
worse and worse. After that, in the troubles of Stephen's reign,
anarchy let loose tyranny in its most fearful form, and things were
done which recall the cruelties of the old Spanish CONQUISTADORES in
America. Scott's charming romance of "Ivanhoe" must be taken, I
fear, as a too true picture of English society in the time of
Richard I.
And what came of it all? What was the result of all this misery and
wrong?
This, paradoxical as it may seem: That the Norman conquest was the
making of the English people; of the Free Commons of England.
Paradoxical, but true. First, you must dismiss from your minds the
too common notion that there is now, in England, a governing Norman
aristocracy, or that there has been one, at least since the year
1215, when Magna Charta was won from the Norman John by Normans and
by English alike. For the first victors at Hastings, like the first
conquistadores in America, perished, as the monk chronicles point
out, rapidly by their own crimes; and very few of our nobility can
trace their names back to the authentic Battle Abbey roll. The
great majority of the peers have sprung from, and all have
intermarried with, the Commons; and the peerage has been from the
first, and has become more and more as centuries have rolled on, the
prize of success in life.
The cause is plain. The conquest of England by the Normans was not
one of those conquests of a savage by a civilised race, or of a
cowardly race by a brave race, which results in the slavery of the
conquered, and leaves the gulf of caste between two races--master
and slave. That was the case in France, and resulted, after
centuries of oppression, in the great and dreadful revolution of
1793, which convulsed not only France but the whole civilised world.
But caste, thank God, has never existed in England, since at least
the first generation after the Norman conquest.
The vast majority, all but the whole population of England, have
been always free; and free, as they are not where caste exists to
change their occupations. They could intermarry, if they were able
men, into the ranks above them; as they could sink, if they were
unable men, into the ranks below them. Any man acquainted with the
origin of our English surnames may verify this fact for himself, by
looking at the names of a single parish or a single street of shops.
There, jumbled together, he will find names marking the noblest
Saxon or Angle blood--Kenward or Kenric, Osgood or Osborne, side by
side with Cordery or Banister--now names of farmers in my own
parish--or other Norman-French names which may be, like those two
last, in Battle Abbey roll--and side by side the almost ubiquitous
Brown, whose ancestor was probably some Danish or Norwegian house-
carle, proud of his name Biorn the Bear, and the ubiquitous Smith or
Smythe, the Smiter, whose forefather, whether he be now peasant or
peer, assuredly handled the tongs and hammer at his own forge. This
holds true equally in New England and in Old. When I search through
(as I delight to do) your New England surnames, I find the same
jumble of names--West Saxon, Angle, Danish, Norman, and French-
Norman likewise, many of primaeval and heathen antiquity, many of
high nobility, all worked together, as at home, to form the Free
Commoners of England.
If any should wish to know more on this curious and important
subject, let me recommend them to study Ferguson's "Teutonic Name
System," a book from which you will discover that some of our
quaintest, and seemingly most plebeian surnames--many surnames, too,
which are extinct in England, but remain in America--are really
corruptions of good old Teutonic names, which our ancestors may have
carried in the German Forest, before an Englishman set foot on
British soil; from which he will rise with the comfortable feeling
that we English-speaking men, from the highest to the lowest, are
literally kinsmen. Nay, so utterly made up now is the old blood-
feud between Norseman and Englishman, between the descendants of
those who conquered and those who were conquered, that in the
children of our Prince of Wales, after 800 years, the blood of
William of Normandy is mingled with the blood of the very Harold who
fell at Hastings. And so, by the bitter woes which followed the
Norman conquest was the whole population, Dane, Angle, and Saxon,
earl and churl, freeman and slave, crushed and welded together into
one homogeneous mass, made just and merciful towards each other by
the most wholesome of all teachings, a community of suffering; and
if they had been, as I fear they were, a lazy and a sensual people,
were taught
That life is not as idle ore,
But heated hot with burning fears,
And bathed in baths of hissing tears,
And battered with the strokes of doom
To shape and use.
But how did these wild Vikings become Christian men? It is a long
story. So stanch a race was sure to be converted only very slowly.
Noble missionaries as Ansgar, Rembert, and Poppo, had worked for 150
years and more among the heathens of Denmark. But the patriotism of
the Norseman always recoiled, even though in secret, from the fact
that they were German monks, backed by the authority of the German
emperor; and many a man, like Svend Fork-beard, father of the great
Canute, though he had the Kaiser himself for godfather, turned
heathen once more the moment he was free, because his baptism was
the badge of foreign conquest, and neither pope nor kaiser should
lord it over him, body or soul. St. Olaf, indeed, forced
Christianity on the Norse at the sword's point, often by horrid
cruelties, and perished in the attempt. But who forced it on the
Norsemen of Scotland, England, Ireland, Neustria, Russia, and all
the Eastern Baltic? It was absorbed and in most cases, I believe,
gradually and willingly, as a gospel and good news to hearts worn
out with the storm of their own passions. And whence came their
Christianity? Much of it, as in the case of the Danes, and still
more of the French Normans, came direct from Rome, the city which,
let them defy its influence as they would, was still the fount of
all theology, as well as of all civilisation. But I must believe
that much of it came from that mysterious ancient Western Church,
the Church of St. Patric, St. Bridget, St. Columba, which had
covered with rude cells and chapels the rocky islets of the North
Atlantic, even to Iceland itself. Even to Iceland; for when that
island was first discovered, about A.D. 840, the Norsemen found in
an isle, on the east and west and elsewhere, Irish books and bells
and wooden crosses, and named that island Papey, the isle of the
popes--some little colony of monks, who lived by fishing, and who
are said to have left the land when the Norsemen settled in it. Let
us believe, for it is consonant with reason and experience, that the
sight of those poor monks, plundered and massacred again and again
by the "mailed swarms of Lochlin," yet never exterminated, but
springing up again in the same place, ready for fresh massacre, a
sacred plant which God had planted, and which no rage of man could
trample out--let us believe, I say, that that sight taught at last
to the buccaneers of the old world that there was a purer manliness,
a loftier heroism, than the ferocious self-assertion of the
Berserker, even the heroism of humility, gentleness, self-restraint,
self-sacrifice; that there was a strength which was made perfect in
weakness; a glory, not of the sword but of the cross. We will
believe that that was the lesson which the Norsemen learnt, after
many a wild and blood-stained voyage, from the monks of Iona or of
Derry, which caused the building of such churches as that which
Sightrys, king of Dublin, raised about the year 1030, not in the
Norse but in the Irish quarter of Dublin: a sacred token of amity
between the new settlers and the natives on the ground of a common
faith. Let us believe, too, that the influence of woman was not
wanting in the good work--that the story of St. Margaret and Malcolm
Canmore was repeated, though inversely, in the case of many a
heathen Scandinavian jarl, who, marrying the princely daughter of
some Scottish chieftain, found in her creed at last something more
precious than herself; while his brother or his cousin became, at
Dublin or Wexford or Waterford, the husband of some saffron-robed
Irish princess, "fair as an elf," as the old saying was; some
"maiden of the three transcendent hues," of whom the old book of
Linane says:
Red as the blood which flowed from stricken deer,
White as the snow on which that blood ran down,
Black as the raven who drank up that blood;
- and possibly, as in the case of Brian Boru's mother, had given his
fair-haired sister in marriage to some Irish prince, and could not
resist the spell of their new creed, and the spell too, it may be,
of some sister of theirs who had long given up all thought of
earthly marriage to tend the undying fire of St. Bridget among the
consecrated virgins of Kildare.
I am not drawing from mere imagination. That such things must have
happened, and happened again and again, is certain to anyone who
knows, even superficially, the documents of that time. And I doubt
not that, in manners as well as in religion, the Norse were
humanised and civilised by their contact with the Celts, both in
Scotland and in Ireland. Both peoples had valour, intellect,
imagination: but the Celt had that which the burly angular Norse
character, however deep and stately, and however humorous, wanted;
namely, music of nature, tenderness, grace, rapidity, playfulness;
just the qualities, combining with the Scandinavian (and in Scotland
with the Angle) elements of character which have produced, in
Ireland and in Scotland, two schools of lyric poetry second to none
in the world.
And so they were converted to what was then a dark and awful creed;
a creed of ascetic self-torture and purgatorial fires for those who
escape the still more dreadful, because endless, doom of the rest of
the human race. But, because it was a sad creed, it suited better,
men who had, when conscience re-awakened in them, but too good
reason to be sad; and the minsters and cloisters which sprang up
over the whole of Northern Europe, and even beyond it, along the
dreary western shores of Greenland itself, are the symbols of a
splendid repentance for their own sins and for the sins of their
forefathers.
Gudruna herself, of whom I spoke just now, one of those old Norse
heroines who helped to discover America, though a historic
personage, is a symbolic one likewise, and the pattern of a whole
class. She too, after many journeys to Iceland, Greenland, and
Winland, goes on a pilgrimage to Rome, to get, I presume, absolution
from the Pope himself for all the sins of her strange, rich, stormy,
wayward life.
Have you not read--many of you surely have--La Motte Fouque's
romance of "Sintram?" It embodies all that I would say. It is the
spiritual drama of that early Middle Age; very sad, morbid if you
will, but true to fact. The Lady Verena ought not, perhaps, to
desert her husband, and shut herself up in a cloister. But so she
would have done in those old days. And who shall judge her harshly
for so doing? When the brutality of the man seems past all cure,
who shall blame the woman if she glides away into some atmosphere of
peace and purity, to pray for him whom neither warnings nor caresses
will amend? It is a sad book, "Sintram." And yet not too sad. For
they were a sad people, those old Norse forefathers of ours. Their
Christianity was sad; their minsters sad; there are few sadder,
though few grander, buildings than a Norman church.
And yet, perhaps, their Christianity did not make them sad. It was
but the other and the healthier side of that sadness which they had
as heathens. Read which you will of the old sagas--heathen or half-
Christian--the Eyrbiggia, Viga Glum, Burnt Niall, Grettir the
Strong, and, above all, Snorri Sturluson's "Heimskringla" itself--
and you will see at once how sad they are. There is, in the old
sagas, none of that enjoyment of life which shines out everywhere in
Greek poetry, even through its deepest tragedies. Not in
complacency with Nature's beauty, but in the fierce struggle with
her wrath, does the Norseman feel pleasure. Nature to him was not,
as in Mr. Longfellow's exquisite poem, {3} the kind old nurse, to
take him on her knee and whisper to him, ever anew, the story
without an end. She was a weird witch-wife, mother of storm demons
and frost giants, who must be fought with steadily, warily, wearily,
over dreary heaths and snow-capped fells, and rugged nesses and
tossing sounds, and away into the boundless sea--or who could live?-
-till he got hardened in the fight into ruthlessness of need and
greed. The poor strip of flat strath, ploughed and re-ploughed
again in the short summer days, would yield no more; or wet harvests
spoiled the crops, or heavy snows starved the cattle. And so the
Norseman launched his ships when the lands were sown in spring, and
went forth to pillage or to trade, as luck would have, to summerted,
as he himself called it; and came back, if he ever came, in autumn
to the women to help at harvest-time, with blood upon his hand. But
had he stayed at home, blood would have been there still. Three out
of four of them had been mixed up in some man-slaying, or had some
blood-feud to avenge among their own kin.
The whole of Scandinavia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Orkney, and the
rest, remind me ever of that terrible picture of the great Norse
painter, Tiddeman, in which two splendid youths, lashed together, in
true Norse duel fashion by the waist, are hewing each other to death
with the short axe, about some hot words over their ale. The loss
of life, and that of the most gallant of the young, in those days
must have been enormous. If the vitality of the race had not been
even more enormous, they must have destroyed each other, as the Red
Indians have done, off the face of the earth. They lived these
Norsemen, not to live--they lived to die. For what cared they?
Death--what was death to them? what it was to the Jomsburger Viking,
who, when led out to execution, said to the headsman: "Die! with
all pleasure. We used to question in Jomsburg whether a man felt
when his head was off? Now I shall know; but if I do, take care,
for I shall smite thee with my knife. And meanwhile, spoil not this
long hair of mine; it is so beautiful."
But, oh! what waste! What might not these men have done if they had
sought peace, not war; if they had learned a few centuries sooner to
do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with their God?
And yet one loves them, blood-stained as they are. Your own poets,
men brought up under circumstances, under ideas the most opposite to
theirs, love them, and cannot help it. And why? It is not merely
for their bold daring, it is not merely for their stern endurance;
nor again that they had in them that shift and thrift, those steady
and common-sense business habits, which made their noblest men not
ashamed to go on voyages of merchandise. Nor is it, again, that
grim humour--humour as of the modern Scotch--which so often flashes
out into an actual jest, but more usually underlies unspoken all
their deeds. Is it not rather that these men are our forefathers?
that their blood runs in the veins of perhaps three men out of four
in any general assembly, whether in America or in Britain?
Startling as the assertion may be, I believe it to be strictly true.
Be that as it may, I cannot read the stories of your western men,
the writings of Bret Harte, or Colonel John Hay, for instance,
without feeling at every turn that there are the old Norse alive
again, beyond the very ocean which they first crossed, 850 years
ago.
Let me try to prove my point, and end with a story, as I began with
one.
It is just thirty years before the Norman conquest of England, the
evening of the battle of Sticklestead. St. Olaf's corpse is still
lying unburied on the hillside. The reforming and Christian king
has fallen in the attempt to force Christianity and despotism on the
Conservative and half-heathen party--the free bonders or yeoman-
farmers of Norway. Thormod, his poet--the man, as his name means,
of thunder mood--who has been standing in the ranks, at last has an
arrow in his left side. He breaks off the shaft, and thus sore
wounded goes up, when all is lost, to a farm where is a great barn
full of wounded. One Kimbe comes, a man out of the opposite or
bonder part. "There is great howling and screaming in there," he
says. "King Olaf's men fought bravely enough: but it is a shame
brisk young lads cannot bear their wounds. On what side wert thou
in the fight?" "On the best side," says the beaten Thormod. Kimbe
sees that Thormod has a good bracelet on his arm. "Thou art surely
a king's man. Give me thy gold ring and I will hide thee, ere the
bonders kill thee."
Thormod said, "Take it, if thou canst get it. I have lost that
which is worth more;" and he stretched out his left hand, and Kimbe
tried to take it. But Thormod, swinging his sword, cut off his
hand; and it is said Kimbe behaved no better over his wound than
those he had been blaming.
Then Thormod went into the barn; and after he had sung his song
there in praise of his dead king, he went into an inner room, where
was a fire, and water warming, and a handsome girl binding up men's
wounds. And he sat down by the door; and one said to him, "Why art
thou so dead pale? Why dost thou not call for the leech?" Then
sung Thormod:
"I am not blooming; and the fair
And slender maiden loves to care
For blooming youths. Few care for me,
With Fenri's gold meal I can't fee;"
and so forth, improvising after the old Norse fashion. Then Thormod
got up and went to the fire, and stood and warmed himself. And the
nurse-girl said to him, "Go out, man, and bring some of the split-
firewood which lies outside the door." He went out and brought an
armful of wood and threw it down. Then the nurse-girl looked him in
the face, and said, "Dreadful pale is this man. Why art thou so?"
Then sang Thormod:
"Thou wonderest, sweet bloom, at me,
A man so hideous to see.
The arrow-drift o'ertook me, girl,
A fine-ground arrow in the whirl
Went through me, and I feel the dart
Sits, lovely lass, too near my heart."
The girl said, "Let me see thy wound." Then Thormod sat down, and
the girl saw his wounds, and that which was in his side, and saw
that there was a piece of iron in it; but could not tell where it
had gone. In a stone pot she had leeks and other herbs, and boiled
them, and gave the wounded man of it to eat. But Thormod said,
"Take it away; I have no appetite now for my broth." Then she took
a great pair of tongs and tried to pull out the iron; but the wound
was swelled, and there was too little to lay hold of. Now said
Thormod, "Cut in so deep that thou canst get at the iron, and give
me the tongs." She did as he said. Then took Thormod the gold
bracelet off his hand and gave it the nurse-girl, and bade her do
with it what she liked.
"It is a good man's gift," said he. "King Olaf gave me the ring
this morning."
Then Thormod took the tongs and pulled the iron out. But on the
iron was a barb, on which hung flesh from the heart, some red, some
white. When he saw that, he said, "The king has fed us well. I am
fat, even to the heart's roots." And so leant back and was dead.
CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF-THE LORD {4}
I wish to speak to you to-night about one of those old despotic
empires which were in every case the earliest known form of
civilisation. Were I minded to play the cynic or the mountebank, I
should choose some corrupt and effete despotism, already grown weak
and ridiculous by its decay--as did at last the Roman and then the
Byzantine Empire--and, after raising a laugh at the expense of the
old system say: See what a superior people you are now--how
impossible, under free and enlightened institutions, is anything so
base and so absurd as went on, even in despotic France before the
Revolution of 1793. Well, that would be on the whole true, thank
God; but what need is there to say it?
Let us keep our scorn for our own weaknesses, our blame for our own
sins, certain that we shall gain more instruction, though not more
amusement, by hunting out the good which is in anything than by
hunting out its evil. I have chosen, not the worst, but the best
despotism which I could find in history, founded and ruled by a
truly heroic personage, one whose name has become a proverb and a
legend, that so I might lift up your minds, even by the
contemplation of an old Eastern empire, to see that it, too, could
be a work and ordinance of God, and its hero the servant of the
Lord. For we are almost bound to call Cyrus, the founder of the
Persian Empire, by this august title for two reasons--First, because
the Hebrew Scriptures call him so; the next, because he proved
himself to be such by his actions and their consequences--at least
in the eyes of those who believe, as I do, in a far-seeing and far-
reaching Providence, by which all human history is
Bound by gold chains unto the throne of God.
His work was very different from any that need be done, or can be
done, in these our days. But while we thank God that such work is
now as unnecessary as impossible; we may thank God likewise that,
when such work was necessary and possible, a man was raised up to do
it: and to do it, as all accounts assert, better, perhaps, than it
had ever been done before or since.
True, the old conquerors, who absorbed nation after nation, tribe
after tribe, and founded empires on their ruins, are now, I trust,
about to be replaced, throughout the world, as here and in Britain
at home, by free self-governed peoples:
The old order changeth, giving place to the new;
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
And that custom of conquest and empire and transplantation did more
than once corrupt the world. And yet in it, too, God may have more
than once fulfilled His own designs, as He did, if Scripture is to
be believed, in Cyrus, well surnamed the Great, the founder of the
Persian Empire some 2400 years ago. For these empires, it must be
remembered, did at least that which the Roman Empire did among a
scattered number of savage tribes, or separate little races, hating
and murdering each other, speaking different tongues, and
worshipping different gods, and losing utterly the sense of a common
humanity, till they looked on the people who dwelt in the next
valley as fiends, to be sacrificed, if caught, to their own fiends
at home. Among such as these, empires did introduce order, law,
common speech, common interest, the notion of nationality and
humanity. They, as it were, hammered together the fragments of the
human race till they had moulded them into one. They did it
cruelly, clumsily, ill: but was there ever work done on earth,
however noble, which was not--alas, alas!--done somewhat ill?
Let me talk to you a little about the old hero. He and his hardy
Persians should be specially interesting to us. For in them first
does our race, the Aryan race, appear in authentic history. In them
first did our race give promise of being the conquering and
civilising race of the future world. And to the conquests of Cyrus-
-so strangely are all great times and great movements of the human
family linked to each other--to his conquests, humanly speaking, is
owing the fact that you are here, and I am speaking to you at this
moment.
It is an oft-told story: but so grand a one that I must sketch it
for you, however clumsily, once more.
In that mountain province called Farsistan, north-east of what we
now call Persia, the dwelling-place of the Persians, there dwelt, in
the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, a hardy tribe, of the
purest blood of Iran, a branch of the same race as the Celtic,
Teutonic, Greek, and Hindoo, and speaking a tongue akin to theirs.
They had wandered thither, say their legends, out of the far north-
east, from off some lofty plateau of Central Asia, driven out by the
increasing cold, which left them but two mouths of summer to ten of
winter.
They despised at first--would that they had despised always!--the
luxurious life of the dwellers in the plains, and the effeminate
customs of the Medes--a branch of their own race who had conquered
and intermarried with the Turanian, or Finnish tribes; and adopted
much of their creed, as well as of their morals, throughout their
vast but short-lived Median Empire. "Soft countries," said Cyrus
himself--so runs the tale--"gave birth to small men. No region
produced at once delightful fruits and men of a war-like spirit."
Letters were to them, probably, then unknown. They borrowed them in
after years, as they borrowed their art, from Babylonians,
Assyrians, and other Semitic nations whom they conquered. From the
age of five to that of twenty, their lads were instructed but in two
things--to speak the truth and to shoot with the bow. To ride was
the third necessary art, introduced, according to Xenophon, after
they had descended from their mountain fastnessess to conquer the
whole East.
Their creed was simple enough. Ahura Mazda--Ormuzd, as he has been
called since--was the one eternal Creator, the source of all light
and life and good. He spake his word, and it accomplished the
creation of heaven, before the water, before the earth, before the
cow, before the tree, before the fire, before man the truthful,
before the Devas and beasts of prey, before the whole existing
universe; before every good thing created by Ahura Mazda and
springing from Truth.
He needed no sacrifices of blood. He was to be worshipped only with
prayers, with offerings of the inspiring juice of the now unknown
herb Homa, and by the preservation of the sacred fire, which,
understand, was not he, but the symbol--as was light and the sun--of
the good spirit--of Ahura Mazda. They had no images of the gods,
these old Persians; no temples, no altars, so says Herodotus, and
considered the use of them a sign of folly. They were, as has been
well said of them, the Puritans of the old world. When they
descended from their mountain fastnesses, they became the
iconoclasts of the old world; and the later Isaiah, out of the
depths of national shame, captivity, and exile, saw in them brother-
spirits, the chosen of the Lord, whose hero Cyrus, the Lord was
holding by His right hand, till all the foul superstitions and foul
effeminacies of the rotten Semitic peoples of the East, and even of
Egypt itself, should be crushed, though, alas! only for awhile, by
men who felt that they had a commission from the God of light and
truth and purity, to sweep out all that with the besom of
destruction.
But that was a later inspiration. In earlier, and it may be
happier, times the duty of the good man was to strive against all
evil, disorder, uselessness, incompetence in their more simple
forms. "He therefore is a holy man," says Ormuzd in the Zend-
avesta, "who has built a dwelling on the earth, in which he
maintains fire, cattle, his wife, his children, and flocks and
herds; he who makes the earth produce barley, he who cultivates the
fruits of the soil, cultivates purity; he advances the law of Ahura
Mazda as much as if he had offered a hundred sacrifices."
To reclaim the waste, to till the land, to make a corner of the
earth better than they found it, was to these men to rescue a bit of
Ormuzd's world out of the usurped dominion of Ahriman; to rescue it
from the spirit of evil and disorder for its rightful owner, the
Spirit of Order and of Good.
For they believed in an evil spirit, these old Persians. Evil was
not for them a lower form of good. With their intense sense of the
difference between right and wrong it could be nothing less than
hateful; to be attacked, exterminated, as a personal enemy, till it
became to them at last impersonate and a person.
Zarathustra, the mystery of evil, weighed heavily on them and on
their great prophet, Zoroaster--splendour of gold, as I am told his
name signifies--who lived, no man knows clearly when or clearly
where, but who lived and lives for ever, for his works follow him.
He, too, tried to solve for his people the mystery of evil; and if
he did not succeed, who has succeeded yet? Warring against Ormuzd,
Ahura Mazda, was Ahriman, Angra Mainyus, literally the being of an
evil mind, the ill-conditioned being. He was labouring perpetually
to spoil the good work of Ormuzd alike in nature and in man. He was
the cause of the fall of man, the tempter, the author of misery and
death; he was eternal and uncreate as Ormuzd was. But that,
perhaps, was a corruption of the purer and older Zoroastrian creed.
With it, if Ahriman were eternal in the past, he would not be
eternal in the future. Somehow, somewhen, somewhere, in the day
when three prophets--the increasing light, the increasing truth, and
the existing truth--should arise and give to mankind the last three
books of the Zend-avesta, and convert all mankind to the pure creed,
then evil should be conquered, the creation become pure again, and
Ahriman vanish for ever; and, meanwhile, every good man was to fight
valiantly for Ormuzd, his true lord, against Ahriman and all his
works.
Men who held such a creed, and could speak truth and draw the bow,
what might they not do when the hour and the man arrived? They were
not a BIG nation. No; but they were a GREAT nation, even while they
were eating barley-bread and paying tribute to their conquerors the
Medes, in the sterile valleys of Farsistan.
And at last the hour and the man came. The story is half legendary-
-differently told by different authors. Herodotus has one tale,
Xenophon another. The first, at least, had ample means of
information. Astyages is the old shah of the Median Empire, then at
the height of its seeming might and splendour and effeminacy. He
has married his daughter, the Princess Mandane, to Cambyses,
seemingly a vassal-king or prince of the pure Persian blood. One
night the old man is troubled with a dream. He sees a vine spring
from his daughter, which overshadows all Asia. He sends for the
Magi to interpret; and they tell him that Mandane will have a son
who will reign in his stead. Having sons of his own, and fearing
for the succession, he sends for Mandane, and, when her child is
born, gives it to Harpagus, one of his courtiers, to be slain. The
courtier relents, and hands it over to a herdsman, to be exposed on
the mountains. The herdsman relents in turn, and bring the babe up
as his own child.
When the boy, who goes by the name of Agradates, is grown, he is at
play with the other herdboys, and they choose him for a mimic king.
Some he makes his guards, some he bids build houses, some carry his
messages. The son of a Mede of rank refuses, and Agradates has him
seized by his guards and chastised with the whip. The ancestral
instincts of command and discipline are showing early in the lad.
The young gentleman complains to his father, the father to the old
king, who of course sends for the herdsman and his boy. The boy
answers in a tone so exactly like that in which Xenophon's Cyrus
would have answered, that I must believe that both Xenophon's Cyrus
and Herodotus's Cyrus (like Xenophon's Socrates and Plato's
Socrates) are real pictures of a real character; and that
Herodotus's story, though Xenophon says nothing of it, is true.
He has done nothing, the noble boy says, but what was just. He had
been chosen king in play, because the boys thought him most fit.
The boy whom he had chastised was one of those who chose him. All
the rest obeyed: but he would not, till at last he got his due
reward. "If I deserve punishment for that," says the boy, "I am
ready to submit."
The old king looks keenly and wonderingly at the young king, whose
features seem somewhat like his own. Likely enough in those days,
when an Iranian noble or prince would have a quite different cast of
complexion and of face from a Turanian herdsman. A suspicion
crosses him; and by threats of torture he gets the truth from the
trembling herdsman.
To the poor wretch's rapture the old king lets him go unharmed. He
has a more exquisite revenge to take, and sends for Harpagus, who
likewise confessed the truth. The wily old tyrant has naught but
gentle words. It is best as it is. He has been very sorry himself
for the child, and Mandane's reproaches had gone to his heart. "Let
Harpagus go home and send his son to be a companion to the new-found
prince. To-night there will be great sacrifices in honour of the
child's safety, and Harpagus is to be a guest at the banquet."
Harpagus comes; and after eating his fill, is asked how he likes the
king's meat? He gives the usual answer; and a covered basket is put
before him, out of which he is to take--in Median fashion--what he
likes. He finds in it the head and hands and feet of his own son.
Like a true Eastern he shows no signs of horror. The king asks him
if he knew what flesh he had been eating. He answers that he knew
perfectly. That whatever the king did pleased him.
Like an Eastern courtier, he knew how to dissemble, but not to
forgive, and bided his time. The Magi, to their credit, told
Astyages that his dream had been fulfilled, that Cyrus--as we must
now call the foundling prince--had fulfilled it by becoming a king
in play, and the boy is let to go back to his father and his hardy
Persian life. But Harpagus does not leave him alone, nor perhaps,
do his own thoughts. He has wrongs to avenge on his grandfather.
And it seems not altogether impossible to the young mountaineer.
He has seen enough of Median luxury to despise it and those who
indulge in it. He has seen his own grandfather with his cheeks
rouged, his eyelids stained with antimony, living a womanlike life,
shut up from all his subjects in the recesses of a vast seraglio.
He calls together the mountain rulers; makes friends with Tigranes,
an Armenian prince, a vassal of the Mede, who has his wrongs
likewise to avenge. And the two little armies of foot-soldiers--the
Persians had no cavalry--defeat the innumerable horsemen of the
Mede, take the old king, keep him in honourable captivity, and so
change, one legend says, in a single battle, the fortunes of the
whole East.
And then begins that series of conquests of which we know hardly
anything, save the fact that they were made. The young mountaineer
and his playmates, whom he makes his generals and satraps, sweep
onward towards the West, teaching their men the art of riding, till
the Persian cavalry becomes more famous than the Median had been.
They gather to them, as a snowball gathers in rolling, the picked
youth of every tribe whom they overcome. They knit these tribes to
them in loyalty and affection by that righteousness--that
truthfulness and justice--for which Isaiah in his grandest lyric
strains has made them illustrious to all time; which Xenophon has
celebrated in like manner in that exquisite book of his--the
"Cyropaedia." The great Lydian kingdom of Croesus--Asia Minor as we
call it now--goes down before them. Babylon itself goes down, after
that world-famed siege which ended in Belshazzar's feast; and when
Cyrus died--still in the prime of life, the legends seem to say--he
left a coherent and well-organised empire, which stretched from the
Mediterranean to Hindostan.
So runs the tale, which to me, I confess, sounds probable and
rational enough. It may not do so to you; for it has not to many
learned men. They are inclined to "relegate it into the region of
myth;" in plain English, to call old Herodotus a liar, or at least a
dupe. What means those wise men can have at this distance of more
than 2000 years, of knowing more about the matter than Herodotus,
who lived within 100 years of Cyrus, I for myself cannot discover.
And I say this without the least wish to disparage these
hypercritical persons. For there are--and more there ought to be,
as long as lies and superstitions remain on this earth--a class of
thinkers who hold in just suspicion all stories which savour of the
sensational, the romantic, even the dramatic. They know the
terrible uses to which appeals to the fancy and the emotions have
been applied, and are still applied to enslave the intellects, the
consciences, the very bodies of men and women. They dread so much
from experience the abuse of that formula, that "a thing is so
beautiful it must be true," that they are inclined to reply:
"Rather let us say boldly, it is so beautiful that it cannot be
true. Let us mistrust, or even refuse to believe e priori, and at
first sight, all startling, sensational, even poetic tales, and
accept nothing as history, which is not as dull as the ledger of a
dry-goods' store." But I think that experience, both in nature and
in society, are against that ditch-water philosophy. The weather,
being governed by laws, ought always to be equable and normal, and
yet you have whirlwinds, droughts, thunderstorms. The share-market,
being governed by laws, ought to be always equable and normal, and
yet you have startling transactions, startling panics, startling
disclosures, and a whole sensational romance of commercial crime and
folly. Which of us has lived to be fifty years old, without having
witnessed in private life sensation tragedies, alas! sometimes too
fearful to be told, or at least sensational romances, which we shall
take care not to tell, because we shall not be believed? Let the
ditch-water philosophy say what it will, human life is not a ditch,
but a wild and roaring river, flooding its banks, and eating out new
channels with many a landslip. It is a strange world, and man, a
strange animal, guided, it is true, usually by most common-place
motives; but, for that reason, ready and glad at times to escape
from them and their dulness and baseness; to give vent, if but for a
moment, in wild freedom, to that demoniac element, which, as Goethe
says, underlies his nature and all nature; and to prefer for an
hour, to the normal and respectable ditch-water, a bottle of
champagne or even a carouse on fire-water, let the consequences be
what they may.
How else shall we explain such a phenomenon as those old crusades?
Were they undertaken for any purpose, commercial or other?
Certainly not for lightening an overburdened population. Nay, is
not the history of your own Mormons, and their exodus into the far
West, one of the most startling instances which the world has seen
for several centuries, of the unexpected and incalculable forces
which lie hid in man? Believe me, man's passions, heated to
igniting point, rather than his prudence cooled down to freezing
point, are the normal causes of all great human movement. And a
truer law of social science than any that political economists are
wont to lay down, is that old DOV' E LA DONNA? of the Italian judge,
who used to ask, as a preliminary to every case, civil or criminal,
which was brought before him, Dov' e la donna? "Where is the lady?"
certain, like a wise old gentleman, that a woman was most probably
at the bottom of the matter.
Strangeness? Romance? Did any of you ever read--if you have not
you should read--Archbishop Whately's "Historic Doubts about the
Emperor Napoleon the First"? Therein the learned and witty
Archbishop proved, as early as 1819, by fair use of the criticism of
Mr. Hume and the Sceptic School, that the whole history of the great
Napoleon ought to be treated by wise men as a myth and a romance,
that there is little or no evidence of his having existed at all;
and that the story of his strange successes and strange defeats was
probably invented by our Government in order to pander to the vanity
of the English nation.
I will say this, which Archbishop Whately, in a late edition,
foreshadows, wittily enough--that if one or two thousand years
hence, when the history of the late Emperor Napoleon the Third, his
rise and fall, shall come to be subjected to critical analysis by
future Philistine historians of New Zealand or Australia, it will be
proved by them to be utterly mythical, incredible, monstrous--and
that all the more, the more the actual facts remain to puzzle their
unimaginative brains. What will they make two thousand years hence,
of the landing at Boulogne with the tame eagle? Will not that, and
stranger facts still, but just as true, be relegated to the region
of myth, with the dream of Astyages, and the young and princely
herdsman playing at king over his fellow-slaves?
But enough of this. To me these bits of romance often seem the
truest, as well as the most important portions of history.
When old Herodotus tells me how, King Astyages having guarded the
frontier, Harpagus sent a hunter to young Cyrus with a fresh-killed
hare, telling him to open it in private; and how, sewn up in it was
the letter, telling him that the time to rebel was come, I am
inclined to say, That must be true. It is so beneath the dignity of
history, so quaint and unexpected, that it is all the more likely
NOT to have been invented.
So with that other story--How young Cyrus, giving out that his
grandfather had made him general of the Persians, summoned them all,
each man with a sickle in his hand, into a prairie full of thorns,
and bade them clear it in one day; and how when they, like loyal
men, had finished, he bade them bathe, and next day he took them
into a great meadow and feasted them with corn and wine, and all
that his father's farm would yield, and asked them which day they
liked best; and, when they answered as was to be expected, how he
opened his parable and told them, "Choose, then, to work for the
Persians like slaves, or to be free with me."
Such a tale sounds to me true. It has the very savour of the
parables of the Old Testament; as have, surely, the dreams of the
old Sultan, with which the tale begins. Do they not put us in mind
of the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar, in the Book of Daniel?
Such stories are actually so beautiful that they are very likely to
be true. Understand me, I only say likely; the ditch-water view of
history is not all wrong. Its advocates are right in saying great
historic changes are not produced simply by one great person, by one
remarkable event. They have been preparing, perhaps for centuries.
They are the result of numberless forces, acting according to laws,
which might have been foreseen, and will be foreseen, when the
science of History is more perfectly understood.
For instance, Cyrus could not have conquered the Median Empire at a
single blow, if first that empire had not been utterly rotten; and
next, if he and his handful of Persians had not been tempered and
sharpened, by long hardihood, to the finest cutting edge.
Yes, there were all the materials for the catastrophe--the cannon,
the powder, the shot. But to say that the Persians must have
conquered the Medes, even if Cyrus had never lived, is to say, as
too many philosophers seem to me to say, that, given cannon, powder,
and shot, it will fire itself off some day if we only leave it alone
long enough.
It may be so. But our usual experience of Nature and Fact is, that
spontaneous combustion is a rare and exceptional phenomenon; that if
a cannon is to be fired, someone must arise and pull the trigger.
And I believe that in Society and Politics, when a great event is
ready to be done, someone must come and do it--do it, perhaps, half
unwittingly, by some single rash act--like that first fatal shot
fired by an electric spark.
But to return to Cyrus and his Persians.
I know not whether the "Cyropaedia" is much read in your schools and
universities. But it is one of the books which I should like to
see, either in a translation or its own exquisite Greek, in the
hands of every young man. It is not all fact. It is but a historic
romance. But it is better than history. It is an ideal book, like
Sidney's "Arcadia" or Spenser's "Fairy Queen"--the ideal self-
education of an ideal hero. And the moral of the book--ponder it
well, all young men who have the chance or the hope of exercising
authority among your follow-men--the noble and most Christian moral
of that heathen book is this: that the path to solid and
beneficent influence over our fellow-men lies, not through brute
force, not through cupidity, but through the highest morality;
through justice, truthfulness, humanity, self-denial, modesty,
courtesy, and all which makes man or woman lovely in the eyes of
mortals or of God.
Yes, the "Cyropaedia" is a noble book, about a noble personage. But
I cannot forget that there are nobler words by far concerning that
same noble personage, in the magnificent series of Hebrew Lyrics,
which begins "Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith the Lord"--in
which the inspired poet, watching the rise of Cyrus and his
Puritans, and the fall of Babylon, and the idolatries of the East,
and the coming deliverance of his own countrymen, speaks of the
Persian hero in words so grand that they have been often enough
applied, and with all fitness, to one greater than Cyrus, and than
all men:
Who raised up the righteous man from the East,
And called him to attend his steps?
Who subdued nations at his presence,
And gave him dominion over kings?
And made them like the dust before his sword,
And the driven stubble before his bow?
He pursueth them, he passeth in safety,
By a way never trodden before by his feet.
Who hath performed and made these things,
Calling the generations from the beginning?
I, Jehovah, the first and the last, I am the same.
Behold my servant, whom I will uphold;
My chosen, in whom my soul delighteth;
I will make my spirit rest upon him,
And he shall publish judgment to the nations.
He shall not cry aloud, nor clamour,
Nor cause his voice to be heard in the streets.
The bruised reed he shall not break,
And the smoking flax he shall not quench.
He shall publish justice, and establish it.
His force shall not be abated, nor broken,
Until he has firmly seated justice in the earth,
And the distant nations shall wait for his Law.
Thus saith the God, even Jehovah,
Who created the heavens, and stretched them out;
Who spread abroad the earth, and its produce:
I, Jehovah, have called thee for a righteous end,
And I will take hold of thy hand, and preserve thee,
And I will give thee for a covenant to the people,
And for a light to the nations;
To open the eyes of the blind,
To bring the captives out of prison,
And from the dungeon those who dwell in darkness.
I am Jehovah--that is my name;
And my glory will I not give to another,
Nor my praise to the graven idols.
Who saith to Cyrus--Thou art my shepherd,
And he shall fulfil all my pleasure:
Who saith to Jerusalem--Thou shalt be built;
And to the Temple--Thou shalt be founded.
Thus saith Jehovah to his anointed,
To Cyrus whom I hold fast by his right hand,
That I may subdue nations under him,
And loose the loins of kings;
That I may open before him the two-leaved doors,
And the gates shall not be shut;
I will go before thee
And bring the mountains low.
The gates of brass will I break in sunder,
And the bars of iron hew down.
And I will give thee the treasures of darkness,
And the hoards hid deep in secret places,
That thou mayest know that I am Jehovah.
I have surnamed thee, though thou knowest not me.
I am Jehovah, and none else;
Beside me there is no God.
I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me,
That they may know from the rising of the sun,
And from the west, that there is none beside me;
I am Jehovah, and none else;
Forming light and creating darkness;
Forming peace, and creating evil.
I, Jehovah, make all these.
This is the Hebrew prophet's conception of the great Puritan of the
Old World who went forth with such a commission as this, to destroy
the idols of the East, while
The isles saw that, and feared,
And the ends of the earth were afraid;
They drew near, they came together;
Everyone helped his neighbour,
And said to his brother, Be of good courage.
The carver encouraged the smith,
He that smoothed with the hammer
Him that smote on the anvil;
Saying of the solder, It is good;
And fixing the idol with nails, lest it be moved;
But all in vain; for as the poet goes on:
Bel bowed down, and Nebo stooped;
Their idols were upon the cattle,
A burden to the weary beast.
They stoop, they bow down together;
They could not deliver their own charge;
Themselves are gone into captivity.
And what, to return, what was the end of the great Cyrus and of his
empire?
Alas, alas! as with all human glory, the end was not as the
beginning.
We are scarce bound to believe positively the story how Cyrus made
one war too many, and was cut off in the Scythian deserts, falling
before the arrows of mere savages; and how their queen, Tomyris,
poured blood down the throat of the dead corpse, with the words,
"Glut thyself with the gore for which thou hast thirsted." But it
may be true--for Xenophon states it expressly, and with detail--that
Cyrus, from the very time of his triumph, became an Eastern despot,
a sultan or a shah, living apart from his people in mysterious
splendour, in the vast fortified palace which he built for himself;
and imitating and causing his nobles and satraps to imitate, in all
but vice and effeminacy, the very Medes whom he had conquered. And
of this there is no doubt--that his sons and their empire ran
rapidly through that same vicious circle of corruption to which all
despotisms are doomed, and became within 250 years, even as the
Medes, the Chaldeans, the Lydians, whom they had conquered, children
no longer of Ahura Mazda, but of Ahriman, of darkness and not of
light, to be conquered by Alexander and his Greeks even more rapidly
and more shamefully than they had conquered the East.
This is the short epic of the Persian Empire, ending, alas! as all
human epics are wont to end, sadly, if not shamefully.
But let me ask you, Did I say too much, when I said, that to these
Persians we owe that we are here to-night?
I do not say that without them we should not have been here. God, I
presume, when He is minded to do anything, has more than one way of
doing it.
But that we are now the last link in a chain of causes and effects
which reaches as far back as the emigration of the Persians
southward from the plateau of Pamir, we cannot doubt.
For see. By the fall of Babylon and its empire the Jews were freed
from their captivity--large numbers of them at least--and sent home
to their own Jerusalem. What motives prompted Cyrus, and Darius
after him, to do that deed?
Those who like to impute the lowest motives may say, if they will,
that Daniel and the later Isaiah found it politic to worship the
rising sun, and flatter the Persian conquerors: and that Cyrus and
Darius in turn were glad to see Jerusalem rebuilt, as an impregnable
frontier fortress between them and Egypt. Be it so; I, who wish to
talk of things noble, pure, lovely, and of good report, would rather
point you once more to the magnificent poetry of the later Isaiah
which commences at the 40th chapter of the Book of Isaiah, and say--
There, upon the very face of the document, stands written the fact
that the sympathy between the faithful Persian and the faithful Jew-
-the two puritans of the Old World, the two haters of lies,
idolatries, superstitions, was actually as intense as it ought to
have been, as it must have been.
Be that as it may, the return of the Jews to Jerusalem preserved for
us the Old Testament, while it restored to them a national centre, a
sacred city, like that of Delphi to the Greeks, Rome to the Romans,
Mecca to the Muslim, loyalty to which prevented their being utterly
absorbed by the more civilised Eastern races among whom they had
been scattered abroad as colonies of captives.
Then another, and a seemingly needful link of cause and effect
ensued: Alexander of Macedon destroyed the Persian Empire, and the
East became Greek, and Alexandria, rather than Jerusalem, became the
head-quarters of Jewish learning. But for that very cause, the
Scriptures were not left inaccessible to the mass of mankind, like
the old Pehlevi liturgies of the Zend-avesta, or the old Sanscrit
Vedas, in an obsolete and hieratic tongue, but were translated into,
and continued in, the then all but world-wide Hellenic speech, which
was to the ancient world what French is to the modern.
Then the East became Roman, without losing its Greek speech. And
under the wide domination of that later Roman Empire--which had
subdued and organised the whole known world, save the Parthian
descendants of those old Persians, and our old Teutonic forefathers
in their German forests and on their Scandinavian shores--that
Divine book was carried far and wide, East and West, and South, from
the heart of Abyssinia to the mountains of Armenia, and to the isles
of the ocean, beyond Britain itself to Ireland and to the Hebrides.
And that book--so strangely coinciding with the old creed of the
earlier Persians--that book, long misunderstood, long overlain by
the dust, and overgrown by the parasitic fungi of centuries, that
book it was which sent to these trans-Atlantic shores the founders
of your great nation. That book gave them their instinct of
Freedom, tempered by reverence for Law. That book gave them their
hatred of idolatry; and made them not only say but act upon their
own words, with these old Persians and with the Jewish prophets
alike, Sacrifice and burnt offering thou wouldst not; Then said we,
Lo, we come. In the volume of the book it is written of us, that we
come to do thy will, O God. Yes, long and fantastic is the chain of
causes and effects, which links you here to the old heroes who came
down from Central Asia, because the land had grown so wondrous cold,
that there were ten months of winter to two of summer; and when
simply after warmth and life, and food for them and for their
flocks, they wandered forth to found and help to found a spiritual
kingdom.
And even in their migration, far back in these dim and mystic ages,
have we found the earliest link of the long chain? Not so. What if
the legend of the change of climate be the dim recollection of an
enormous physical fact? What if it, and the gradual depopulation of
the whole north of Asia, be owing, as geologists now suspect, to the
slow and age-long uprise of the whole of Siberia, thrusting the warm
Arctic sea farther and farther to the northward, and placing between
it and the Highlands of Thibet an ever-increasing breadth of icy
land, destroying animals, and driving whole races southward, in
search of the summer and the sun?
What if the first link in the chain, as yet conceivable by man,
should be the cosmic changes in the distribution of land and water,
which filled the mouths of the Siberian rivers with frozen carcases
of woolly mammoth and rhinoceros; and those again, doubt it not, of
other revolutions, reaching back and back, and on and on, into the
infinite unknown? Why not? For so are all human destinies
Bound with gold chains unto the throne of God.
ANCIENT CIVILISATION {5} {6}
There is a theory abroad in the world just now about the origin of
the human race, which has so many patent and powerful physiological
facts to support it that we must not lightly say that it is absurd
or impossible; and that is, that man's mortal body and brain were
derived from some animal and ape-like creature. Of that I am not
going to speak now. My subject is: How this creature called man,
from whatever source derived, became civilised, rational, and moral.
And I am sorry to say that there is tacked on by many to the first
theory, another which does not follow from it, and which has really
nothing to do with it, and it is this: That man, with all his
wonderful and mysterious aspirations, always unfulfilled yet always
precious, at once his torment and his joy, his very hope of
everlasting life; that man, I say, developed himself, unassisted,
out of a state of primaeval brutishness, simply by calculations of
pleasure and pain, by observing what actions would pay in the long
run and what would not; and so learnt to conquer his selfishness by
a more refined and extended selfishness, and exchanged his brutality
for worldliness, and then, in a few instances, his worldliness for
next-worldliness. I hope I need not say that I do not believe this
theory. If I did, I could not be a Christian, I think, nor a
philosopher either. At least, if I thought that human civilisation
had sprung from such a dunghill as that, I should, in honour to my
race, say nothing about it, here or elsewhere.
Why talk of the shame of our ancestors? I want to talk of their
honour and glory. I want to talk, if I talk at all, about great
times, about noble epochs, noble movements, noble deeds, and noble
folk; about times in which the human race--it may be through many
mistakes, alas! and sin, and sorrow, and blood-shed--struggled up
one step higher on those great stairs which, as we hope, lead upward
towards the far-off city of God; the perfect polity, the perfect
civilisation, the perfect religion, which is eternal in the heavens.
Of great men, then, and noble deeds I want to speak. I am bound to
do so first, in courtesy to my hearers. For in choosing such a
subject I took for granted a nobleness and greatness of mind in them
which can appreciate and enjoy the contemplation of that which is
lofty and heroic, and that which is useful indeed, though not to the
purses merely or the mouths of men, but to their intellects and
spirits; that highest philosophy which, though she can (as has been
sneeringly said of her) bake no bread, she--and she alone, can at
least do this--make men worthy to eat the bread which God has given
them.
I am bound to speak on such subjects, because I have never yet met,
or read of, the human company who did not require, now and then at
least, being reminded of such times and such personages--of
whatsoever things are just, pure, true, lovely, and of good report,
if there be any manhood and any praise to think, as St. Paul bids us
all, of such things, that we may keep up in our minds as much as
possible a lofty standard, a pure ideal, instead of sinking to the
mere selfish standard which judges all things, even those of the
world to come, by profit and by loss, and into that sordid frame of
mind in which a man grows to believe that the world is constructed
of bricks and timber, and kept going by the price of stocks.
We are all tempted, and the easier and more prosperous we are, the
more we are tempted, to fall into that sordid and shallow frame of
mind. Sordid even when its projects are most daring, its outward
luxuries most refined; and shallow, even when most acute, when
priding itself most on its knowledge of human nature, and of the
secret springs which, so it dreams, move the actions and make the
history of nations and of men. All are tempted that way, even the
noblest-hearted. ADHAESIT PAVIMENTO VENTER, says the old psalmist.
I am growing like the snake, crawling in the dust, and eating the
dust in which I crawl. I try to lift up my eyes to the heavens, to
the true, the beautiful, the good, the eternal nobleness which was
before all time, and shall be still when time has passed away. But
to lift up myself is what I cannot do. Who will help me? Who will
quicken me? as our old English tongue has it. Who will give me
life? The true, pure, lofty human life which I did NOT inherit from
the primaeval ape, which the ape-nature in me is for ever trying to
stifle, and make me that which I know too well I could so easily
become--a cunninger and more dainty-featured brute? Death itself,
which seems at times so fair, is fair because even it may raise me
up and deliver me from the burden of this animal and mortal body:
'Tis life, not death for which I pant;
'Tis life, whereof my nerves are scant;
More life, and fuller, that I want.
Man? I am a man not by reason of my bones and muscles, nerves and
brain, which I have in common with apes and dogs and horses. I am a
man--thou art a man or woman--not because we have a flesh--God
forbid! but because there is a spirit in us, a divine spark and ray,
which nature did not give, and which nature cannot take away. And
therefore, while I live on earth, I will live to the spirit, not to
the flesh, that I may be, indeed, a man; and this same gross flesh,
this animal ape-nature in me, shall be the very element in me which
I will renounce, defy, despise; at least, if I am minded to be, not
a merely higher savage, but a truly higher civilised man.
Civilisation with me shall mean, not more wealth, more finery, more
self-indulgence--even more aesthetic and artistic luxury; but more
virtue, more knowledge, more self-control, even though I earn scanty
bread by heavy toil; and when I compare the Caesar of Rome or the
great king, whether of Egypt, Babylon, or Persia, with the hermit of
the Thebaid, starving in his frock of camel's hair, with his soul
fixed on the ineffable glories of the unseen, and striving, however
wildly and fantastically, to become an angel and not an ape, I will
say the hermit, and not the Caesar, is the civilised man.
There are plenty of histories of civilisation and theories of
civilisation abroad in the world just now, and which profess to show
you how the primeval savage has, or at least may have, become the
civilised man. For my part, with all due and careful consideration,
I confess I attach very little value to any of them: and for this
simple reason that we have no facts. The facts are lost.
Of course, if you assume a proposition as certainly true, it is easy
enough to prove that proposition to be true, at least to your own
satisfaction. If you assert with the old proverb, that you may make
a silk purse out of a sow's ear, you will be stupider than I dare
suppose anyone here to be, if you cannot invent for yourselves all
the intermediate stages of the transformation, however startling.
And, indeed, if modern philosophers had stuck more closely to this
old proverb, and its defining verb "make," and tried to show how
some person or persons--let them be who they may--men, angels, or
gods--made the sow's ear into the silk purse, and the savage into
the sage--they might have pleaded that they were still trying to
keep their feet upon the firm ground of actual experience. But
while their theory is, that the sow's ear grew into a silk purse of
itself, and yet unconsciously and without any intention of so
bettering itself in life, why, I think that those who have studied
the history which lies behind them, and the poor human nature which
is struggling, and sinning, and sorrowing, and failing around them,
and which seems on the greater part of this planet going downwards
and not upwards, and by no means bettering itself, save in the
increase of opera-houses, liquor-bars, and gambling-tables, and that
which pertaineth thereto; then we, I think, may be excused if we say
with the old Stoics--[Greek text]--I withhold my judgment. I know
nothing about the matter yet; and you, oh my imaginative though
learned friends, know I suspect very little either.
Eldest of things, Divine Equality:
so sang poor Shelley, and with a certain truth. For if, as I
believe, the human race sprang from a single pair, there must have
been among their individual descendants an equality far greater than
any which has been known on earth during historic times. But that
equality was at best the infantile innocence of the primary race,
which faded away in the race as quickly, alas! as it does in the
individual child. Divine--therefore it was one of the first
blessings which man lost; one of the last, I fear, to which he will
return; that to which civilisation, even at its best yet known, has
not yet attained, save here and there for short periods; but towards
which it is striving as an ideal goal, and, as I trust, not in vain.
The eldest of things which we see actually as history is not
equality, but an already developed hideous inequality, trying to
perpetuate itself, and yet by a most divine and gracious law,
destroying itself by the very means which it uses to keep itself
alive.
"There were giants in the earth in those days. And Nimrod began to
be a mighty one in the earth" -
A mighty hunter; and his game was man.
No; it is not equality which we see through the dim mist of bygone
ages.
What we do see is--I know not whether you will think me
superstitious or old-fashioned, but so I hold--very much what the
earlier books of the Bible show us under symbolic laws. Greek
histories, Roman histories, Egyptian histories, Eastern histories,
inscriptions, national epics, legends, fragments of legends--in the
New World as in the Old--all tell the same story. Not the story
without an end, but the story without a beginning. As in the Hindoo
cosmogony, the world stands on an elephant, and the elephant on a
tortoise, and the tortoise on--what? No man knows. I do not know.
I only assert deliberately, waiting, as Napoleon says, till the
world come round to me, that the tortoise does not stand--as is held
by certain anthropologists, some honoured by me, some personally
dear to me--upon the savages who chipped flints and fed on mammoth
and reindeer in North-Western Europe, shortly after the age of ice,
a few hundred thousand years ago. These sturdy little fellows--the
kinsmen probably of the Esquimaux and Lapps--could have been but the
AVANT-COURIERS, or more probably the fugitives from the true mass of
mankind--spreading northward from the Tropics into climes becoming,
after the long catastrophe of the age of ice, once more genial
enough to support men who knew what decent comfort was, and were
strong enough to get the same, by all means fair or foul. No. The
tortoise of the human race does not stand on a savage. The savage
may stand on an ape-like creature. I do not say that he does not.
I do not say that he does. I do not know; and no man knows. But at
least I say that the civilised man and his world stand not upon
creatures like to any savage now known upon the earth. For first,
it seems to be most unlikely; and next, and more important to an
inductive philosopher, there is no proof of it. I see no savages
becoming really civilised men--that is, not merely men who will ape
the outside of our so-called civilisation, even absorb a few of our
ideas; not merely that; but truly civilised men who will think for
themselves, invent for themselves, act for themselves; and when the
sacred lamp of light and truth has been passed into their hands,
carry it on unextinguished, and transmit it to their successors
without running back every moment to get it relighted by those from
whom they received it: and who are bound--remember that--patiently
and lovingly to relight it for them; to give freely to all their
fellow-men of that which God has given to them and to their
ancestors; and let God, not man, be judge of how much the Red Indian
or the Polynesian, the Caffre or the Chinese, is capable of
receiving and of using.
Moreover, in history there is no record, absolutely no record, as
far as I am aware, of any savage tribe civilising itself. It is a
bold saying. I stand by my assertion: most happy to find myself
confuted, even in a single instance; for my being wrong would give
me, what I can have no objection to possess, a higher opinion than I
have now, of the unassisted capabilities of my fellow-men.
But civilisation must have begun somewhen, somewhere, with some
person, or some family, or some nation; and how did it begin?
I have said already that I do not know. But I have had my dream--
like the philosopher--and as I have not been ashamed to tell it
elsewhere, I shall not be ashamed to tell it here. And it is this:
What if the beginnings of true civilisation in this unique,
abnormal, diseased, unsatisfied, incomprehensible, and truly
miraculous and supernatural race we call man, had been literally,
and in actual fact, miraculous and supernatural likewise? What if
that be the true key to the mystery of humanity and its origin?
What if the few first chapters of the most ancient and most sacred
book should point, under whatever symbols, to the actual and the
only possible origin of civilisation, the education of a man, or a
family by beings of some higher race than man? What if the old
Puritan doctrine of Election should be even of a deeper and wider
application than divines have been wont to think? What if
individuals, if peoples, have been chosen out from time to time for
a special illumination, that they might be the lights of the earth,
and the salt of the world? What if they have, each in their turn,
abused that divine teaching to make themselves the tyrants, instead
of the ministers, of the less enlightened? To increase the
inequalities of nature by their own selfishness, instead of
decreasing them, into the equality of grace, by their own self-
sacrifice? What if the Bible after all was right, and even more
right than we were taught to think?
So runs my dream. If, after I have confessed to it, you think me
still worth listening to, in this enlightened nineteenth century, I
will go on.
At all events, what we see at the beginning of all known and half-
known history, is not savagery, but high civilisation, at least of
an outward and material kind. Do you demur? Then recollect, I pray
you, that the three oldest peoples known to history on this planet
are Egypt, China, Hindostan. The first glimpses of the world are
always like those which the book of Genesis gives us; like those
which your own continent gives us. As it was 400 years ago in
America, so it was in North Africa and in Asia 4000 years ago, or
40,000 for aught I know. Nay, if anyone should ask--And why not
400,000 years ago, on Miocene continents long sunk beneath the
Tropic sea? I for one have no rejoinder save--We have no proofs as
yet.
There loom up, out of the darkness of legend, into the as yet dim
dawn of history, what the old Arabs call Races of pre-Adamite
Sultans--colossal monarchies, with fixed and often elaborate laws,
customs, creeds; with aristocracies, priesthoods--seemingly always
of a superior and conquering race; with a mass of common folk,
whether free or half-free, composed of older conquered races; of
imported slaves too, and their descendants.
But whence comes the royal race, the aristocracy, the priesthood?
You inquire, and you find that they usually know not themselves.
They are usually--I had almost dared to say, always--foreigners.
They have crossed the neighbouring mountains. The have come by sea,
like Dido to Carthage, like Manco Cassae and Mama Belle to America,
and they have sometimes forgotten when. At least they are wiser,
stronger, fairer, than the aborigines. They are to them--as Jacques
Cartier was to the Indians of Canada--as gods. They are not sure
that they are not descended from gods. They are the Children of the
Sun, or what not. The children of light, who ray out such light as
they have, upon the darkness of their subjects. They are at first,
probably, civilisers, not conquerors. For, if tradition is worth
anything--and we have nothing else to go upon--they are at first few
in number. They come as settlers, or even as single sages. It is,
in all tradition, not the many who influence the few, but the few
who influence the many.
So aristocracies, in the true sense, are formed.
But the higher calling is soon forgotten. The purer light is soon
darkened in pride and selfishness, luxury and lust; as in Genesis,
the sons of God see the daughters of men, that they are fair; and
they take them wives of all that they choose. And so a mixed race
springs up and increases, without detriment at first to the
commonwealth. For, by a well-known law of heredity, the cross
between two races, probably far apart, produces at first a progeny
possessing the forces, and, alas! probably the vices of both. And
when the sons of God go in to the daughters of men, there are giants
in the earth in those days, men of renown. The Roman Empire,
remember, was never stronger than when the old Patrician blood had
mingled itself with that of every nation round the Mediterranean.
But it does not last. Selfishness, luxury, ferocity, spread from
above, as well as from below. The just aristocracy of virtue and
wisdom becomes an unjust one of mere power and privilege; that
again, one of mere wealth corrupting and corrupt; and is destroyed,
not by the people from below, but by the monarch from above. The
hereditary bondsmen may know
Who would be free,
Himself must strike the blow.
But they dare not, know not how. The king must do it for them. He
must become the State. "Better one tyrant," as Voltaire said, "than
many." Better stand in fear of one lion far away, than of many
wolves, each in the nearest wood. And so arise those truly
monstrous Eastern despotisms, of which modern Persia is, thank God,
the only remaining specimen; for Turkey and Egypt are too amenable
of late years to the influence of the free nations to be counted as
despotisms pure and simple--despotisms in which men, instead of
worshipping a God-man, worship the hideous counterfeit, a Man-god--a
poor human being endowed by public opinion with the powers of deity,
while he is the slave of all the weaknesses of humanity. But such,
as an historic fact, has been the last stage of every civilisation--
even that of Rome, which ripened itself upon this earth the last in
ancient times, and, I had almost said, until this very day, except
among the men who speak Teutonic tongues, and who have preserved
through all temptations, and reasserted through all dangers, the
free ideas which have been our sacred heritage ever since Tacitus
beheld us, with respect and awe, among our German forests, and saw
in us the future masters of the Roman Empire.
Yes, it is very sad, the past history of mankind. But shall we
despise those who went before us, and on whose accumulated labours
we now stand?
Shall we not reverence our spiritual ancestors? Shall we not show
our reverence by copying them, at least whenever, as in those old
Persians, we see in them manliness and truthfulness, hatred of
idolatries, and devotion to the God of light and life and good? And
shall we not feel pity, instead of contempt, for their ruder forms
of government, their ignorances, excesses, failures--so excusable in
men who, with little or no previous teaching, were trying to solve
for themselves for the first time the deepest social and political
problems of humanity.
Yes, those old despotisms we trust are dead, and never to revive.
But their corpses are the corpses, not of our enemies, but of our
friends and predecessors, slain in the world-old fight of Ormuzd
against Ahriman--light against darkness, order against disorder.
Confusedly they fought, and sometimes ill: but their corpses piled
the breach and filled the trench for us, and over their corpses we
step on to what should be to us an easy victory--what may be to us,
yet, a shameful ruin.
For if we be, as we are wont to boast, the salt of the earth and the
light of the world, what if the salt should lose its savour? What
if the light which is in us should become darkness? For myself,
when I look upon the responsibilities of the free nations of modern
times, so far from boasting of that liberty in which I delight--and
to keep which I freely, too, could die--I rather say, in fear and
trembling, God help us on whom He has laid so heavy a burden as to
make us free; responsible, each individual of us, not only to
ourselves, but to Him and all mankind. For if we fall we shall fall
I know not whither, and I dare not think.
How those old despotisms, the mighty empires of old time, fell, we
know, and we can easily explain. Corrupt, luxurious, effeminate,
eaten out by universal selfishness and mutual fear, they had at last
no organic coherence. The moral anarchy within showed through, at
last burst through, the painted skin of prescriptive order which
held them together. Some braver and abler, and usually more
virtuous people, often some little, hardy, homely mountain tribe,
saw that the fruit was ripe for gathering; and, caring naught for
superior numbers--and saying with German Alaric when the Romans
boasted of their numbers, "The thicker the hay the easier it is
mowed"--struck one brave blow at the huge inflated wind-bag--as
Cyrus and his handful of Persians struck at the Medes; as Alexander
and his handful of Greeks struck afterwards at the Persians--and
behold, it collapsed upon the spot. And then the victors took the
place of the conquered; and became in their turn an aristocracy, and
then a despotism; and in their turn rotted down and perished. And
so the vicious circle repeated itself, age after age, from Egypt and
Assyria to Mexico and Peru.
And therefore, we, free peoples as we are, have need to watch, and
sternly watch, ourselves. Equality of some kind or other is, as I
said, our natural and seemingly inevitable goal. But which
equality? For there are two--a true one and a false; a noble and a
base; a healthful and a ruinous. There is the truly divine
equality, and there is the brute equality of sheep and oxen, and of
flies and worms. There is the equality which is founded on mutual
envy. The equality which respects others, and the equality which
asserts itself. The equality which longs to raise all alike, and
the equality which desires to pull down all alike. The equality
which says: Thou art as good as I, and it may be better too, in
the sight of God. And the equality which says: I am as good as
thou, and will therefore see if I cannot master thee.
Side by side, in the heart of every free man, and every free people,
are the two instincts struggling for the mastery, called by the same
name, but bearing the same relation to each other as Marsyas to
Apollo, the Satyr to the God. Marsyas and Apollo, the base and the
noble, are, as in the old Greek legend, contending for the prize.
And the prize is no less a one than all free people of this planet.
In proportion as that nobler idea conquers, and men unite in the
equality of mutual respect and mutual service, they move one step
farther towards realising on earth that Kingdom of God of which it
is written: "The despots of the nations exercise dominion over
them, and they that exercise authority over them are called
benefactors. But he that will be great among you let him be the
servant of all."
And in proportion as that base idea conquers, and selfishness, not
self-sacrifice, is the ruling spirit of a State, men move on, one
step forward, towards realising that kingdom of the devil upon
earth, "Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost."
Only, alas! in that evil equality of envy and hate, there is no
hindmost, and the devil takes them all alike.
And so is a period of discontent, revolution, internecine anarchy,
followed by a tyranny endured, as in old Rome, by men once free,
because tyranny will at least do for them what they were too lazy
and greedy and envious to do for themselves.
And all because they have forgot
What 'tis to be a man--to curb and spurn.
The tyrant in us: the ignobler self
Which boasts, not loathes, its likeness to the brute;
And owns no good save ease, no ill save pain,
No purpose, save its share in that wild war
In which, through countless ages, living things
Compete in internecine greed. Ah, loving God,
Are we as creeping things, which have no lord?
That we are brutes, great God, we know too well;
Apes daintier-featured; silly birds, who flaunt
Their plumes, unheeding of the fowler's step;
Spiders, who catch with paper, not with webs;
Tigers, who slay with cannon and sharp steel,
Instead of teeth and claws:- all these we are.
Are we no more than these, save in degree?
Mere fools of nature, puppets of strong lusts,
Taking the sword, to perish by the sword
Upon the universal battle-field,
Even as the things upon the moor outside?
The heath eats up green grass and delicate herbs;
The pines eat up the heath; the grub the pine;
The finch the grub; the hawk the silly finch;
And man, the mightiest of all beasts of prey,
Eats what he lists. The strong eat up the weak;
The many eat the few; great nations, small;
And he who cometh in the name of all
Shall, greediest, triumph by the greed of all,
And, armed by his own victims, eat up all.
While ever out of the eternal heavens
Looks patient down the great magnanimous God,
Who, Master of all worlds, did sacrifice
All to Himself? Nay: but Himself to all;
Who taught mankind, on that first Christmas Day,
What 'tis to be a man--to give, not take;
To serve, not rule; to nourish, not devour;
To lift, not crush; if need, to die, not live.
"He that cometh in the name of all"--the popular military despot--
the "saviour of his country"--he is our internecine enemy on both
sides of the Atlantic, whenever he rises--the inaugurator of that
Imperialism, that Caesarism into which Rome sank, when not her
liberties merely, but her virtues, were decaying out of her--the
sink into which all wicked States, whether republics or monarchies,
are sure to fall, simply because men must eat and drink for to-
morrow they die. The Military and Bureaucratic Despotism which
keeps the many quiet, as in old Rome, by PANEM ET CIRCENSES--bread
and games--or, if need be, Pilgrimages; that the few may make money,
eat, drink, and be merry, as long as it can last. That, let it ape
as it may--as did the Caesars of old Rome at first--as another
Emperor did even in our own days--the forms of dead freedom, really
upholds an artificial luxury by brute force; and consecrates the
basest of all aristocracies, the aristocracy of the money-bag, by
the divine sanction of the bayonet.
That at all risks, even at the price of precious blood, the free
peoples of the earth must ward off from them; for, makeshift and
stop-gap as it is, it does not even succeed in what it tries to do.
It does not last. Have we not seen that it does not, cannot last?
How can it last? This falsehood, like all falsehoods, must collapse
at one touch of Ithuriel's spear of truth and fact. And -
"Then saw I the end of these men. Namely, how Thou dost set them in
slippery places, and casteth them down. Suddenly do they perish,
and come to a fearful end. Yea, like as a dream when one awaketh,
so shalt Thou make their image to vanish out of the city."
Have we not seen that too, though, thank God, neither in England nor
in the United States?
And then? What then? None knows, and none can know.
The future of France and Spain, the future of the Tropical Republics
of Spanish America, is utterly blank and dark; not to be prophesied,
I hold, by mortal man, simply because we have no like cases in the
history of the past whereby to judge the tendencies of the present.
Will they revive? Under the genial influences of free institutions
will the good seed which is in them take root downwards, and bear
fruit upwards? and make them all what that fair France has been, in
spite of all her faults, so often in past years--a joy and an
inspiration to all the nations round? Shall it be thus? God grant
it may; but He, and He alone, can tell. We only stand by, watching,
if we be wise, with pity and with fear, the working out of a
tremendous new social problem, which must affect the future of the
whole civilised world.
For if the agonising old nations fail to regenerate themselves, what
can befall? What, when even Imperialism has been tried and failed,
as fail it must? What but that lower depth within the lowest deep?
That last dread mood
Of sated lust, and dull decrepitude.
No law, no art, no faith, no hope, no God.
When round the freezing founts of life in peevish ring,
Crouched on the bare-worn sod,
Babbling about the unreturning spring,
And whining for dead creeds, which cannot save,
The toothless nations shiver to their grave.
And we, who think we stand, let us take heed lest we fall. Let us
accept, in modesty and in awe, the responsibility of our freedom,
and remember that that freedom can be preserved only in one old-
fashioned way. Let us remember that the one condition of a true
democracy is the same as the one condition of a true aristocracy,
namely, virtue. Let us teach our children, as grand old Lilly
taught our forefathers 300 years ago--"It is virtue, gentlemen, yea,
virtue that maketh gentlemen; that maketh the poor rich, the subject
a king, the lowborn noble, the deformed beautiful. These things
neither the whirling wheel of fortune can overturn, nor the
deceitful cavillings of worldlings separate, neither sickness abate,
nor age abolish."
Yes. Let us teach our children thus on both sides of the Atlantic.
For if they--which God forbid--should grow corrupt and weak by their
own sins, there is no hardier race now left on earth to conquer our
descendants and bring them back to reason, as those old Jews were
brought by bitter shame and woe. And all that is before them and
the whole civilised world, would be long centuries of anarchy such
as the world has not seen for ages--a true Ragnarok, a twilight of
the very gods, an age such as the wise woman foretold in the old
Voluspe.
When brethren shall be
Each other's bane,
And sisters' sons rend
The ties of kin.
Hard will be that age,
An age of bad women,
An axe-age, a sword-age,
Shields oft cleft in twain,
A storm-age, a wolf-age,
Ere earth meet its doom.
So sang, 2000 years ago, perhaps, the great unnamed prophetess, of
our own race, of what might be, if we should fail mankind and our
own calling and election.
God grant that day may never come. But God grant, also, that if
that day does come, then may come true also what that wise Vala
sang, of the day when gods, and men, and earth should be burnt up
with fire.
When slaked Surtur's flame is,
Still the man and the maiden,
Hight Valour and Life,
Shall keep themselves hid
In the wood of remembrance.
The dew of the dawning
For food it shall serve them:
From them spring new peoples.
New peoples. For after all is said, the ideal form of human society
is democracy.
A nation--and, were it even possible, a whole world--of free men,
lifting free foreheads to God and Nature; calling no man master--for
one is their master, even God; knowing and obeying their duties
towards the Maker of the Universe, and therefore to each other, and
that not from fear, nor calculation of profit or loss, but because
they loved and liked it, and had seen the beauty of righteousness
and trust and peace; because the law of God was in their hearts, and
needing at last, it may be, neither king nor priest, for each man
and each woman, in their place, were kings and priests to God. Such
a nation--such a society--what nobler conception of mortal existence
can we form? Would not that be, indeed, the kingdom of God come on
earth?
And tell me not that that is impossible--too fair a dream to be ever
realised. All that makes it impossible is the selfishness,
passions, weaknesses, of those who would be blest were they masters
of themselves, and therefore of circumstances; who are miserable
because, not being masters of themselves, they try to master
circumstance, to pull down iron walls with weak and clumsy hands,
and forget that he who would be free from tyrants must first be free
from his worst tyrant, self.
But tell me not that the dream is impossible. It is so beautiful
that it must be true. If not now, nor centuries hence, yet still
hereafter. God would never, as I hold, have inspired man with that
rich imagination had He not meant to translate, some day, that
imagination into fact.
The very greatness of the idea, beyond what a single mind or
generation can grasp, will ensure failure on failure--follies,
fanaticisms, disappointments, even crimes, bloodshed, hasty furies,
as of children baulked of their holiday.
But it will be at last fulfilled, filled full, and perfected; not
perhaps here, or among our peoples, or any people which now exist on
earth: but in some future civilisation--it may be in far lands
beyond the sea--when all that you and we have made and done shall be
as the forest-grown mounds of the old nameless civilisers of the
Mississippi valley.
RONDELET, {7} THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST {8}
"Apollo, god of medicine, exiled from the rest of the earth, was
straying once across the Narbonnaise in Gaul, seeking to fix his
abode there. Driven from Asia, from Africa, and from the rest of
Europe, he wandered through all the towns of the province in search
of a place propitious for him and for his disciples. At last he
perceived a new city, constructed from the ruins of Maguelonne, of
Lattes, and of Substantion. He contemplated long its site, its
aspect, its neighbourhood, and resolved to establish on this hill of
Montpellier a temple for himself and his priests. All smiled on his
desires. By the genius of the soil, by the character of the
inhabitants, no town is more fit for the culture of letters, and
above all of medicine. What site is more delicious and more lovely?
A heaven pure and smiling; a city built with magnificence; men born
for all the labours of the intellect. All around vast horizons and
enchanting sites--meadows, vines, olives, green champaigns;
mountains and hills, rivers, brooks, lagoons, and the sea.
Everywhere a luxuriant vegetation--everywhere the richest production
of the land and the water. Hail to thee sweet and dear city! Hail,
happy abode of Apollo, who spreadest afar the light of the glory of
thy name!"
"This fine tirade," says Dr. Maurice Raynaud--from whose charming
book on the "Doctors of the Time of Moliere" I quote--"is not, as
one might think, the translation of a piece of poetry. It is simply
part of a public oration by Francois Fanchon, one of the most
illustrious chancellors of the faculty of medicine of Montpellier in
the seventeenth century." "From time immemorial," he says, "'the
faculty' of Montpellier had made itself remarkable by a singular
mixture of the sacred and the profane. The theses which were
sustained there began by an invocation to God, the Blessed Virgin,
and St. Luke, and ended by these words: 'This thesis will be
sustained in the sacred Temple of Apollo.'"
But however extravagant Chancellor Fanchon's praises of his native
city may seem, they are really not exaggerated. The Narbonnaise, or
Languedoc, is perhaps the most charming district of charming France.
In the far north-east gleam the white Alps; in the far south-west
the white Pyrenees; and from the purple glens and yellow downs of
the Cevennes on the north-west, the Herault slopes gently down
towards the "Etangs," or great salt-water lagoons, and the vast
alluvial flats of the Camargue, the field of Caius Marius, where
still run herds of half-wild horses, descended from some ancient
Roman stock; while beyond all glitters the blue Mediterranean. The
great almond orchards, each one sheet of rose-colour in spring; the
mulberry orchards, the oliveyards, the vineyards, cover every foot
of available upland soil: save where the rugged and arid downs are
sweet with a thousand odoriferous plants, from which the bees
extract the famous white honey of Narbonne. The native flowers and
shrubs, of a beauty and richness rather Eastern than European, have
made the "Flora Montpeliensis," and with it the names of Rondelet
and his disciples, famous among botanists; and the strange fish and
shells upon its shores afforded Rondelet materials for his immortal
work upon the "Animals of the Sea." The innumerable wild fowl of
the Benches du Rhone; the innumerable songsters and other birds of
passage, many of them unknown in these islands, and even in the
north of France itself, which haunt every copse of willow and aspen
along the brook-sides; the gaudy and curious insects which thrive
beneath that clear, fierce, and yet bracing sunlight; all these have
made the district of Montpellier a home prepared by Nature for those
who study and revere her.
Neither was Chancellor Fanchon misled by patriotism, when he said
the pleasant people who inhabit that district are fit for all the
labours of the intellect. They are a very mixed race, and, like
most mixed races, quick-witted, and handsome also. There is
probably much Roman blood among them, especially in the towns; for
Languedoc, or Gallia Narbonnensis, as it was called of old, was said
to be more Roman than Rome itself. The Roman remains are more
perfect and more interesting--so the late Dr. Whewell used to say--
than any to be seen now in Italy; and the old capital, Narbonne
itself, was a complete museum of Roman antiquities ere Francis I.
destroyed it, in order to fortify the city upon a modern system
against the invading armies of Charles V. There must be much
Visigothic blood likewise in Languedoc: for the Visigothic Kings
held their courts there from the fifth century, until the time that
they were crushed by the invading Moors. Spanish blood, likewise,
there may be; for much of Languedoc was held in the early Middle Age
by those descendants of Eudes of Aquitaine who established
themselves as kings of Majorca and Arragon; and Languedoc did not
become entirely French till 1349, when Philip le Bel bought
Montpellier of those potentates. The Moors, too, may have left some
traces of their race behind. They held the country from about A.D.
713 to 758, when they were finally expelled by Charles Martel and
Eudes. One sees to this day their towers of meagre stonework,
perched on the grand Roman masonry of those old amphitheatres, which
they turned into fortresses. One may see, too--so tradition holds--
upon those very amphitheatres the stains of the fires with which
Charles Martel smoked them out; and one may see, too, or fancy that
one sees, in the aquiline features, the bright black eyes, the lithe
and graceful gestures, which are so common in Languedoc, some touch
of the old Mahommedan race, which passed like a flood over that
Christian land.
Whether or not the Moors left behind any traces of their blood, they
left behind, at least, traces of their learning; for the university
of Montpellier claimed to have been founded by Moors at a date of
altogether abysmal antiquity. They looked upon the Arabian
physicians of the Middle Age, on Avicenna and Averrhoes, as modern
innovators, and derived their parentage from certain mythic doctors
of Cordova, who, when the Moors were expelled from Spain in the
eighth century, fled to Montpellier, bringing with them traditions
of that primaeval science which had been revealed to Adam while
still in Paradise; and founded Montpellier, the mother of all the
universities in Europe. Nay, some went farther still, and told of
Bengessaus and Ferragius, the physicians of Charlemagne, and of
Marilephus, chief physician of King Chilperic, and even--if a letter
of St. Bernard's was to be believed--of a certain bishop who went as
early as the second century to consult the doctors of Montpellier;
and it would have been in vain to reply to them that in those days,
and long after them, Montpellier was not yet built. The facts are
said to be: that as early as the beginning of the thirteenth
century Montpellier had its schools of law, medicine, and arts,
which were erected into a university by Pope Nicholas IV. in 1289.
The university of Montpellier, like--I believe--most foreign ones,
resembled more a Scotch than an English university. The students
lived, for the most part, not in colleges, but in private lodgings,
and constituted a republic of their own, ruled by an abbe of the
scholars, one of themselves, chosen by universal suffrage. A terror
they were often to the respectable burghers, for they had all the
right to carry arms; and a plague likewise, for, if they ran in
debt, their creditors were forbidden to seize their books, which,
with their swords, were generally all the property they possessed.
If, moreover, anyone set up a noisy or unpleasant trade near their
lodgings, the scholars could compel the town authorities to turn him
out. They were most of them, probably, mere boys of from twelve to
twenty, living poorly, working hard, and--those at least of them who
were in the colleges--cruelly beaten daily, after the fashion of
those times; but they seem to have comforted themselves under their
troubles by a good deal of wild life out of school, by rambling into
the country on the festivals of the saints, and now and then by
acting plays; notably, that famous one which Rabelais wrote for them
in 1531: "The moral comedy of the man who had a dumb wife;" which
"joyous PATELINAGE" remains unto this day in the shape of a well-
known comic song. That comedy young Rondelet must have seen acted.
The son of a druggist, spicer, and grocer--the three trades were
then combined--in Montpellier, and born in 1507, he had been
destined for the cloister, being a sickly lad. His uncle, one of
the canons of Maguelonne, near by, had even given him the revenues
of a small chapel--a job of nepotism which was common enough in
those days. But his heart was in science and medicine. He set off,
still a mere boy, to Paris to study there; and returned to
Montpellier, at the age of eighteen, to study again.
The next year, 1530, while still a scholar himself, he was appointed
procurator of the scholars--a post which brought him in a small fee
on each matriculation--and that year he took a fee, among others,
from one of the most remarkable men of that or of any age, Francois
Rabelais himself.
And what shall I say of him?--who stands alone, like Shakespeare, in
his generation; possessed of colossal learning--of all science which
could be gathered in his days--of practical and statesmanlike
wisdom--of knowledge of languages, ancient and modern, beyond all
his compeers--of eloquence, which when he speaks of pure and noble
things becomes heroic, and, as it were, inspired--of scorn for
meanness, hypocrisy, ignorance--of esteem, genuine and earnest, for
the Holy Scriptures, and for the more moderate of the Reformers who
were spreading the Scriptures in Europe,--and all this great light
wilfully hidden, not under a bushel, but under a dunghill. He is
somewhat like Socrates in face, and in character likewise; in him,
as in Socrates, the demigod and the satyr, the man and the ape, are
struggling for the mastery. In Socrates, the true man conquers, and
comes forth high and pure; in Rabelais, alas! the victor is the ape,
while the man himself sinks down in cynicism, sensuality, practical
jokes, foul talk. He returns to Paris, to live an idle, luxurious
life; to die--says the legend--saying, "I go to seek a great
perhaps," and to leave behind him little save a school of
Pantagruelists--careless young gentlemen, whose ideal was to laugh
at everything, to believe in nothing, and to gratify their five
senses like the brutes which perish. There are those who read his
books to make them laugh; the wise man, when he reads them, will be
far more inclined to weep. Let any young man who may see these
words remember, that in him, as in Rabelais, the ape and the man are
struggling for the mastery. Let him take warning by the fate of one
who was to him as a giant to a pigmy; and think of Tennyson's words
-
Arise, and fly
The reeling faun, the sensual feast;
Strive upwards, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.
But to return. Down among them there at Montpellier, like a
brilliant meteor, flashed this wonderful Rabelais, in the year 1530.
He had fled, some say, for his life. Like Erasmus, he had no mind
to be a martyr, and he had been terrified at the execution of poor
Louis de Berquin, his friend, and the friend of Erasmus likewise.
This Louis de Berquin, a man well known in those days, was a gallant
young gentleman and scholar, holding a place in the court of Francis
I., who had translated into French the works of Erasmus, Luther, and
Melancthon, and had asserted that it was heretical to invoke the
Virgin Mary instead of the Holy Spirit, or to call her our Hope and
our Life, which titles--Berquin averred--belonged alone to God.
Twice had the doctors of the Sorbonne, with that terrible
persecutor, Noel Beda, at their head, seized poor Berquin, and tried
to burn his books and him; twice had that angel in human form,
Marguerite d'Angouleme, sister of Francis I., saved him from their
clutches; but when Francis--taken prisoner at the battle of Pavia--
at last returned from his captivity in Spain, the suppression of
heresy and the burning of heretics seemed to him and to his mother,
Louise of Savoy, a thank-offering so acceptable to God, that Louis
Berquin--who would not, in spite of the entreaties of Erasmus,
purchase his life by silence--was burnt at last on the Place de
Greve, being first strangled, because he was of gentle blood.
Montpellier received its famous guest joyfully. Rabelais was now
forty-two years old, and a distinguished savant; so they excused him
his three years' undergraduate's career, and invested him at once
with the red gown of the bachelors. That red gown--or, rather, the
ragged phantom of it--is still shown at Montpellier, and must be
worn by each bachelor when he takes his degree. Unfortunately,
antiquarians assure us that the precious garment has been renewed
again and again--the students having clipped bits of it away for
relics, and clipped as earnestly from the new gowns as their
predecessors had done from the authentic original.
Doubtless, the coming of such a man among them to lecture on the
Aphorisms of Hippocrates, and the Ars Parva of Galen, not from the
Latin translations then in use, but from original Greek texts, with
comments and corrections of his own, must have had a great influence
on the minds of the Montpellier students; and still more influence--
and that not altogether a good one--must Rabelais's lighter talk
have had, as he lounged--so the story goes--in his dressing-gown
upon the public place, picking up quaint stories from the cattle-
drivers off the Cevennes, and the villagers who came in to sell
their olives and their grapes, their vinegar and their vine-twig
faggots, as they do unto this day. To him may be owing much of the
sound respect for natural science, and much, too, of the contempt
for the superstition around them, which is notable in that group of
great naturalists who were boys in Montpellier at that day.
Rabelais seems to have liked Rondelet, and no wonder: he was a
cheery, lovable, honest little fellow, very fond of jokes, a great
musician and player on the violin, and who, when he grew rich, liked
nothing so well as to bring into his house any buffoon or strolling-
player to make fun for him. Vivacious he was, hot-tempered,
forgiving, and with a power of learning and a power of work which
were prodigious, even in those hard-working days. Rabelais chaffs
Rondelet, under the name of Rondibilis; for, indeed, Rondelet grew
up into a very round, fat, little man; but Rabelais puts excellent
sense into his mouth, cynical enough, and too cynical, but both
learned and humorous; and, if he laughs at him for being shocked at
the offer of a fee, and taking it, nevertheless, kindly enough,
Rondelet is not the first doctor who has done that, neither will he
be the last.
Rondelet, in his turn, put on the red robe of the bachelor, and
received, on taking his degree, his due share of fisticuffs from his
dearest friends, according to the ancient custom of the University
of Montpellier. He then went off to practise medicine in a village
at the foot of the Alps, and, half-starved, to teach little
children. Then he found he must learn Greek; went off to Paris a
second time, and alleviated his poverty there somewhat by becoming
tutor to a son of the Viscomte de Turenne. There he met Gonthier of
Andernach, who had taught anatomy at Louvain to the great Vesalius,
and learned from him to dissect. We next find him setting up as a
medical man amid the wild volcanic hills of the Auvergne, struggling
still with poverty, like Erasmus, like George Buchanan, like almost
every great scholar in those days; for students then had to wander
from place to place, generally on foot, in search of new teachers,
in search of books, in search of the necessaries of life; undergoing
such an amount of bodily and mental toil as makes it wonderful that
all of them did not--as some of them doubtless did--die under the
hard training, or, at best, desert the penurious Muses for the
paternal shop or plough.
Rondelet got his doctorate in 1537, and next year fell in love with
and married a beautiful young girl called Jeanne Sandre, who seems
to have been as poor as he.
But he had gained, meanwhile, a powerful patron; and the patronage
of the great was then as necessary to men of letters as the
patronage of the public is now. Guillaume Pellicier, Bishop of
Maguelonne--or rather then of Montpellier itself, whither he had
persuaded Paul II. to transfer the ancient see--was a model of the
literary gentleman of the sixteenth century; a savant, a diplomat, a
collector of books and manuscripts, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac, which
formed the original nucleus of the present library of the Louvre; a
botanist, too, who loved to wander with Rondelet collecting plants
and flowers. He retired from public life to peace and science at
Montpellier, when to the evil days of his master, Francis I.,
succeeded the still worse days of Henry II., and Diana of Poitiers.
That Jezebel of France could conceive no more natural or easy way of
atoning for her own sins than that of hunting down heretics, and
feasting her wicked eyes--so it is said--upon their dying torments.
Bishop Pellicier fell under suspicion of heresy: very probably
with some justice. He fell, too, under suspicion of leading a life
unworthy of a celibate churchman, a fault which--if it really
existed--was, in those days, pardonable enough in an orthodox
prelate, but not so in one whose orthodoxy was suspected. And for
awhile Pellicier was in prison. After his release he gave himself
up to science, with Rondelet and the school of disciples who were
growing up around him. They rediscovered together the Garum, that
classic sauce, whose praises had been sung of old by Horace,
Martial, and Ausonius; and so child-like, superstitious if you will,
was the reverence in the sixteenth century for classic antiquity,
that when Pellicier and Rondelet discovered that the Garum was made
from the fish called Picarel--called Garon by the fishers of
Antibes, and Giroli at Venice, both these last names corruptions of
the Latin Gerres--then did the two fashionable poets of France,
Etienne Dolet and Clement Marot, think it not unworthy of their muse
to sing the praises of the sauce which Horace had sung of old. A
proud day, too, was it for Pellicier and Rondelet, when wandering
somewhere in the marshes of the Camargue, a scent of garlic caught
the nostrils of the gentle bishop, and in the lovely pink flowers of
the water-germander he recognised the Scordium of the ancients.
"The discovery," says Professor Planchon, "made almost as much noise
as that of the famous Garum; for at that moment of naive fervour on
behalf of antiquity, to re-discover a plant of Dioscorides or of
Pliny was a good fortune and almost an event."
I know not whether, after his death, the good bishop's bones reposed
beneath some gorgeous tomb, bedizened with the incongruous half-
Pagan statues of the Renaissance; but this at least is certain, that
Rondelet's disciples imagined for him a monument more enduring than
of marble or of brass, more graceful and more curiously wrought than
all the sculptures of Torrigiano or Cellini, Baccio Bandinelli or
Michael Angelo himself. For they named a lovely little lilac
snapdragon, Linaria Domini Pellicerii--"Lord Pellicier's toad-flax;"
and that name it will keep, we may believe, as long as winter and
summer shall endure.
But to return. To this good Patron--who was the Ambassador at
Venice--the newly-married Rondelet determined to apply for
employment; and to Venice he would have gone, leaving his bride
behind, had he not been stayed by one of those angels who sometimes
walk the earth in women's shape. Jeanne Sandre had an elder sister,
Catharine, who had brought her up. She was married to a wealthy
man, but she had no children of her own. For four years she and her
good husband had let the Rondelets lodge with them, and now she was
a widow, and to part with them was more than she could bear. She
carried Rondelet off from the students who were seeing him safe out
of the city, brought him back, settled on him the same day half her
fortune, and soon after settled on him the whole, on the sole
condition that she should live with him and her sister. For years
afterwards she watched over the pretty young wife and her two girls
and three boys--the three boys, alas! all died young--and over
Rondelet himself, who, immersed in books and experiments, was
utterly careless about money; and was to them all a mother--
advising, guiding, managing, and regarded by Rondelet with genuine
gratitude as his guardian angel.
Honour and good fortune, in a worldly sense, now poured in upon the
druggist's son. Pellicier, his own bishop, stood godfather to his
first-born daughter. Montluc, Bishop of Valence, and that wise and
learned statesman, the Cardinal of Tournon, stood godfathers a few
years later to his twin boys; and what was of still more solid worth
to him, Cardinal Tournon took him to Antwerp, Bordeaux, Bayonne, and
more than once to Rome; and in these Italian journeys of his he
collected many facts for the great work of his life, that "History
of Fishes" which he dedicated, naturally enough, to the cardinal.
This book with its plates is, for the time, a masterpiece of
accuracy. Those who are best acquainted with the subject say, that
it is up to the present day a key to the whole ichthyology of the
Mediterranean. Two other men, Belon and Salviani, were then at work
on the same subject, and published their books almost at the same
time; a circumstance which caused, as was natural, a three-cornered
duel between the supporters of the three naturalists, each party
accusing the other of plagiarism. The simple fact seems to be that
the almost simultaneous appearance of the three books in 1554-55 is
one of those coincidences inevitable at moments when many minds are
stirred in the same direction by the same great thoughts--
coincidences which have happened in our own day on questions of
geology, biology, and astronomy; and which, when the facts have been
carefully examined, and the first flush of natural jealousy has
cooled down, have proved only that there were more wise men than one
in the world at the same time.
And this sixteenth century was an age in which the minds of men were
suddenly and strangely turned to examine the wonders of nature with
an earnestness, with a reverence, and therefore with an accuracy,
with which they had never been investigated before. "Nature," says
Professor Planchon, "long veiled in mysticism and scholasticism, was
opening up infinite vistas. A new superstition, the exaggerated
worship of the ancients, was nearly hindering this movement of
thought towards facts. Nevertheless, Learning did her work. She
rediscovered, reconstructed, purified, commented on the texts of
ancient authors. Then came in observation, which showed that more
was to be seen in one blade of grass than in any page of Pliny.
Rondelet was in the middle of this crisis a man of transition, while
he was one of progress. He reflected the past; he opened and
prepared the future. If he commented on Dioscorides, if he remained
faithful to the theories of Galen, he founded in his 'History of
Fishes' a monument which our century respects. He is above all an
inspirer, an initiator; and if he wants one mark of the leader of a
school, the foundation of certain scientific doctrines, there is in
his speech what is better than all systems, the communicative power
which urges a generation of disciples along the path of independent
research, with Reason for guide, and Faith for aim."
Around Rondelet, in those years, sometimes indeed in his house--for
professors in those days took private pupils as lodgers--worked the
group of botanists whom Linnaeus calls "the Fathers," the authors of
the descriptive botany of the sixteenth century. Their names, and
those of their disciples and their disciples again, are household
words in the mouth of every gardener, immortalised, like good Bishop
Pellicier, in the plants that have been named after them. The
Lobelia commemorates Lobel, one of Rondelet's most famous pupils,
who wrote those "Adversaria" which contain so many curious sketches
of Rondelet's botanical expeditions, and who inherited his botanical
(as Joubert his biographer inherited his anatomical) manuscripts.
The Magnolia commemorates the Magnols; the Sarracenia, Sarrasin of
Lyons; the Bauhinia, Jean Bauhin; the Fuchsia, Bauhin's earlier
German master, Leonard Fuchs; and the Clusia--the received name of
that terrible "Matapalo" or "Scotch attorney," of the West Indies,
which kills the hugest tree, to become as huge a tree itself--
immortalises the great Clusius, Charles de l'Escluse, citizen of
Arras, who, after studying civil law at Louvain, philosophy at
Marburg, and theology at Wittemberg under Melancthon, came to
Montpellier in 1551, to live in Rondelet's own house, and become the
greatest botanist of his age.
These were Rondelet's palmy days. He had got a theatre of anatomy
built at Montpellier, where he himself dissected publicly. He had,
says tradition, a little botanic garden, such as were springing up
then in several universities, specially in Italy. He had a villa
outside the city, whose tower, near the modern railway station,
still bears the name of the "Mas de Rondelet." There, too, may be
seen the remnants of the great tanks, fed with water brought through
earthen pipes from the Fountain of Albe, wherein he kept the fish
whose habits he observed. Professor Planchon thinks that he had
salt-water tanks likewise; and thus he may have been the father of
all "Aquariums." He had a large and handsome house in the city
itself, a large practice as physician in the country round; money
flowed in fast to him, and flowed out fast likewise. He spent much
upon building, pulling down, rebuilding, and sent the bills in
seemingly to his wife and to his guardian angel Catharine. He
himself had never a penny in his purse: but earned the money, and
let his ladies spend it; an equitable and pleasant division of
labour which most married men would do well to imitate. A generous,
affectionate, careless little man, he gave away, says his pupil and
biographer, Joubert, his valuable specimens to any savant who begged
for them, or left them about to be stolen by visitors, who, like too
many collectors in all ages, possessed light fingers and lighter
consciences. So pacific was he meanwhile, and so brave withal that
even in the fearful years of "The Troubles," he would never carry
sword, nor even tuck or dagger: but went about on the most
lonesome journeys as one who wore a charmed life, secure in God and
in his calling, which was to heal, and not to kill.
These were the golden years of Rondelet's life; but trouble was
coming on him, and a stormy sunset after a brilliant day. He lost
his sister-in-law, to whom he owed all his fortunes, and who had
watched ever since over him and his wife like a mother; then he lost
his wife herself under most painful circumstances; then his best-
beloved daughter. Then he married again, and lost the son who was
born to him; and then came, as to many of the best in those days,
even sorer trials, trials of the conscience, trials of faith.
For in the meantime Rondelet had become a Protestant, like many of
the wisest men round him; like, so it would seem from the event, the
majority of the university and the burghers of Montpellier. It is
not to be wondered at. Montpellier was a sort of halfway resting-
place for Protestant preachers, whether fugitive or not, who were
passing from Basle, Geneva, or Lyons, to Marguerite of Navarre's
little Protestant court at Pan or at Nerac, where all wise and good
men, and now and then some foolish and fanatical ones, found shelter
and hospitality. Thither Calvin himself had been, passing probably
through Montpellier and leaving--as such a man was sure to leave--
the mark of his foot behind him. At Lyons, no great distance up the
Rhone, Marguerite had helped to establish an organised Protestant
community; and when in 1536 she herself had passed through
Montpellier, to visit her brother at Valence, and Montmorency's camp
at Avignon, she took with her doubtless Protestant chaplains of her
own, who spoke wise words--it may be that she spoke wise words
herself--to the ardent and inquiring students of Montpellier.
Moreover, Rondelet and his disciples had been for years past in
constant communication with the Protestant savants of Switzerland
and Germany, among whom the knowledge of nature was progressing as
it never had progressed before. For--it is a fact always to be
remembered--it was only in the free air of Protestant countries the
natural sciences could grow and thrive. They sprung up, indeed, in
Italy after the restoration of Greek literature in the fifteenth
century; but they withered there again only too soon under the
blighting upas shade of superstition. Transplanted to the free air
of Switzerland, of Germany, of Britain, and of Montpellier, then
half Protestant, they developed rapidly and surely, simply because
the air was free; to be checked again in France by the return of
superstition with despotism super-added, until the eve of the great
French Revolution.
So Rondelet had been for some years Protestant. He had hidden in
his house for a long while a monk who had left his monastery. He
had himself written theological treatises: but when his Bishop
Pellicier was imprisoned on a charge of heresy, Rondelet burnt his
manuscripts, and kept his opinions to himself. Still he was a
suspected heretic, at last seemingly a notorious one; for only the
year before his death, going to visit patients at Perpignan, he was
waylaid by the Spaniards, and had to get home through bypasses of
the Pyrenees, to avoid being thrown into the Inquisition.
And those were times in which it was necessary for a man to be
careful, unless he had made up his mind to be burned. For more than
thirty years of Rondelet's life the burning had gone on in his
neighbourhood; intermittently it is true: the spasms of
superstitious fury being succeeded, one may charitably hope, by pity
and remorse; but still the burnings had gone on. The Benedictine
monk of St. Maur, who writes the history of Languedoc, says, quite
en passant, how someone was burnt at Toulouse in 1553, luckily only
in effigy, for he had escaped to Geneva: but he adds, "next year
they burned several heretics," it being not worth while to mention
their names. In 1556 they burned alive at Toulouse Jean Escalle, a
poor Franciscan monk, who had found his order intolerable; while one
Pierre de Lavaur, who dared preach Calvinism in the streets of
Nismes, was hanged and burnt. So had the score of judicial murders
been increasing year by year, till it had to be, as all evil scores
have to be in this world, paid off with interest, and paid off
especially against the ignorant and fanatic monks who for a whole
generation, in every university and school in France, had been
howling down sound science, as well as sound religion; and at
Montpellier in 1560-61, their debt was paid them in a very ugly way.
News came down to the hot southerners of Languedoc of the so-called
conspiracy of Amboise.--How the Duc de Guise and the Cardinal de
Lorraine had butchered the best blood in France under the pretence
of a treasonable plot; how the King of Navarre and the Prince de
Conde had been arrested; then how Conde and Coligny were ready to
take up arms at the head of all the Huguenots of France, and try to
stop this life-long torturing, by sharp shot and cold steel; then
how in six months' time the king would assemble a general council to
settle the question between Catholics and Huguenots. The Huguenots,
guessing how that would end, resolved to settle the question for
themselves. They rose in one city after another, sacked the
churches, destroyed the images, put down by main force superstitious
processions and dances; and did many things only to be excused by
the exasperation caused by thirty years of cruelty. At Montpellier
there was hard fighting, murders--so say the Catholic historians--of
priests and monks, sack of the new cathedral, destruction of the
noble convents which lay in a ring round Montpellier. The city and
the university were in the hands of the Huguenots, and Montpellier
became Protestant on the spot.
Next year came the counter-blow. There were heavy battles with the
Catholics all round the neighbourhood, destruction of the suburbs,
threatened siege and sack, and years of misery and poverty for
Montpellier and all who were therein.
Horrible was the state of France in those times of the wars of
religion which began in 1562; the times which are spoken of usually
as "The Troubles," as if men did not wish to allude to them too
openly. Then, and afterwards in the wars of the League, deeds were
done for which language has no name. The population decreased. The
land lay untilled. The fair face of France was blackened with burnt
homesteads and ruined towns. Ghastly corpses dangled in rows upon
the trees, or floated down the blood-stained streams. Law and order
were at an end. Bands of robbers prowled in open day, and bands of
wolves likewise. But all through the horrors of the troubles we
catch sight of the little fat doctor riding all unarmed to see his
patients throughout Languedoc; going vast distances, his biographers
say, by means of regular relays of horses, till he too broke down.
Well, for him, perhaps, that he broke down when he did; for capture
and recapture, massacre and pestilence, were the fate of Montpellier
and the surrounding country, till the better times of Henry IV. and
the Edict of Nantes in 1598, when liberty of worship was given to
the Protestants for awhile.
In the burning summer of 1566, Rondelet went a long journey to
Toulouse, seemingly upon an errand of charity, to settle some law
affairs for his relations. The sanitary state of the southern
cities is bad enough still. It must have been horrible in those
days of barbarism and misrule. Dysentery was epidemic at Toulouse
then, and Rondelet took it. He knew from the first that he should
die. He was worn out, it is said, by over-exertion; by sorrow for
the miseries of the land; by fruitless struggles to keep the peace,
and to strive for moderation in days when men were all immoderate.
But he rode away a day's journey--he took two days over it, so weak
he was--in the blazing July sun, to a friend's sick wife at
Realmont, and there took to his bed, and died a good man's death.
The details of his death and last illness were written and published
by his cousin Claude Formy; and well worth reading they are to any
man who wishes to know how to die. Rondelet would have no tidings
of his illness sent to Montpellier. He was happy, he said, in dying
away from the tears of his household, and "safe from insult." He
dreaded, one may suppose, lest priests and friars should force their
way to his bedside, and try to extort some recantation from the
great savant, the honour and glory of their city. So they sent for
no priest to Realmont; but round his bed a knot of Calvinist
gentlemen and ministers read the Scriptures, and sang David's
psalms, and prayed; and Rondelet prayed with them through long
agonies, and so went home to God.
The Benedictine monk-historian of Languedoc, in all his voluminous
folios, never mentions, as far as I can find, Rondelet's existence.
Why should he? The man was only a druggist's son and a heretic, who
healed diseases, and collected plants, and wrote a book on fish.
But the learned men of Montpellier, and of all Europe, had a very
different opinion of him. His body was buried at Realmont; but
before the schools of Toulouse they set up a white marble slab, and
an inscription thereon setting forth his learning and his virtues;
and epitaphs on him were composed by the learned throughout Europe,
not only in French and Latin, but in Greek, Hebrew, and even
Chaldee.
So lived and so died a noble man; more noble, to my mind, than many
a victorious warrior, or successful statesman, or canonised saint.
To know facts, and to heal diseases, were the two objects of his
life. For them he toiled, as few men have toiled; and he died in
harness, at his work--the best death any man can die.
VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST {9}
I cannot begin a sketch of the life of this great man better than by
trying to describe a scene so picturesque, so tragic in the eyes of
those who are wont to mourn over human follies, so comic in the eyes
of those who prefer to laugh over them, that the reader will not be
likely to forget either it or the actors in it.
It is a darkened chamber in the College of Alcala, in the year 1562,
where lies, probably in a huge four-post bed, shrouded in stifling
hangings, the heir-apparent of the greatest empire in the then
world, Don Carlos, only son of Philip II. and heir-apparent of
Spain, the Netherlands, and all the Indies. A short sickly boy of
sixteen, with a bull head, a crooked shoulder, a short leg, and a
brutal temper, he will not be missed by the world if he should die.
His profligate career seems to have brought its own punishment. To
the scandal of his father, who tolerated no one's vices save his
own, as well as to the scandal of the university authorities of
Alcala, he has been scouring the streets at the head of the most
profligate students, insulting women, even ladies of rank, and
amenable only to his lovely young stepmother, Elizabeth of Valois,
Isabel de la Paz, as the Spaniards call her, the daughter of
Catherine do Medicis, and sister of the King of France. Don Carlos
should have married her, had not his worthy father found it more
advantageous for the crown of Spain, as well as more pleasant for
him, Philip, to marry her himself. Whence came heart-burnings,
rage, jealousies, romances, calumnies, of which two last--in as far
at least as they concern poor Elizabeth--no wise man now believes a
word.
Going on some errand on which he had no business--there are two
stories, neither of them creditable nor necessary to repeat--Don
Carlos has fallen downstairs and broken his head. He comes, by his
Portuguese mother's side, of a house deeply tainted with insanity;
and such an injury may have serious consequences. However, for nine
days the wound goes on well, and Don Carlos, having had a wholesome
fright, is, according to Doctor Olivarez, the medico de camara, a
very good lad, and lives on chicken broth and dried plums. But on
the tenth day comes on numbness of the left side, acute pains in the
head, and then gradually shivering, high fever, erysipelas. His
head and neck swell to an enormous size; then comes raging delirium,
then stupefaction, and Don Carlos lies as one dead.
A modern surgeon would, probably, thanks to that training of which
Vesalius may be almost called the father, have had little difficulty
in finding out what was the matter with the luckless lad, and little
difficulty in removing the evil, if it had not gone too far. But
the Spanish physicians were then, as many of them are said to be
still, as far behind the world in surgery as in other things; and
indeed surgery itself was then in its infancy, because men, ever
since the early Greek schools of Alexandria had died out, had been
for centuries feeding their minds with anything rather than with
facts. Therefore the learned morosophs who were gathered round Don
Carlos's sick bed had become according to their own confession,
utterly confused, terrified, and at their wits' end.
It is the 7th of May, the eighteenth day after the accident
according to Olivarez's story: he and Dr Vega have been bleeding
the unhappy prince, enlarging the wound twice, and torturing him
seemingly on mere guesses. "I believe," says Olivarez, "that all
was done well: but as I have said, in wounds in the head there are
strange labyrinths." So on the 7th they stand round the bed in
despair. Don Garcia de Toledo, the prince's faithful governor, is
sitting by him, worn out with sleepless nights, and trying to supply
to the poor boy that mother's tenderness which he has never known.
Alva, too, is there, stern, self-compressed, most terrible, and yet
most beautiful. He has a God on earth, and that is Philip his
master; and though he has borne much from Don Carlos already, and
will have to bear more, yet the wretched lad is to him as a son of
God, a second deity, who will by right divine succeed to the
inheritance of the first; and he watches this lesser deity
struggling between life and death with an intensity of which we, in
these less loyal days, can form no notion. One would be glad to
have a glimpse of what passed through that mind, so subtle and so
ruthless, so disciplined and so loyal withal: but Alva was a man
who was not given to speak his mind, but to act it.
One would wish, too, for a glimpse of what was passing through the
mind of another man, who has been daily in that sick chamber,
according to Olivarez's statement, since the first of the month:
but he is one who has had, for some years past, even more reason
than Alva for not speaking his mind. What he looked like we know
well, for Titian has painted him from the life--a tall, bold, well-
dressed man, with a noble brain, square and yet lofty, short curling
locks and beard, an eye which looks as though it feared neither man
nor fiend--and it has had good reason to fear both--and features
which would be exceeding handsome, but for the defiant snub-nose.
That is Andreas Vesalius, of Brussels, dreaded and hated by the
doctors of the old school--suspect, moreover, it would seem to
inquisitors and theologians, possibly to Alva himself; for he has
dared to dissect human bodies; he has insulted the mediaevalists at
Paris, Padua, Bologna, Pisa, Venice, in open theatre; he has turned
the heads of all the young surgeons in Italy and France; he has
written a great book, with prints in it, designed, some say, by
Titian--they were actually done by another Netherlander, John of
Calcar, near Cleves--in which he has dared to prove that Galen's
anatomy was at fault throughout, and that he had been describing a
monkey's inside when he had pretended to be describing a man's; and
thus, by impudence and quackery, he has wormed himself--this
Netherlander, a heretic at heart, as all Netherlanders are, to God
as well as to Galen--into the confidence of the late Emperor Charles
V., and gone campaigning with him as one of his physicians,
anatomising human bodies even on the battle-field, and defacing the
likeness of Deity; and worse than that, the most religious King
Philip is deceived by him likewise, and keeps him in Madrid in
wealth and honour; and now, in the prince's extreme danger, the king
has actually sent for him, and bidden him try his skill--a man who
knows nothing save about bones and muscles and the outside of the
body, and is unworthy the name of a true physician.
One can conceive the rage of the old Spanish pedants at the
Netherlander's appearance, and still more at what followed, if we
are to believe Hugo Bloet of Delft, his countryman and contemporary.
{10} Vesalius, he says, saw that the surgeons had bound up the
wound so tight that an abscess had formed outside the skull, which
could not break: he asserted that the only hope lay in opening it;
and did so, Philip having given leave, "by two cross-cuts. Then the
lad returned to himself, as if awakened from a profound sleep,
affirming that he owed his restoration to life to the German
doctor."
Dionysius Daza, who was there with the other physicians and
surgeons, tells a different story: "The most learned, famous, and
rare Baron Vesalius," he says, advised that the skull should be
trepanned; but his advice was not followed.
Olivarez's account agrees with that of Daza. They had opened the
wounds, he says, down to the skull before Vesalius came. Vesalius
insisted that the injury lay inside the skull, and wished to pierce
it. Olivarez spends much labour in proving that Vesalius had "no
great foundation for his opinion:" but confesses that he never
changed that opinion to the last, though all the Spanish doctors
were against him. Then on the 6th, he says, the Bachelor Torres
came from Madrid, and advised that the skull should be laid bare
once more; and on the 7th, there being still doubt whether the skull
was not injured, the operation was performed--by whom it is not
said--but without any good result, or, according to Olivarez, any
discovery, save that Vesalius was wrong, and the skull uninjured.
Whether this second operation of the 7th of May was performed by
Vesalius, and whether it was that of which Bloet speaks, is an open
question. Olivarez's whole relation is apologetic, written to
justify himself and his seven Spanish colleagues, and to prove
Vesalius in the wrong. Public opinion, he confesses, had been very
fierce against him. The credit of Spanish medicine was at stake:
and we are not bound to believe implicitly a paper drawn up under
such circumstances for Philip's eye. This, at least, we gather:
that Don Carlos was never trepanned, as is commonly said; and this,
also, that whichever of the two stories is true, equally puts
Vesalius into direct, and most unpleasant, antagonism to the Spanish
doctors. {11}
But Don Carlos still lay senseless; and yielding to popular clamour,
the doctors called in the aid of a certain Moorish doctor, from
Valencia, named Priotarete, whose unguents, it was reported, had
achieved many miraculous cures. The unguent, however, to the horror
of the doctors, burned the skull till the bone was as black as the
colour of ink; and Olivarez declares he believes it to have been a
preparation of pure caustic. On the morning of the 9th of May, the
Moor and his unguents were sent away, "and went to Madrid, to send
to heaven Hernando de Vega, while the prince went back to our method
of cure."
Considering what happened on the morning of the 10th of May, we
should now presume that the second opening of the abscess, whether
by Vesalius or someone else, relieved the pressure on the brain;
that a critical period of exhaustion followed, probably prolonged by
the Moor's premature caustic, which stopped the suppuration: but
that God's good handiwork, called nature, triumphed at last; and
that therefore it came to pass that the prince was out of danger
within three days of the operation. But he was taught, it seems, to
attribute his recovery to a very different source from that of a
German knife. For on the morning of the 9th, when the Moor was
gone, and Don Carlos lay seemingly lifeless, there descended into
his chamber a Deus e machina, or rather a whole pantheon of greater
or lesser deities, who were to effect that which medical skill
seemed not to have effected. Philip sent into the prince's chamber
several of the precious relics which he usually carried about with
him. The miraculous image of the Virgin of Atocha, in embroidering
garments for whom, Spanish royalty, male and female, has spent so
many an hour ere now, was brought in solemn procession and placed on
an altar at the foot of the prince's bed; and in the afternoon there
entered, with a procession likewise, a shrine containing the bones
of a holy anchorite, one Fray Diego, "whose life and miracles," says
Olivarez, "are so notorious:" and the bones of St. Justus and St.
Pastor, the tutelar saints of the university of Alcala. Amid solemn
litanies the relics of Fray Diego were laid upon the prince's
pillow, and the sudarium, or mortuary cloth, which had covered his
face, was placed upon the prince's forehead.
Modern science might object that the presence of so many personages,
however pious or well intentioned, in a sick chamber on a hot
Spanish May day, especially as the bath had been, for some
generations past, held in religious horror throughout Spain, as a
sign of Moorish and Mussulman tendencies, might have somewhat
interfered with the chances of the poor boy's recovery.
Nevertheless the event seems to have satisfied Philip's highest
hopes; for that same night (so Don Carlos afterwards related) the
holy monk Diego appeared to him in a vision, wearing the habit of
St. Francis, and bearing in his hand a cross of reeds tied with a
green band. The prince stated that he first took the apparition to
be that of the blessed St. Francis; but not seeing the stigmata, he
exclaimed, "How? Dost thou not bear the marks of the wounds?" What
he replied Don Carlos did not recollect; save that he consoled him,
and told him that he should not die of that malady.
Philip had returned to Madrid, and shut himself up in grief in the
great Jeronymite monastery. Elizabeth was praying for her step-son
before the miraculous images of the same city. During the night of
the 9th of May prayers went up for Don Carlos in all the churches of
Toledo, Alcala, and Madrid. Alva stood all that night at the bed's
foot. Don Garcia de Toledo sat in the arm-chair, where he had now
sat night and day for more than a fortnight. The good preceptor,
Honorato Juan, afterwards Bishop of Osma, wrestled in prayer for the
lad the whole night through. His prayer was answered: probably it
had been answered already, without his being aware of it. Be that
as it may, about dawn Don Carlos's heavy breathing ceased; he fell
into a quiet sleep; and when he awoke all perceived at once that he
was saved.
He did not recover his sight, seemingly on account of the
erysipelas, for a week more. He then opened his eyes upon the
miraculous image of Atocha, and vowed that, if he recovered, he
would give to the Virgin, at four different shrines in Spain, gold
plate of four times his weight; and silver plate of seven times his
weight, when he should rise from his couch. So on the 6th of June
he rose, and was weighed in a fur coat and a robe of damask, and his
weight was three arrobas and one pound--seventy-six pounds in all.
On the 14th of June he went to visit his father at the episcopal
palace; then to all the churches and shrines in Alcala, and of
course to that of Fray Diego, whose body it is said he contemplated
for some time with edifying devotion. The next year saw Fray Diego
canonised as a saint, at the intercession of Philip and his son; and
thus Don Carlos re-entered the world, to be a terror and a torment
to all around him, and to die--not by Philip's cruelty, as his
enemies reported too hastily indeed, yet excusably, for they knew
him to be capable of any wickedness--but simply of constitutional
insanity.
And now let us go back to the history of "that most learned, famous,
and rare Baron Vesalius," who had stood by and seen all these things
done; and try if we cannot, after we have learned the history of his
early life, guess at some of his probable meditations on this
celebrated clinical case; and guess also how those meditations may
have affected seriously the events of his afterlife.
Vesalius (as I said) was a Netherlander, born at Brussels in 1513 or
1514. His father and grandfather had been medical men of the
highest standing in a profession which then, as now, was commonly
hereditary. His real name was Wittag, an ancient family of Wesel,
on the Rhine, from which town either he or his father adopted the
name of Vesalius, according to the classicising fashion of those
days. Young Vesalius was sent to college at Louvain, where he
learned rapidly. At sixteen or seventeen he knew not only Latin,
but Greek enough to correct the proofs of Galen, and Arabic enough
to become acquainted with the works of the Mussulman physicians. He
was a physicist too, and a mathematician, according to the knowledge
of those times; but his passion--the study to which he was destined
to devote his life--was anatomy.
Little or nothing (it must be understood) had been done in anatomy
since the days of Galen of Pergamos, in the second century after
Christ, and very little even by him. Dissection was all but
forbidden among the ancients. The Egyptians, Herodotus tells us,
used to pursue with stones and curses the embalmers as soon as they
had performed their unpleasant office; and though Herophilus and
Erasistratus are said to have dissected many subjects under the
protection of Ptolemy Soter in Alexandria itself: yet the public
feeling of the Greeks as well as of the Romans continued the same as
that of the ancient Egyptians; and Galen was fain--as Vesalius
proved--to supplement his ignorance of the human frame by describing
that of an ape. Dissection was equally forbidden among the
Mussulmans; and the great Arabic physicians could do no more than
comment on Galen. The same prejudice extended through the Middle
Age. Medical men were all clerks, CLERICI, and as such forbidden to
shed blood. The only dissection, as far as I am aware, made during
the Middle Age was one by Mundinus in 1306; and his subsequent
commentaries on Galen--for he dare allow his own eyes to see no more
than Galen had seen before him--constituted the best anatomical
manual in Europe till the middle of the fifteenth century.
Then, in Italy at least, the classic Renaissance gave fresh life to
anatomy as to all other sciences. Especially did the improvements
in painting and sculpture stir men up to a closer study of the human
frame. Leonardo da Vinci wrote a treatise on muscular anatomy. The
artist and the sculptor often worked together, and realised that
sketch of Michael Angelo's in which he himself is assisting
Fallopius, Vesalius's famous pupil, to dissect. Vesalius soon found
that his thirst for facts could not be slaked by the theories of the
Middle Age; so in 1530 he went off to Montpellier, where Francis I.
had just founded a medical school, and where the ancient laws of the
city allowed the faculty each year the body of a criminal. From
thence, after becoming the fellow-pupil and the friend of Rondelet,
and probably also of Rabelais and those other luminaries of
Montpellier, of whom I spoke in my essay on Rondelet, he returned to
Paris to study under old Sylvius, whose real name was Jacques
Dubois, alias Jock o' the Wood; and to learn less--as he complains
himself--in an anatomical theatre than a butcher might learn in his
shop.
Were it not that the whole question of dissection is one over which
it is right to draw a reverent veil, as a thing painful, however
necessary and however innocent, it would be easy to raise ghastly
laughter in many a reader by the stories which Vesalius himself
tells of his struggles to learn anatomy. How old Sylvius tried to
demonstrate the human frame from a bit of a dog, fumbling in vain
for muscles which he could not find, or which ought to have been
there, according to Galen, and were not; while young Vesalius, as
soon as the old pedant's back was turned, took his place, and, to
the delight of the students, found for him--provided it were there--
what he could not find himself;--how he went body-snatching and
gibbet-robbing, often at the danger of his life, as when he and his
friend were nearly torn to pieces by the cannibal dogs who haunted
the Butte de Montfaucon, or place of public execution;--how he
acquired, by a long and dangerous process, the only perfect skeleton
then in the world, and the hideous story of the robber to whom it
had belonged--all these horrors those who list may read for
themselves elsewhere. I hasten past them with this remark--that to
have gone through the toils, dangers, and disgusts which Vesalius
faced, argued in a superstitious and cruel age like his, no common
physical and moral courage, and a deep conscience that he was doing
right, and must do it at all risks in the face of a generation
which, peculiarly reckless of human life and human agony, allowed
that frame which it called the image of God to be tortured, maimed,
desecrated in every way while alive; and yet--straining at the gnat
after having swallowed the camel--forbade it to be examined when
dead, though for the purpose of alleviating the miseries of mankind.
The breaking out of war between Francis I. and Charles V. drove
Vesalius back to his native country and Louvain; and in 1535 we hear
of him as a surgeon in Charles V.'s army. He saw, most probably,
the Emperor's invasion of Provence, and the disastrous retreat from
before Montmorency's fortified camp at Avignon, through a country in
which that crafty general had destroyed every article of human food,
except the half-ripe grapes. He saw, perhaps, the Spanish soldiers,
poisoned alike by the sour fruit and by the blazing sun, falling in
hundreds along the white roads which led back into Savoy, murdered
by the peasantry whose homesteads had been destroyed, stifled by the
weight of their own armour, or desperately putting themselves, with
their own hands, out of a world which had become intolerable. Half
the army perished. Two thousand corpses lay festering between Aix
and Frejus alone. If young Vesalius needed "subjects," the ambition
and the crime of man found enough for him in those blazing September
days.
He went to Italy, probably with the remnants of the army. Where
could he have rather wished to find himself? He was at last in the
country where the human mind seemed to be growing young once more;
the country of revived arts, revived sciences, learning, languages;
and--though, alas! only for awhile of revived free thought, such as
Europe had not seen since the palmy days of Greece. Here at least
he would be appreciated; here at least he would be allowed to think
and speak: and he was appreciated. The Italian cities, who were
then, like the Athenians of old, "spending their time in nothing
else save to hear or to tell something new," welcomed the brave
young Fleming and his novelties. Within two years he was professor
of anatomy at Padua, then the first school in the world; then at
Bologna and at Pisa at the same time; last of all at Venice, where
Titian painted that portrait of him which remains unto this day.
These years were for him a continual triumph; everywhere, as he
demonstrated on the human body, students crowded his theatre, or
hung round him as he walked the streets; professors left their own
chairs--their scholars having deserted them already--to go and
listen humbly or enviously to the man who could give them what all
brave souls throughout half Europe were craving for, and craving in
vain--facts. And so, year after year, was realised that scene which
stands engraved in the frontispiece of his great book--where, in the
little quaint Cinquecento theatre, saucy scholars, reverend doctors,
gay gentlemen, and even cowled monks, are crowding the floor,
peeping over each other's shoulders, hanging on the balustrades;
while in the centre, over his "subject"--which one of those same
cowled monks knew but too well--stands young Vesalius, upright,
proud, almost defiant, as one who knows himself safe in the
impregnable citadel of fact; and in his hand the little blade of
steel, destined--because wielded in obedience to the laws of nature,
which are the laws of God--to work more benefit for the human race
than all the swords which were drawn in those days, or perhaps in
any other, at the bidding of most Catholic Emperors and most
Christian Kings.
Those were indeed days of triumph for Vesalius; of triumph deserved,
because earned by patient and accurate toil in a good cause: but
Vesalius, being but a mortal man, may have contracted in those same
days a temper of imperiousness and self-conceit, such as he showed
afterwards when his pupil Fallopius dared to add fresh discoveries
to those of his master. And yet, in spite of all Vesalius knew, how
little he knew! How humbling to his pride it would have been had he
known then--perhaps he does know now--that he had actually again and
again walked, as it were, round and round the true theory of the
circulation of the blood, and yet never seen it; that that discovery
which, once made, is intelligible, as far as any phenomenon is
intelligible, to the merest peasant, was reserved for another
century, and for one of those Englishmen on whom Vesalius would have
looked as semi-barbarians.
To make a long story short: three years after the publication of
his famous book, "De Corporis Humani Fabrica," he left Venice to
cure Charles V., at Regensburg, and became one of the great
Emperor's physicians.
This was the crisis of Vesalius's life. The medicine with which he
had worked the cure was China--Sarsaparilla, as we call it now--
brought home from the then newly-discovered banks of the Paraguay
and Uruguay, where its beds of tangled vine, they say, tinge the
clear waters a dark-brown like that of peat, and convert whole
streams into a healthful and pleasant tonic. On the virtues of this
China (then supposed to be a root) Vesalius wrote a famous little
book, into which he contrived to interweave his opinions on things
in general, as good Bishop Berkeley did afterwards into his essay on
the virtues of tar-water. Into this book, however, Vesalius
introduced--as Bishop Berkeley did not--much, and perhaps too much,
about himself; and much, though perhaps not too much, about poor old
Galen, and his substitution of an ape's inside for that of a human
being. The storm which had been long gathering burst upon him. The
old school, trembling for their time-honoured reign, bespattered,
with all that pedantry, ignorance, and envy could suggest, the man
who dared not only to revolutionise surgery, but to interfere with
the privileged mysteries of medicine; and, over and above, to become
a greater favourite at the court of the greatest of monarchs. While
such as Eustachius, himself an able discoverer, could join in the
cry, it is no wonder if a lower soul, like that of Sylvius, led it
open-mouthed. He was a mean, covetous, bad man, as George Bachanan
well knew; and, according to his nature, he wrote a furious book--
"Ad Vesani calumnias depulsandas." The punning change of Vesalius
into Vesanus (madman) was but a fair and gentle stroke for a
polemic, in days in which those who could not kill their enemies
with steel or powder, held themselves justified in doing so, if
possible, by vituperation, calumny, and every engine of moral
torture. But a far more terrible weapon, and one which made
Vesalius rage, and it may be for once in his life tremble, was the
charge of impiety and heresy. The Inquisition was a very ugly
place. It was very easy to get into it, especially for a
Netherlander: but not so easy to get out. Indeed Vesalius must
have trembled, when he saw his master, Charles V., himself take
fright, and actually call on the theologians of Salamanca to decide
whether it was lawful to dissect a human body. The monks, to their
honour, used their common sense, and answered Yes. The deed was so
plainly useful that it must be lawful likewise. But Vesalius did
not feel that he had triumphed. He dreaded, possibly, lest the
storm should only have blown over for a time. He fell, possibly,
into hasty disgust at the folly of mankind, and despair of arousing
them to use their common sense, and acknowledge their true interest
and their true benefactors. At all events, he threw into the fire--
so it is said--all his unpublished manuscripts, the records of long
years of observation, and renounced science thenceforth.
We hear of him after this at Brussels, and at Basle likewise--in
which latter city, in the company of physicians, naturalists, and
Grecians, he must have breathed awhile a freer air. But he seems to
have returned thence to his old master Charles V., and to have
finally settled at Madrid as a court surgeon to Philip II., who sent
him, but too late, to extract the lance splinters from the eye of
the dying Henry II.
He was now married to a lady of rank from Brussels, Anne van Hamme
by name; and their daughter married in time Philip II.'s grand
falconer, who was doubtless a personage of no small social rank.
Vesalius was well off in worldly things; somewhat fond, it is said,
of good living and of luxury; inclined, it may be, to say, "Let us
eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," and to sink more and more into
the mere worldling, unless some shock should awake him from his
lethargy.
And the awakening shock did come. After eight years of court life,
he resolved, early in the year 1564, to go on a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem.
The reasons for so strange a determination are wrapped in mystery
and contradiction. The common story was that he had opened a corpse
to ascertain the cause of death, and that, to the horror of the
bystanders, the heart was still seen to beat; that his enemies
accused him to the Inquisition, and that he was condemned to death,
a sentence which was commuted to that of going on pilgrimage. But
here, at the very outset, accounts differ. One says that the victim
was a nobleman, name not given; another that it was a lady's maid,
name not given. It is most improbable, if not impossible, that
Vesalius, of all men, should have mistaken a living body for a dead
one; while it is most probable, on the other hand, that his medical
enemies would gladly raise such a calumny against him, when he was
no longer in Spain to contradict it. Meanwhile Llorente, the
historian of the Inquisition, makes no mention of Vesalius having
been brought before its tribunal, while he does mention Vesalius's
residence at Madrid. Another story is, that he went abroad to
escape the bad temper of his wife; another that he wanted to enrich
himself. Another story--and that not an unlikely one--is, that he
was jealous of the rising reputation of his pupil Fallopius, then
professor of anatomy at Venice. This distinguished surgeon, as I
said before, had written a book, in which he added to Vesalius's
discoveries, and corrected certain of his errors. Vesalius had
answered him hastily and angrily, quoting his anatomy from memory;
for, as he himself complained, he could not in Spain obtain a
subject for dissection; not even, he said, a single skull. He had
sent his book to Venice to be published, and had heard, seemingly,
nothing of it. He may have felt that he was falling behind in the
race of science, and that it was impossible for him to carry on his
studies in Madrid; and so, angry with his own laziness and luxury,
he may have felt the old sacred fire flash up in him, and have
determined to go to Italy and become a student and a worker once
more.
The very day that he set out, Clusius of Arras, then probably the
best botanist in the world, arrived at Madrid; and, asking the
reason of Vesalius's departure, was told by their fellow-countryman,
Charles de Tisnacq, procurator for the affairs of the Netherlands,
that Vesalius had gone of his own free will, and with all facilities
which Philip could grant him, in performance of a vow which he had
made during a dangerous illness. Here, at least, we have a drop of
information, which seems taken from the stream sufficiently near to
the fountain-head: but it must be recollected that De Tisnacq
lived in dangerous times, and may have found it necessary to walk
warily in them; that through him had been sent, only the year
before, that famous letter from William of Orange, Horn, and Egmont,
the fate whereof may be read in Mr. Motley's fourth chapter; that
the crisis of the Netherlands which sprung out of that letter was
coming fast; and that, as De Tisnacq was on friendly terms with
Egmont, he may have felt his head at times somewhat loose on his
shoulders; especially if he had heard Alva say, as he wrote, "that
every time he saw the despatches of those three senors, they moved
his choler so, that if he did not take much care to temper it, he
would seem a frenzied man." In such times, De Tisnacq may have
thought good to return a diplomatic answer to a fellow-countryman
concerning a third fellow-countryman, especially when that
countryman, as a former pupil of Melancthon at Wittemberg, might
himself be under suspicion of heresy, and therefore of possible
treason.
Be this as it may, one cannot but suspect some strain of truth in
the story about the Inquisition; for, whether or not Vesalius
operated on Don Carlos, he had seen with his own eyes that
miraculous Virgin of Atocha at the bed's foot of the prince. He had
heard his recovery attributed, not to the operation, but to the
intercession of Fray, now Saint Diego; {12} and he must have had his
thoughts thereon, and may, in an unguarded moment, have spoken them.
For he was, be it always remembered, a Netherlander. The crisis of
his country was just at hand. Rebellion was inevitable, and, with
rebellion, horrors unutterable; and, meanwhile, Don Carlos had set
his mad brain on having the command of the Netherlands. In his
rage, at not having it, as all the world knows, he nearly killed
Alva with his own hands, some two years after. If it be true that
Don Carlos felt a debt of gratitude to Vesalius, he may (after his
wont) have poured out to him some wild confidence about the
Netherlands, to have even heard which would be a crime in Philip's
eyes. And if this be but a fancy, still Vesalius was, as I just
said, a Netherlander, and one of a brain and a spirit to which
Philip's doings, and the air of the Spanish court, must have been
growing ever more and more intolerable. Hundreds of his country
folk, perhaps men and women whom he had known, were being racked,
burnt alive, buried alive, at the bidding of a jocular ruffian,
Peter Titelmann, the chief inquisitor. The "day of the MAUBRULEZ,"
and the wholesale massacre which followed it, had happened but two
years before; and, by all the signs of the times, these murders and
miseries were certain to increase. And why were all these poor
wretches suffering the extremity of horror, but because they would
not believe in miraculous images, and bones of dead friars, and the
rest of that science of unreason and unfact, against which Vesalius
had been fighting all his life, consciously or not, by using reason
and observing fact? What wonder if, in some burst of noble
indignation and just contempt, he forgot a moment that he had sold
his soul, and his love of science likewise, to be a luxurious, yet
uneasy, hanger-on at the tyrant's court; and spoke unadvisedly some
word worthy of a German man?
As to the story of his unhappy quarrels with his wife, there may be
a grain of truth in it likewise. Vesalius's religion must have sat
very lightly on him. The man who had robbed churchyards and gibbets
from his youth was not likely to be much afraid of apparitions and
demons. He had handled too many human bones to care much for those
of saints. He was probably, like his friends of Basle, Montpellier,
and Paris, somewhat of a heretic at heart, probably somewhat of a
pagan, while his lady, Anne van Hamme, was probably a strict
Catholic, as her father, being a councillor and master of the
exchequer at Brussels, was bound to be; and freethinking in the
husband, crossed by superstition in the wife, may have caused in
them that wretched vie e part, that want of any true communion of
soul, too common to this day in Catholic countries.
Be these things as they may--and the exact truth of them will now be
never known--Vesalius set out to Jerusalem in the spring of 1564.
On his way he visited his old friends at Venice to see about his
book against Fallopius. The Venetian republic received the great
philosopher with open arms. Fallopius was just dead; and the senate
offered their guest the vacant chair of anatomy. He accepted it:
but went on to the East.
He never occupied that chair; wrecked upon the Isle of Zante, as he
was sailing back from Palestine, he died miserably of fever and
want, as thousands of pilgrims returning from the Holy Land had died
before him. A goldsmith recognised him; buried him in a chapel of
the Virgin; and put up over him a simple stone, which remained till
late years; and may remain, for aught I know, even now.
So perished, in the prime of life, "a martyr to his love of
science," to quote the words of M. Burggraeve of Ghent, his able
biographer and commentator, "the prodigious man, who created a
science at an epoch when everything was still an obstacle to his
progress; a man whose whole life was a long struggle of knowledge
against ignorance, of truth against lies."
Plaudite: Exeat: with Rondelet and Buchanan. And whensoever
this poor foolish world needs three such men, may God of His great
mercy send them.
PARACELSUS {13}
I told you of Vesalius and Rondelet as specimens of the men who
three hundred years ago were founding the physical science of the
present day, by patient investigation of facts. But such an age as
this would naturally produce men of a very different stamp, men who
could not imitate their patience and humility; who were trying for
royal roads to knowledge, and to the fame and wealth which might be
got out of knowledge; who meddled with vain dreams about the occult
sciences, alchemy, astrology, magic, the cabala, and so forth, who
were reputed magicians, courted and feared for awhile, and then, too
often, died sad deaths.
Such had been, in the century before, the famous Dr. Faust--Faustus,
who was said to have made a compact with Satan--actually one of the
inventors of printing--immortalised in Goethe's marvellous poem.
Such, in the first half of the sixteenth century, was Cornelius
Agrippa--a doctor of divinity and a knight-at-arms; secret-service
diplomatist to the Emperor Maximilian in Austria; astrologer, though
unwilling, to his daughter Margaret, Regent of the Low Countries;
writer on the occult sciences and of the famous "De Vanitate
Scientiarum," and what not? who died miserably at the age of forty-
nine, accused of magic by the Dominican monks from whom he had
rescued a poor girl, who they were torturing on a charge of
witchcraft; and by them hunted to death; nor to death only, for they
spread the fable--such as you may find in Delrio the Jesuit's
"Disquisitions on Magic" {14}--that his little pet black dog was a
familiar spirit, as Butler has it in "Hudibras":
Agrippa kept a Stygian pug
I' the garb and habit of a dog -
That was his taste; and the cur
Read to th' occult philosopher,
And taught him subtly to maintain
All other sciences are vain.
Such also was Jerome Cardan, the Italian scholar and physician, the
father of algebraic science (you all recollect Cardan's rule,)
believer in dreams, prognostics, astrology; who died, too, miserably
enough, in old age.
Cardan's sad life, and that of Cornelius Agrippa, you can, and ought
to read for yourselves, in two admirable biographies, as amusing as
they are learned, by Professor Morley, of the London University. I
have not chosen either of them as a subject for this lecture,
because Mr. Morley has so exhausted what is to be known about them,
that I could tell you nothing which I had not stolen from him.
But what shall I say of the most famous of these men--Paracelsus?
whose name you surely know. He too has been immortalised in a poem
which you all ought to have read, one of Robert Browning's earliest
and one of his best creations.
I think we must accept as true Mr. Browning's interpretation of
Paracelsus's character. We must believe that he was at first an
honest and high-minded, as he was certainly a most gifted, man; that
he went forth into the world, with an intense sense of the
worthlessness of the sham knowledge of the pedants and quacks of the
schools; an intense belief that some higher and truer science might
be discovered, by which diseases might be actually cured, and
health, long life, happiness, all but immortality, be conferred on
man; an intense belief that he, Paracelsus, was called and chosen by
God to find out that great mystery, and be a benefactor to all
future ages. That fixed idea might degenerate--did, alas!
degenerate--into wild self-conceit, rash contempt of the ancients,
violent abuse of his opponents. But there was more than this in
Paracelsus. He had one idea to which, if he had kept true, his life
would have been a happier one--the firm belief that all pure science
was a revelation from God; that it was not to be obtained at second
or third hand, by blindly adhering to the words of Galen or
Hippocrates or Aristotle, and putting them (as the scholastic
philosophers round him did) in the place of God: but by going
straight to nature at first hand, and listening to what Bacon calls
"the voice of God revealed in facts." True and noble is the passage
with which he begins his "Labyrinthus Medicorum," one of his attacks
on the false science of his day,
"The first and highest book of all healing," he says, "is called
wisdom, and without that book no man will carry out anything good or
useful . . . And that book is God Himself. For in Him alone who
hath created all things, the knowledge and principle of all things
dwells . . . without Him all is folly. As the sun shines on us from
above, so He must pour into us from above all arts whatsoever.
Therefore the root of all learning and cognition is, that we should
seek first the kingdom of God--the kingdom of God in which all
sciences are founded . . . If any man think that nature is not
founded on the kingdom of God, he knows nothing about it. All
gifts," he repeats again and again, confused and clumsily (as is his
wont), but with a true earnestness, "are from God."
The true man of science, with Paracelsus, is he who seeks first the
kingdom of God in facts, investigating nature reverently, patiently,
in faith believing that God, who understands His own work best, will
make him understand it likewise. The false man of science is he who
seeks the kingdom of this world, who cares nothing about the real
interpretation of facts: but is content with such an
interpretation as will earn him the good things of this world--the
red hat and gown, the ambling mule, the silk clothes, the
partridges, capons, and pheasants, the gold florins chinking in his
palm. At such pretenders Paracelsus sneered, at last only too
fiercely, not only as men whose knowledge consisted chiefly in
wearing white gloves, but as rogues, liars, villains, and every
epithet which his very racy vocabulary, quickened (it is to be
feared) by wine and laudanum, could suggest. With these he
contrasts the true men of science. It is difficult for us now to
understand how a man setting out in life with such pure and noble
views should descend at last (if indeed he did descend) to be a
quack and a conjuror--and die under the imputation that
Bombastes kept a devil's bird
Hid in the pommel of his sword,
and have, indeed, his very name, Bombast, used to this day as a
synonym of loud, violent, and empty talk. To understand it at all,
we must go back and think a little over these same occult sciences
which were believed in by thousands during the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries.
The reverence for classic antiquity, you must understand, which
sprang up at the renaissance in the fifteenth century, was as
indiscriminating as it was earnest. Men caught the trash as well as
the jewels. They put the dreams of the Neoplatonists, Iamblicus,
Porphyry, or Plotinus, or Proclus, on the same level as the sound
dialectic philosophy of Plato himself. And these Neoplatonists were
all, more or less, believers in magic--Theurgy, as it was called--in
the power of charms and spells, in the occult virtues of herbs and
gems, in the power of adepts to evoke and command spirits, in the
significance of dreams, in the influence of the stars upon men's
characters and destinies. If the great and wise philosopher
Iamblicus believed such things, why might not the men of the
sixteenth century?
And so grew up again in Europe a passion for what were called the
Occult sciences. It had always been haunting the European
imagination. Mediaeval monks had long ago transformed the poet
Virgil into a great necromancer. And there were immense excuses for
such a belief. There was a mass of collateral evidence that the
occult sciences were true, which it was impossible then to resist.
Races far more ancient, learned, civilised, than any Frenchman,
German, Englishman, or even Italian, in the fifteenth century had
believed in these things. The Moors, the best physicians of the
Middle Ages, had their heads full, as the "Arabian Nights" prove, of
enchanters, genii, peris, and what not? The Jewish rabbis had their
Cabala, which sprang up in Alexandria, a system of philosophy
founded on the mystic meaning of the words and the actual letters of
the text of Scripture, which some said was given by the angel Ragiel
to Adam in Paradise, by which Adam talked with angels, the sun and
moon, summoned spirits, interpreted dreams, healed and destroyed;
and by that book of Ragiel, as it was called, Solomon became the
great magician and master of all the spirits and their hoarded
treasures.
So strong, indeed, was the belief in the mysteries of the Cabala,
that Reuchlin, the restorer of Hebrew learning in Germany, and Pico
di Mirandola, the greatest of Italian savants, accepted them; and
not only Pope Leo X. himself, but even statesmen and warriors
received with delight Reuchlin's cabalistic treatise, "De Verbo
Mirifico," on the mystic word "Schemhamphorash"--that hidden name of
God, which whosoever can pronounce aright is, for the moment, lord
of nature and of all daemons.
Amulets, too, and talismans; the faith in them was exceeding
ancient. Solomon had his seal, by which he commanded all daemons;
and there is a whole literature of curious nonsense, which you may
read if you will, about the Abraxas and other talismans of the
Gnostics in Syria; and another, of the secret virtues which were
supposed to reside in gems: especially in the old Roman and Greek
gems, carved into intaglios with figures of heathen gods and
goddesses. Lapidaria, or lists of these gems and their magical
virtues, were not uncommon in the Middle Ages. You may read a great
deal that is interesting about them at the end of Mr. King's book on
gems.
Astrology too; though Pico di Mirandola might set himself against
the rest of the world, few were found daring enough to deny so
ancient a science. Luther and Melancthon merely followed the
regular tradition of public opinion when they admitted its truth.
It sprang probably from the worship of the Seven Planets by the old
Chaldees. It was brought back from Babylon by the Jews after the
Captivity, and spread over all Europe--perhaps all Asia likewise.
The rich and mighty of the earth must needs have their nativities
cast, and consult the stars; and Cornelius Agrippa gave mortal
offence to the Queen-Dowager of France (mother of Francis I.)
because, when she compelled him to consult the stars about Francis's
chance of getting out of his captivity in Spain after the battle of
Pavia, he wrote and spoke his mind honestly about such nonsense.
Even Newton seems to have hankered after it when young. Among his
MSS. in Lord Portsmouth's library at Hurstbourne are whole folios of
astrologic calculations. It went on till the end of the seventeenth
century, and died out only when men had begun to test it, and all
other occult sciences, by experience, and induction founded thereon.
Countless students busied themselves over the transmutation of
metals. As for magic, necromancy, pyromancy, geomancy,
coscinomancy, and all the other mancies--there was then a whole
literature about them. And the witch-burning inquisitors like
Sprenger, Bodin, Delrio, and the rest, believed as firmly in the
magic powers of the poor wretches whom they tortured to death, as
did, in many cases, the poor wretches themselves.
Everyone, almost, believed in magic. Take two cases. Read the
story which Benvenuto Cellini, the sculptor, tells in his life
(everyone should read it) of the magician whom he consults in the
Coliseum at Rome, and the figure which he sees as he walks back with
the magician, jumping from roof to roof along the tiles of the
houses.
And listen to this story, which Mr. Froude has dug up in his
researches. A Church commissioner at Oxford, at the beginning of
the Reformation, being unable to track an escaped heretic, "caused a
figure to be made by an expert in astronomy;" by which it was
discovered that the poor wretch had fled in a tawny coat and was
making for the sea. Conceive the respected head of your College--or
whoever he may be--in case you slept out all night without leave,
going to a witch to discover whether you had gone to London or to
Huntingdon, and then writing solemnly to inform the Bishop of Ely of
his meritorious exertions!
In such a mad world as this was Paracelsus born. The son of a Swiss
physician, but of noble blood, Philip Aureolus Theophrastus was his
Christian name, Bombast von Hohenheim his surname, which last word
he turned, after the fashion of the times, into Paracelsus. Born in
1493 at Einsiedeln (the hermitage), in Schweiz, which is still a
famous place of pilgrimage, he was often called Eremita--the hermit.
Erasmus, in a letter still extant, but suspected not to be genuine,
addressed him by that name.
How he passed the first thirty-three years of his life it is hard to
say. He used to boast that he had wandered over all Europe, been in
Sweden, Italy, in Constantinople, and perhaps in the far East, with
barber-surgeons, alchemists, magicians, haunting mines, and forges
of Sweden and Bohemia, especially those which the rich merchants of
that day had in the Tyrol.
It was from that work, he said, that he learnt what he knew: from
the study of nature and of facts. He had heard all the learned
doctors and professors; he had read all their books, and they could
teach him nothing. Medicine was his monarch, and no one else. He
declared that there was more wisdom under his bald pate than in
Aristotle and Galen, Hippocrates and Rhasis. And fact seemed to be
on his side. He reappeared in Germany about 1525, and began working
wondrous cures. He had brought back with him from the East an
arcanum, a secret remedy, and laudanum was its name. He boasted,
says one of his enemies, that he could raise the dead to life with
it; and so the event all but proved. Basle was then the university
where free thought and free creeds found their safest home; and
hither OEcolampadius the reformer invited young Paracelsus to
lecture on medicine and natural science.
It would have been well for him, perhaps, had he never opened his
lips. He might have done good enough to his fellow-creatures by his
own undoubted powers of healing. He cured John Frobenius, the
printer, Erasmus's friend, at Basle, when the doctors were going to
cut his leg off. His fame spread far and wide. Round Basle and
away into Alsace he was looked on, even an enemy says, as a new
AEsculapius.
But these were days in which in a university everyone was expected
to talk and teach, and so Paracelsus began lecturing; and then the
weakness which was mingled with his strength showed itself. He
began by burning openly the books of Galen and Avicenna, and
declared that all the old knowledge was useless. Doctors and
students alike must begin over again with him. The dons were
horrified. To burn Galen and Avicenna was as bad as burning the
Bible. And more horrified still were they when Paracelsus began
lecturing, not in the time-honoured dog-Latin, but in good racy
German, which everyone could understand. They shuddered under their
red gowns and hats. If science was to be taught in German, farewell
to the Galenists' formulas, and their lucrative monopoly of
learning. Paracelsus was bold enough to say that he wished to break
up their monopoly; to spread a popular knowledge of medicine. "How
much," he wrote once, "would I endure and suffer, to see every man
his own shepherd--his own healer." He laughed to scorn their long
prescriptions, used the simplest drugs, and declared Nature, after
all, to be the best physician--as a dog, he says, licks his wound
well again without our help; or as the broken rib of the ox heals of
its own accord.
Such a man was not to be endured. They hated him, he says, for the
same reason that they hated Luther, for the same reason that the
Pharisees hated Christ. He met their attacks with scorn, rage, and
language as coarse and violent as their own. The coarseness and
violence of those days seem incredible to us now; and, indeed,
Paracelsus, as he confessed himself, was, though of gentle blood,
rough and unpolished; and utterly, as one can see from his writings,
unable to give and take, to conciliate--perhaps to pardon. He
looked impatiently on these men who were (not unreasonably) opposing
novelties which they could not understand, as enemies of God, who
were balking him in his grand plan for regenerating science and
alleviating the woes of humanity, and he outraged their prejudices
instead of soothing them.
Soon they had their revenge. Ugly stories were whispered about.
Oporinus, the printer, who had lived with him for two years, and who
left him, it is said, because he thought Paracelsus concealed from
him unfairly the secret of making laudanum, told how Paracelsus was
neither more nor less than a sot, who came drunk to his lectures,
used to prime himself with wine before going to his patients, and
sat all night in pothouses swilling with the boors.
Men looked coldly on him--longed to be rid of him. And they soon
found an opportunity. He took in hand some Canon of the city from
whom it was settled beforehand that he was to receive a hundred
florins. The priest found himself cured so suddenly and easily
that, by a strange logic, he refused to pay the money, and went to
the magistrates. They supported him, and compelled Paracelsus to
take six florins instead of the hundred. He spoke his mind fiercely
to them. I believe, according to one story, he drew his long sword
on the Canon. His best friends told him he must leave the place;
and within two years, seemingly, after his first triumph at Basle,
he fled from it a wanderer and a beggar.
The rest of his life is a blank. He is said to have recommenced his
old wanderings about Europe, studying the diseases of every country,
and writing his books, which were none of them published till after
his death. His enemies joyfully trampled on the fallen man. He was
a "dull rustic, a monster, an atheist, a quack, a maker of gold, a
magician." When he was drunk, one Wetter, his servant, told Erastus
(one of his enemies) that he used to offer to call up legions of
devils to prove his skill, while Wetter, in abject terror of his
spells, entreated him to leave the fiends alone--that he had sent
his book by a fiend to the spirit of Galen in hell, and challenged
him to say which was the better system, his or Paracelsus', and what
not?
His books were forbidden to be printed. He himself was refused a
hearing, and it was not till after ten years of wandering that he
found rest and protection in a little village of Carinthia.
Three years afterwards he died in the hospital of St. Sebastian at
Salzburg, in the Tyrol. His death was the signal for empirics and
visionaries to foist on the public book after book on occult
philosophy, written in his name--of which you may see ten folios--
not more than a quarter, I believe, genuine. And these foolish
books, as much as anything, have helped to keep up the popular
prejudice against one who, in spite of all his faults was a true
pioneer of science. {15} I believe (with those moderns who have
tried to do him justice) that under all his verbiage and confusion
there was a vein of sound scientific, experimental common sense.
When he talks of astronomy as necessary to be known by a physician,
it seems to me that he laughs at astrology, properly so called; that
is, that the stars influence the character and destiny of man.
Mars, he says, did not make Nero cruel. There would have been long-
lived men in the world if Saturn had never ascended the skies; and
Helen would have been a wanton, though Venus had never been created.
But he does believe that the heavenly bodies, and the whole skies,
have a physical influence on climate, and on the health of men.
He talks of alchemy, but he means by it, I think, only that sound
science which we call chemistry, and at which he worked, wandering,
he says, among mines and forges, as a practical metallurgist.
He tells us--what sounds startling enough--that magic is the only
preceptor which can teach the art of healing; but he means, it seems
to me, only an understanding of the invisible processes of nature,
in which sense an electrician or a biologist, a Faraday or a Darwin,
would be a magician; and when he compares medical magic to the
Cabalistic science, of which I spoke just now (and in which he seems
to have believed), he only means, I think, that as the Cabala
discovers hidden meaning and virtues in the text of Scripture, so
ought the man of science to find them in the book of nature. But
this kind of talk, wrapt up too in the most confused style, or
rather no style at all, is quite enough to account for ignorant and
envious people accusing him of magic, saying that he had discovered
the philosopher's stone, and the secret of Hermes Trismegistus; that
he must make gold, because, though he squandered all his money, he
had always money in hand; and that he kept a "devil's-bird," a
familiar spirit, in the pommel of that famous long sword of his,
which he was only too ready to lug out on provocation--the said
spirit, Agoth by name, being probably only the laudanum bottle with
which he worked so many wondrous cures, and of which, to judge from
his writings, he took only too freely himself.
But the charm of Paracelsus is in his humour, his mother-wit. He
was blamed for consorting with boors in pot-houses; blamed for
writing in racy German, instead of bad school-Latin: but you can
hardly read a chapter, either of his German or his dog-Latin,
without finding many a good thing--witty and weighty, though often
not a little coarse. He talks in parables. He draws illustrations,
like Socrates of old, from the commonest and the oddest matters to
enforce the weightiest truths. "Fortune and misfortune," he says,
for instance nobly enough, "are not like snow and wind, they must be
deduced and known from the secrets of nature. Therefore misfortune
is ignorance, fortune is knowledge. The man who walks out in the
rain is not unfortunate if he gets a ducking."
"Nature," he says again, "makes the text, and the medical man adds
the gloss; but the two fit each other no better than a dog does a
bath;" and again, when he is arguing against the doctors who hated
chemistry--"Who hates a thing which has hurt nobody? Will you
complain of a dog for biting you, if you lay hold of his tail? Does
the emperor send the thief to the gallows, or the thing which he has
stolen? The thief, I think. Therefore science should not be
despised on account of some who know nothing about it." You will
say the reasoning is not very clear, and indeed the passage, like
too many more, smacks strongly of wine and laudanum. But such is
his quaint racy style. As humorous a man, it seems to me, as you
shall meet with for many a day; and where there is humour there is
pretty sure to be imagination, tenderness, and depth of heart.
As for his notions of what a man of science should be, the servant
of God, and of Nature--which is the work of God--using his powers
not for money, not for ambition, but in love and charity, as he
says, for the good of his fellow-man--on that matter Paracelsus is
always noble. All that Mr. Browning has conceived on that point,
all the noble speeches which he has put into Paracelsus's mouth, are
true to his writings. How can they be otherwise, if Mr. Browning
set them forth--a genius as accurate and penetrating as he is wise
and pure?
But was Paracelsus a drunkard after all?
Gentlemen, what concern is that of yours or mine? I have gone into
the question, as Mr. Browning did, cannot say, and don't care to
say.
Oporinus, who slandered him so cruelly, recanted when Paracelsus was
dead, and sang his praises--too late. But I do not read that he
recanted the charge of drunkenness. His defenders allow it, only
saying that it was the fault not of him alone, but of all Germans.
But if so, why was he specially blamed for what certainly others did
likewise? I cannot but fear from his writings, as well as from
common report, that there was something wrong with the man. I say
only something. Against his purity there never was a breath of
suspicion. He was said to care nothing for women; and even that was
made the subject of brutal jests and lies. But it may have been
that, worn out with toil and poverty, he found comfort in that
laudanum which he believed to be the arcanum--the very elixir of
life; that he got more and more into the habit of exciting his
imagination with the narcotic, and then, it may be, when the fit of
depression followed, he strung his nerves up again by wine. It may
have been so. We have had, in the last generation, an exactly
similar case in a philosopher, now I trust in heaven, and to whose
genius I owe too much to mention his name here.
But that Paracelsus was a sot I cannot believe. That face of his,
as painted by the great Tintoretto, is not the face of a drunkard,
quack, bully, but of such a man as Browning has conceived. The
great globular brain, the sharp delicate chin, is not that of a sot.
Nor are those eyes, which gleam out from under the deep compressed
brow, wild, intense, hungry, homeless, defiant, and yet complaining,
the eyes of a sot--but rather the eyes of a man who struggles to
tell a great secret, and cannot find words for it, and yet wonders
why men cannot understand, will not believe what seems to him as
clear as day--a tragical face, as you well can see.
God keep us all from making our lives a tragedy by one great sin.
And now let us end this sad story with the last words which Mr.
Browning puts into the mouth of Paracelsus, dying in the hospital at
Salzburg, which have come literally true:
Meanwhile, I have done well though not all well.
As yet men cannot do without contempt;
'Tis for their good; and therefore fit awhile
That they reject the weak and scorn the false,
Rather than praise the strong and true in me:
But after, they will know me. If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,
It is but for a time. I press God's lamp
Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom. I shall emerge one day.
GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR
The scholar, in the sixteenth century, was a far more important
personage than now. The supply of learned men was very small, the
demand for them very great. During the whole of the fifteenth, and
a great part of the sixteenth century, the human mind turned more
and more from the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages to that
of the Romans and the Greeks; and found more and more in old Pagan
Art an element which Monastic Art had not, and which was yet
necessary for the full satisfaction of their craving after the
Beautiful. At such a crisis of thought and taste, it was natural
that the classical scholar, the man who knew old Rome, and still
more old Greece, should usurp the place of the monk, as teacher of
mankind; and that scholars should form, for a while, a new and
powerful aristocracy, limited and privileged, and all the more
redoubtable, because its power lay in intellect, and had been won by
intellect alone.
Those who, whether poor or rich, did not fear the monk and priest,
at least feared the "scholar," who held, so the vulgar believed, the
keys of that magic lore by which the old necromancers had built
cities like Rome, and worked marvels of mechanical and chemical
skill, which the degenerate modern could never equal.
If the "scholar" stopped in a town, his hostess probably begged of
him a charm against toothache or rheumatism. The penniless knight
discoursed with him on alchemy, and the chances of retrieving his
fortune by the art of transmuting metals into gold. The queen or
bishop worried him in private about casting their nativities, and
finding their fates among the stars. But the statesman, who dealt
with more practical matters, hired him as an advocate and
rhetorician, who could fight his master's enemies with the weapons
of Demosthenes and Cicero. Wherever the scholar's steps were
turned, he might be master of others, as long as he was master of
himself. The complaints which he so often uttered concerning the
cruelty of fortune, the fickleness of princes and so forth, were
probably no more just then than such complaints are now. Then, as
now, he got his deserts; and the world bought him at his own price.
If he chose to sell himself to this patron and to that, he was used
and thrown away: if he chose to remain in honourable independence,
he was courted and feared.
Among the successful scholars of the sixteenth century, none surely
is more notable than George Buchanan. The poor Scotch widow's son,
by force of native wit, and, as I think, by force of native worth,
fights his way upward, through poverty and severest persecution, to
become the correspondent and friend of the greatest literary
celebrities of the Continent, comparable, in their opinion, to the
best Latin poets of antiquity; the preceptor of princes; the
counsellor and spokesman of Scotch statesmen in the most dangerous
of times; and leaves behind him political treatises, which have
influenced not only the history of his own country, but that of the
civilised world.
Such a success could not be attained without making enemies, perhaps
without making mistakes. But the more we study George Buchanan's
history, the less we shall be inclined to hunt out his failings, the
more inclined to admire his worth. A shrewd, sound-hearted,
affectionate man, with a strong love of right and scorn of wrong,
and a humour withal which saved him--except on really great
occasions--from bitterness, and helped him to laugh where narrower
natures would have only snarled,--he is, in many respects, a type of
those Lowland Scots, who long preserved his jokes, genuine or
reputed, as a common household book. {16} A schoolmaster by
profession, and struggling for long years amid the temptations
which, in those days, degraded his class into cruel and sordid
pedants, he rose from the mere pedagogue to be, in the best sense of
the word, a courtier: "One," says Daniel Heinsius, "who seemed not
only born for a court, but born to amend it. He brought to his
queen that at which she could not wonder enough. For, by affecting
a certain liberty in censuring morals, he avoided all offence, under
the cloak of simplicity." Of him and his compeers, Turnebus, and
Muretus, and their friend Andrea Govea, Ronsard, the French court
poet, said that they had nothing of the pedagogue about them but the
gown and cap. "Austere in face, and rustic in his looks," says
David Buchanan, "but most polished in style and speech; and
continually, even in serious conversation, jesting most wittily."
"Rough-hewn, slovenly, and rude," says Peacham, in his "Compleat
Gentleman," speaking of him, probably, as he appeared in old age,
"in his person, behaviour, and fashion; seldom caring for a better
outside than a rugge-gown girt close about him: yet his inside and
conceipt in poesie was most rich, and his sweetness and facilitie in
verse most excellent." A typical Lowland Scot, as I said just now,
he seems to have absorbed all the best culture which France could
afford him, without losing the strength, honesty, and humour which
he inherited from his Stirlingshire kindred.
The story of his life is easily traced. When an old man, he himself
wrote down the main events of it, at the request of his friends; and
his sketch has been filled out by commentators, if not always
favourable, at least erudite. Born in 1506, at the Moss, in
Killearn--where an obelisk to his memory, so one reads, has been
erected in this century--of a family "rather ancient than rich," his
father dead in the prime of manhood, his grandfather a spendthrift,
he and his seven brothers and sisters were brought up by a widowed
mother, Agnes Heriot--of whom one wishes to know more; for the rule
that great sons have great mothers probably holds good in her case.
George gave signs, while at the village school, of future
scholarship; and when he was only fourteen, his uncle James sent him
to the University of Paris. Those were hard times; and the youths,
or rather boys, who meant to become scholars, had a cruel life of
it, cast desperately out on the wide world to beg and starve, either
into self-restraint and success, or into ruin of body and soul. And
a cruel life George had. Within two years he was down in a severe
illness, his uncle dead, his supplies stopped; and the boy of
sixteen got home, he does not tell how. Then he tried soldiering;
and was with Albany's French Auxiliaries at the ineffectual attack
on Wark Castle. Marching back through deep snow, he got a fresh
illness, which kept him in bed all winter. Then he and his brother
were sent to St. Andrews, where he got his B.A. at nineteen. The
next summer he went to France once more; and "fell," he says, "into
the flames of the Lutheran sect, which was then spreading far and
wide." Two years of penury followed; and then three years of
school-mastering in the College of St. Barbe, which he has
immortalised--at least, for the few who care to read modern Latin
poetry--in his elegy on "The Miseries of a Parisian Teacher of the
Humanities." The wretched regent-master, pale and suffering, sits
up all night preparing his lecture, biting his nails and thumping
his desk; and falls asleep for a few minutes, to start up at the
sound of the four-o'clock bell, and be in school by five, his Virgil
in one hand, and his rod in the other, trying to do work on his own
account at old manuscripts, and bawling all the while at his
wretched boys, who cheat him, and pay each other to answer to
truants' names. The class is all wrong. "One is barefoot,
another's shoe is burst, another cries, another writes home. Then
comes the rod, the sound of blows, and howls; and the day passes in
tears." "Then mass, then another lesson, then more blows; there is
hardly time to eat." I have no space to finish the picture of the
stupid misery which, Buchanan says, was ruining his intellect, while
it starved his body. However, happier days came. Gilbert Kennedy,
Earl of Cassilis, who seems to have been a noble young gentleman,
took him as his tutor for the next five years; and with him he went
back to Scotland.
But there his plain speaking got him, as it did more than once
afterward, into trouble. He took it into his head to write, in
imitation of Dunbar, a Latin poem, in which St. Francis asks him in
a dream to become a Gray Friar, and Buchanan answered in language
which had the unpleasant fault of being too clever, and--to judge
from contemporary evidence--only too true. The friars said nothing
at first; but when King James made Buchanan tutor to one of his
natural sons, they, "men professing meekness, took the matter
somewhat more angrily than befitted men so pious in the opinion of
the people." So Buchanan himself puts it: but, to do the poor
friars justice, they must have been angels, not men, if they did not
writhe somewhat under the scourge which he had laid on them. To be
told that there was hardly a place in heaven for monks, was hard to
hear and bear. They accused him to the king of heresy; but not
being then in favour with James, they got no answer, and Buchanan
was commanded to repeat the castigation. Having found out that the
friars were not to be touched with impunity, he wrote, he says, a
short and ambiguous poem. But the king, who loved a joke, demanded
something sharp and stinging, and Buchanan obeyed by writing, but
not publishing, "The Franciscans," a long satire, compared to which
the "Somnium" was bland and merciful. The storm rose. Cardinal
Beaten, Buchanan says, wanted to buy him of the king, and then, of
course, burn him, as he had just burnt five poor souls; so, knowing
James's avarice, he fled to England, through freebooters and
pestilence.
There he found, he says, "men of both factions being burned on the
same day and in the same fire"--a pardonable exaggeration--"by Henry
VIII., in his old age more intent on his own safety than on the
purity of religion." So to his beloved France he went again, to
find his enemy Beaten ambassador at Paris. The capital was too hot
to hold him; and he fled south to Bordeaux, to Andrea Govea, the
Portuguese principal of the College of Guienne. As Professor of
Latin at Bordeaux, we find him presenting a Latin poem to Charles
V.; and indulging that fancy of his for Latin poetry which seems to
us nowadays a childish pedantry, which was then--when Latin was the
vernacular tongue of all scholars--a serious, if not altogether a
useful, pursuit. Of his tragedies, so famous in their day--the
"Baptist," the "Medea," the "Jephtha," and the "Alcestis"--there is
neither space nor need to speak here, save to notice the bold
declamations in the "Baptist" against tyranny and priestcraft; and
to notice also that these tragedies gained for the poor Scotsman, in
the eyes of the best scholars of Europe, a credit amounting almost
to veneration. When he returned to Paris, he found occupation at
once; and, as his Scots biographers love to record, "three of the
most learned men in the world taught humanity in the same college,"
viz. Turnebus, Muretus, and Buchanan.
Then followed a strange episode in his life. A university had been
founded at Coimbra, in Portugal, and Andrea Govea had been invited
to bring thither what French savants he could collect. Buchanan
went to Portugal with his brother Patrick, two more Scotsmen,
Dempster and Ramsay, and a goodly company of French scholars, whose
names and histories may be read in the erudite pages of Dr. Irving,
went likewise. All prospered in the new Temple of the Muses for a
year or so. Then its high-priest, Govea, died; and, by a peripeteia
too common in those days and countries, Buchanan and two of his
friends migrated unwillingly from the Temple of the Muses for that
of Moloch, and found themselves in the Inquisition.
Buchanan, it seems, had said that St. Augustine was more of a
Lutheran than a Catholic on the question of the mass. He and his
friends had eaten flesh in Lent; which, he says, almost everyone in
Spain did. But he was suspected, and with reason, as a heretic; the
Gray Friars formed but one brotherhood throughout Europe; and news
among them travelled surely if not fast, so that the story of the
satire written in Scotland had reached Portugal. The culprits were
imprisoned, examined, bullied--but not tortured--for a year and a
half. At the end of that time, the proofs of heresy, it seems, were
insufficient; but lest, says Buchanan with honest pride, "they
should get the reputation of having vainly tormented a man not
altogether unknown," they sent him for some months to a monastery,
to be instructed by the monks. "The men," he says, "were neither
inhuman nor bad, but utterly ignorant of religion;" and Buchanan
solaced himself during the intervals of their instructions, by
beginning his Latin translation of the Psalms.
At last he got free, and begged leave to return to France; but in
vain. And so, wearied out, he got on board a Candian ship at
Lisbon, and escaped to England. But England, he says, during the
anarchy of Edward VI.'s reign, was not a land which suited him; and
he returned to France, to fulfil the hopes which he had expressed in
his charming "Desiderium Lutitiae," and the still more charming,
because more simple, "Adventus in Galliam," in which he bids
farewell, in most melodious verse, to "the hungry moors of wretched
Portugal, and her clods fertile in naught but penury."
Some seven years succeeded of schoolmastering and verse-writing:
the Latin paraphrase of the Psalms; another of the "Alcestis" of
Euripides; an Epithalamium on the marriage of poor Mary Stuart,
noble and sincere, however fantastic and pedantic, after the manner
of the times; "Pomps," too, for her wedding, and for other public
ceremonies, in which all the heathen gods and goddesses figure;
epigrams, panegyrics, satires, much of which latter productions he
would have consigned to the dust-heap in his old age, had not his
too fond friends persuaded him to republish the follies and
coarsenesses of his youth. He was now one of the most famous
scholars in Europe, and the intimate friend of all the great
literary men. Was he to go on to the end, die, and no more? Was he
to sink into the mere pedant; or, if he could not do that, into the
mere court versifier?
The wars of religion saved him, as they saved many another noble
soul, from that degradation. The events of 1560-62 forced Buchanan,
as they forced many a learned man besides, to choose whether he
would be a child of light or a child of darkness; whether he would
be a dilettante classicist, or a preacher--it might be a martyr--of
the Gospel. Buchanan may have left France in "The Troubles" merely
to enjoy in his own country elegant and learned repose. He may have
fancied that he had found it, when he saw himself, in spite of his
public profession of adherence to the Reformed Kirk, reading Livy
every afternoon with his exquisite young sovereign; master, by her
favour, of the temporalities of Crossraguel Abbey, and by the favour
of Murray, Principal of St. Leonard's College in St. Andrew's.
Perhaps he fancied at times that "to-morrow was to be as to-day, and
much more abundant;" that thenceforth he might read his folio, and
write his epigram, and joke his joke, as a lazy comfortable
pluralist, taking his morning stroll out to the corner where poor
Wishart had been burned, above the blue sea and the yellow sands,
and looking up to the castle tower from whence his enemy Beaton's
corpse had been hung out; with the comfortable reflection that
quieter times had come, and that whatever evil deeds Archbishop
Hamilton might dare, he would not dare to put the Principal of St.
Leonard's into the "bottle dungeon."
If such hopes ever crossed Geordie's keen fancy, they were
disappointed suddenly and fearfully. The fire which had been
kindled in France was to reach to Scotland likewise. "Revolutions
are not made with rose-water;" and the time was at hand when all
good spirits in Scotland, and George Buchanan among them, had to
choose, once and for all, amid danger, confusion, terror, whether
they would serve God or Mammon; for to serve both would be soon
impossible.
Which side, in that war of light and darkness, George Buchanan took,
is notorious. He saw then, as others have seen since, that the two
men in Scotland who were capable of being her captains in the strife
were Knox and Murray; and to them he gave in his allegiance heart
and soul.
This is the critical epoch in Buchanan's life. By his conduct to
Queen Mary he must stand or fall. It is my belief that he will
stand. It is not my intention to enter into the details of a matter
so painful, so shocking, so prodigious; and now that that question
is finally set at rest, by the writings both of Mr. Froude and Mr.
Burton, there is no need to allude to it further, save where
Buchanan's name is concerned. One may now have every sympathy with
Mary Stuart; one may regard with awe a figure so stately, so tragic,
in one sense so heroic,--for she reminds one rather of the heroine
of an old Greek tragedy, swept to her doom by some irresistible
fate, than of a being of our own flesh and blood, and of our modern
and Christian times. One may sympathise with the great womanhood
which charmed so many while she was alive; which has charmed, in
later years, so many noble spirits who have believed in her
innocence, and have doubtless been elevated and purified by their
devotion to one who seemed to them an ideal being. So far from
regarding her as a hateful personage, one may feel oneself forbidden
to hate a woman whom God may have loved, and may have pardoned, to
judge from the punishment so swift, and yet so enduring, which He
inflicted. At least, he must so believe who holds that punishment
is a sign of mercy; that the most dreadful of all dooms is impunity.
Nay, more, those "Casket" letters and sonnets may be a relief to the
mind of one who believes in her guilt on other grounds; a relief
when one finds in them a tenderness, a sweetness, a delicacy, a
magnificent self-sacrifice, however hideously misplaced, which shows
what a womanly heart was there; a heart which, joined to that
queenly brain, might have made her a blessing and a glory to
Scotland, had not the whole character been warped and ruinate from
childhood, by an education so abominable, that anyone who knows what
words she must have heard, what scenes she must have beheld in
France, from her youth up, will wonder that she sinned so little:
not that she sinned so much. One may feel, in a word, that there is
every excuse for those who have asserted Mary's innocence, because
their own high-mindedness shrank from believing her guilty: but
yet Buchanan, in his own place and time, may have felt as deeply
that he could do no otherwise than he did.
The charges against him, as all readers of Scotch literature know
well, may be reduced to two heads. 1st. The letters and sonnets
were forgeries. Maitland of Lethington may have forged the letters;
Buchanan, according to some, the sonnets. Whoever forged them,
Buchanan made use of them in his Detection, knowing them to be
forged. 2nd. Whether Mary was innocent or not, Buchanan acted a
base and ungrateful part in putting himself in the forefront amongst
her accusers. He had been her tutor, her pensioner. She had heaped
him with favours; and, after all, she was his queen, and a
defenceless woman: and yet he returned her kindness, in the hour
of her fall, by invectives fit only for a rancorous and reckless
advocate, determined to force a verdict by the basest arts of
oratory.
Now as to the Casket letters. I should have thought they bore in
themselves the best evidence of being genuine. I can add nothing to
the arguments of Mr. Froude and Mr. Burton, save this: that no one
clever enough to be a forger would have put together documents so
incoherent, and so incomplete. For the evidence of guilt which they
contain is, after all, slight and indirect, and, moreover,
superfluous altogether; seeing that Mary's guilt was open and
palpable, before the supposed discovery of the letters, to every
person at home and abroad who had any knowledge of the facts. As
for the alleged inconsistency of the letters with proven facts:
the answer is, that whosoever wrote the letters would be more likely
to know facts which were taking place around them than any critic
could be one hundred or three hundred years afterwards. But if
these mistakes as to facts actually exist in them, they are only a
fresh argument for their authenticity. Mary, writing in agony and
confusion, might easily make a mistake: forgers would only take
too good care to make none.
But the strongest evidence in favour of the letters and sonnets, in
spite of the arguments of good Dr. Whittaker and other apologists
for Mary, is to be found in their tone. A forger in those coarse
days would have made Mary write in some Semiramis or Roxana vein,
utterly alien to the tenderness, the delicacy, the pitiful confusion
of mind, the conscious weakness, the imploring and most feminine
trust which makes the letters, to those who--as I do--believe in
them, more pathetic than any fictitious sorrows which poets could
invent. More than one touch, indeed, of utter self-abasement, in
the second letter, is so unexpected, so subtle, and yet so true to
the heart of woman, that--as has been well said--if it was invented
there must have existed in Scotland an earlier Shakespeare; who yet
has died without leaving any other sign, for good or evil, of his
dramatic genius.
As for the theory (totally unsupported) that Buchanan forged the
poem usually called the "Sonnets;" it is paying old Geordie's
genius, however versatile it may have been, too high a compliment to
believe that he could have written both them and the Detection;
while it is paying his shrewdness too low a compliment to believe
that he could have put into them, out of mere carelessness or
stupidity, the well-known line, which seems incompatible with the
theory both of the letters and of his own Detection; and which has
ere now been brought forward as a fresh proof of Mary's innocence.
And, as with the letters, so with the sonnets: their delicacy,
their grace, their reticence, are so many arguments against their
having been forged by any Scot of the sixteenth century, and least
of all by one in whose character--whatever his other virtues may
have been--delicacy was by no means the strongest point.
As for the complaint that Buchanan was ungrateful to Mary, it must
be said: That even if she, and not Murray, had bestowed on him the
temporalities of Crossraguel Abbey four years before, it was merely
fair pay for services fairly rendered; and I am not aware that
payment, or even favours, however gracious, bind any man's soul and
conscience in questions of highest morality and highest public
importance. And the importance of that question cannot be
exaggerated. At a moment when Scotland seemed struggling in death-
throes of anarchy, civil and religious, and was in danger of
becoming a prey either to England or to France, if there could not
be formed out of the heart of her a people, steadfast, trusty,
united, strong politically because strong in the fear of God and the
desire of righteousness--at such a moment as this, a crime had been
committed, the like of which had not been heard in Europe since the
tragedy of Joan of Naples. All Europe stood aghast. The honour of
the Scottish nation was at stake. More than Mary or Bothwell were
known to be implicated in the deed; and--as Buchanan puts it in the
opening of his "De Jure Regni"--"The fault of some few was charged
upon all; and the common hatred of a particular person did redound
to the whole nation; so that even such as were remote from any
suspicion were inflamed by the infamy of men's crimes." {17}
To vindicate the national honour, and to punish the guilty, as well
as to save themselves from utter anarchy, the great majority of the
Scotch nation had taken measures against Mary which required
explicit justification in the sight of Europe, as Buchanan frankly
confesses in the opening of his "De Jure Regni." The chief authors
of those measures had been summoned, perhaps unwisely and unjustly,
to answer for their conduct to the Queen of England. Queen
Elizabeth--a fact which was notorious enough then, though it has
been forgotten till the last few years--was doing her utmost to
shield Mary. Buchanan was deputed, it seems, to speak out for the
people of Scotland; and certainly never people had an abler
apologist. If he spoke fiercely, savagely, it must be remembered
that he spoke of a fierce and savage matter; if he used--and it may
be abused--all the arts of oratory, it must be remembered that he
was fighting for the honour, and it may be for the national life, of
his country, and striking--as men in such cases have a right to
strike--as hard as he could. If he makes no secret of his
indignation, and even contempt, it must be remembered that
indignation and contempt may well have been real with him, while
they were real with the soundest part of his countrymen; with that
reforming middle class, comparatively untainted by French
profligacy, comparatively undebauched by feudal subservience, which
has been the leaven which has leavened the whole Scottish people in
the last three centuries with the elements of their greatness. If,
finally, he heaps up against the unhappy Queen charges which Mr.
Burton thinks incredible, it must be remembered that, as he well
says, these charges give the popular feeling about Queen Mary; and
it must be remembered also, that that popular feeling need not have
been altogether unfounded. Stories which are incredible, thank God,
in these milder days, were credible enough then, because, alas! they
were so often true. Things more ugly than any related of poor Mary
were possible enough--as no one knew better than Buchanan--in that
very French court in which Mary had been brought up; things as ugly
were possible in Scotland then, and for at least a century later;
and while we may hope that Buchanan has overstated his case, we must
not blame him too severely for yielding to a temptation common to
all men of genius when their creative power is roused to its highest
energy by a great cause and a great indignation.
And that the genius was there, no man can doubt; one cannot read
that "hideously eloquent" description of Kirk o' Field, which Mr.
Burton has well chosen as a specimen of Buchanan's style, without
seeing that we are face to face with a genius of a very lofty order:
not, indeed, of the loftiest--for there is always in Buchanan's
work, it seems to me, a want of unconsciousness, and a want of
tenderness--but still a genius worthy to be placed beside those
ancient writers from whom he took his manner. Whether or not we
agree with his contemporaries, who say that he equalled Virgil in
Latin poetry, we may place him fairly as a prose writer by the side
of Demosthenes, Cicero, or Tacitus. And so I pass from this painful
subject; only quoting--if I may be permitted to quote--Mr. Burton's
wise and gentle verdict on the whole. "Buchanan," he says, "though
a zealous Protestant, had a good deal of the Catholic and sceptical
spirit of Erasmus, and an admiring eye for everything that was great
and beautiful. Like the rest of his countrymen, he bowed himself in
presence of the lustre that surrounded the early career of his
mistress. More than once he expressed his pride and reverence in
the inspiration of a genius deemed by his contemporaries to be
worthy of the theme. There is not, perhaps, to be found elsewhere
in literature so solemn a memorial of shipwrecked hopes, of a sunny
opening and a stormy end, as one finds in turning the leaves of the
volume which contains the beautiful epigram "Nympha Caledoniae" in
one part, the "Detectio Mariae Reginae" in another; and this
contrast is, no doubt, a faithful parallel of the reaction in the
popular mind. This reaction seems to have been general, and not
limited to the Protestant party; for the conditions under which it
became almost a part of the creed of the Church of Rome to believe
in her innocence had not arisen."
If Buchanan, as some of his detractors have thought, raised himself
by subserviency to the intrigues of the Regent Murray, the best
heads in Scotland seem to have been of a different opinion. The
murder of Murray did not involve Buchanan's fall. He had avenged
it, as far as pen could do it, by that "Admonition Direct to the
Trew Lordis," in which he showed himself as great a master of
Scottish, as he was of Latin prose. His satire of the "Chameleon,"
though its publication was stopped by Maitland, must have been read
in manuscript by many of those same "True Lords;" and though there
were nobler instincts in Maitland than any Buchanan gave him credit
for, the satire breathed an honest indignation against that wily
turncoat's misgoings, which could not but recommend the author to
all honest men. Therefore it was, I presume, and not because he was
a rogue, and a hired literary spadassin, that to the best heads in
Scotland he seemed so useful, it may be so worthy, a man, that he be
provided with continually increasing employment. As tutor to James
I.; as director, for a short time, of the chancery; as keeper of the
privy seal, and privy councillor; as one of the commissioners for
codifying the laws, and again--for in the semi-anarchic state of
Scotland, government had to do everything in the way of
organisation--in the committee for promulgating a standard Latin
grammar; in the committee for reforming the University of St.
Andrew's: in all these Buchanan's talents were again and again
called for; and always ready. The value of his work, especially
that for the reform of St. Andrew's, must be judged by Scotsmen,
rather than by an Englishman; but all that one knows of it justifies
Melville's sentence in the well-known passage in his memoirs,
wherein he describes the tutors and household of the young king.
"Mr. George was a Stoic philosopher, who looked not far before him;"
in plain words, a high-minded and right-minded man, bent on doing
the duty which lay nearest him. The worst that can be said against
him during these times is, that his name appears with the sum of 100
pounds against it, as one of those "who were to be entertained in
Scotland by pensions out of England;" and Ruddiman, of course,
comments on the fact by saying that Buchanan "was at length to act
under the threefold character of malcontent, reformer, and
pensioner:" but it gives no proof whatsoever that Buchanan ever
received any such bribe; and in the very month, seemingly, in which
that list was written--10th March, 1579--Buchanan had given a proof
to the world that he was not likely to be bribed or bought, by
publishing a book, as offensive probably to Queen Elizabeth as it
was to his own royal pupil; namely, his famous "De Jure Regni apud
Scotos," the very primer, according to many great thinkers, of
constitutional liberty. He dedicates that book to King James, "not
only as his monitor, but also as an importunate and bold exactor,
which in these his tender and flexible years may conduct him in
safety past the rocks of flattery." He has complimented James
already on his abhorrence of flattery, "his inclination far above
his years for undertaking all heroical and noble attempts, his
promptitude in obeying his instructors and governors, and all who
give him sound admonition, and his judgment and diligence in
examining affairs, so that no man's authority can have much weight
with him unless it be confirmed by probable reasons." Buchanan may
have thought that nine years of his stern rule had eradicated some
of James's ill conditions; the petulance which made him kill the
Master of Mar's sparrow, in trying to wrest it out of his hand; the
carelessness with which--if the story told by Chytraeus, on the
authority of Buchanan's nephew, be true--James signed away his crown
to Buchanan for fifteen days, and only discovered his mistake by
seeing Bachanan act in open court the character of King of Scots.
Buchanan had at last made him a scholar; he may have fancied that he
had made him likewise a manful man: yet he may have dreaded that,
as James grew up, the old inclinations would return in stronger and
uglier shapes, and that flattery might be, as it was after all, the
cause of James's moral ruin. He at least will be no flatterer. He
opens the dialogue which he sends to the king, with a calm but
distinct assertion of his mother's guilt, and a justification of the
conduct of men who were now most of them past helping Buchanan, for
they were laid in their graves; and then goes on to argue fairly,
but to lay down firmly, in a sort of Socratic dialogue, those very
principles by loyalty to which the House of Hanover has reigned, and
will reign, over these realms. So with his History of Scotland;
later antiquarian researches have destroyed the value of the earlier
portions of it: but they have surely increased the value of those
later portions, in which Buchanan inserted so much which he had
already spoken out in his Detection of Mary. In that book also
liberavit animam suam; he spoke his mind fearless of consequences,
in the face of a king who he must have known--for Buchanan was no
dullard--regarded him with deep dislike, who might in a few years be
able to work his ruin.
But those few years were not given to Buchanan. He had all but done
his work, and he hastened to get it over before the night should
come wherein no man can work. One must be excused for telling--one
would not tell it in a book intended to be read only by Scotsmen,
who know or ought to know the tale already--how the two Melvilles
and Buchanan's nephew Thomas went to see him in Edinburgh, in
September, 1581, hearing that he was ill, and his History still in
the press; and how they found the old sage, true to his
schoolmaster's instincts, teaching the Hornbook to his servant-lad;
and how he told them that doing that was "better than stealing
sheep, or sitting idle, which was as bad," and showed them that
dedication to James I., in which he holds up to his imitation as a
hero whose equal was hardly to be found in history, that very King
David whose liberality to the Romish Church provoked James's
witticism that "David was a sair saint for the crown." Andrew
Melville, so James Melville says, found fault with the style.
Buchanan replied that he could do no more for thinking of another
thing, which was to die. They then went to Arbuthnot's printing-
house, and inspected the history, as far as that terrible passage
concerning Rizzio's burial, where Mary is represented as "laying the
miscreant almost in the arms of Maud de Valois, the late queen."
Alarmed, and not without reason, at such plain speaking, they
stopped the press, and went back to Buchanan's house. Buchanan was
in bed. "He was going," he said, "the way of welfare." They asked
him to soften the passage; the king might prohibit the whole work.
"Tell me, man," said Buchanan, "if I have told the truth." They
could not, or would not, deny it. "Then I will abide his feud, and
all his kin's; pray, pray to God for me, and let Him direct all."
"So," says Melville, "before the printing of his chronicle was
ended, this most learned, wise, and godly man ended his mortal
life."
Camden has a hearsay story--written, it must be remembered, in James
I.'s time--that Buchanan, on his death-bed, repented of his harsh
words against Queen Mary; and an old Lady Rosyth is said to have
said that when she was young a certain David Buchanan recollected
hearing some such words from George Buchanan's own mouth. Those who
will, may read what Ruddiman and Love have said, and oversaid, on
both sides of the question: whatever conclusion they come to, it
will probably not be that to which George Chalmers comes in his life
of Ruddiman: that "Buchanan, like other liars, who, by the
repetition of falsehoods are induced to consider the fiction as
truth, had so often dwelt with complacency on the forgeries of his
Detections, and the figments of his History, that he at length
regarded his fictions and his forgeries as most authentic facts."
At all events his fictions and his forgeries had not paid him in
that coin which base men generally consider the only coin worth
having, namely, the good things of this life. He left nothing
behind him--if at least Dr. Irving has rightly construed the
"Testament Dative" which he gives in his appendix--save arrears to
the sum of 100 pounds of his Crossraguel pension. We may believe as
we choose the story in Mackenzie's "Scotch Writers" that when he
felt himself dying, he asked his servant Young about the state of
his funds, and finding he had not enough to bury himself withal,
ordered what he had to be given to the poor, and said that if they
did not choose to bury him they might let him lie where he was, or
cast him in a ditch, the matter was very little to him. He was
buried, it seems, at the expense of the city of Edinburgh, in the
Greyfriars' Churchyard--one says in a plain turf grave--among the
marble monuments which covered the bones of worse or meaner men; and
whether or not the "Throughstone" which, "sunk under the ground in
the Greyfriars," was raised and cleaned by the Council of Edinburgh
in 1701, was really George Buchanan's, the reigning powers troubled
themselves little for several generations where he lay.
For Buchanan's politics were too advanced for his age. Not only
Catholic Scotsmen, like Blackwood, Winzet, and Ninian, but
Protestants, like Sir Thomas Craig and Sir John Wemyss, could not
stomach the "De Jure Regni." They may have had some reason on their
side. In the then anarchic state of Scotland, organisation and
unity under a common head may have been more important than the
assertion of popular rights. Be that as it may, in 1584, only two
years after his death, the Scots Parliament condemned his Dialogue
and History as untrue, and commanded all possessors of copies to
deliver them up, that they might be purged of "the offensive and
extraordinary matters" which they contained. The "De Jure Regni"
was again prohibited in Scotland, in 1664, even in manuscript; and
in 1683, the whole of Buchanan's political works had the honour of
being burned by the University of Oxford, in company with those of
Milton, Languet, and others, as "pernicious books, and damnable
doctrines, destructive to the sacred persons of Princes, their state
and government, and of all human society." And thus the seed which
Buchanan had sown, and Milton had watered--for the allegation that
Milton borrowed from Buchanan is probably true, and equally
honourable to both--lay trampled into the earth, and seemingly
lifeless, till it tillered out, and blossomed, and bore fruit to a
good purpose, in the Revolution of 1688.
To Buchanan's clear head and stout heart, Scotland owes, as England
owes likewise, much of her modern liberty. But Scotland's debt to
him, it seems to me, is even greater on the count of morality,
public and private. What the morality of the Scotch upper classes
was like, in Buchanan's early days, is too notorious; and there
remains proof enough--in the writings, for instance, of Sir David
Lindsay--that the morality of the populace, which looked up to the
nobles as its example and its guide, was not a whit better. As
anarchy increased, immorality was likely to increase likewise; and
Scotland was in serious danger of falling into such a state as that
into which Poland fell, to its ruin, within a hundred and fifty
years after; in which the savagery of feudalism, without its order
or its chivalry, would be varnished over by a thin coating of French
"civilisation," and, as in the case of Bothwell, the vices of the
court of Paris should be added to those of the Northern freebooter.
To deliver Scotland from that ruin, it was needed that she should be
united into one people, strong, not in mere political, but in moral
ideas; strong by the clear sense of right and wrong, by the belief
in the government and the judgments of a living God. And the tone
which Buchanan, like Knox, adopted concerning the great crimes of
their day, helped notably that national salvation. It gathered
together, organised, strengthened, the scattered and wavering
elements of public morality. It assured the hearts of all men who
loved the right and hated the wrong; and taught a whole nation to
call acts by their just names, whoever might be the doers of them.
It appealed to the common conscience of men. It proclaimed a
universal and God-given morality, a bar at which all, from the
lowest to the highest, must alike be judged.
The tone was stern: but there was need of sternness. Moral life
and death were in the balance. If the Scots people were to be told
that the crimes which roused their indignation were excusable, or
beyond punishment, or to be hushed up and slipped over in any way,
there was an end of morality among them. Every man, from the
greatest to the least, would go and do likewise, according to his
powers of evil. That method was being tried in France, and in Spain
likewise, during those very years. Notorious crimes were hushed up
under pretence of loyalty; excused as political necessities; smiled
away as natural and pardonable weaknesses. The result was the utter
demoralisation, both of France and Spain. Knox and Buchanan, the
one from the standpoint of an old Hebrew prophet, the other rather
from that of a Juvenal or a Tacitus, tried the other method, and
called acts by their just names, appealing alike to conscience and
to God. The result was virtue and piety, and that manly
independence of soul which is thought compatible with hearty
loyalty, in a country labouring under heavy disadvantages, long
divided almost into two hostile camps, two rival races.
And the good influence was soon manifest, not only in those who
sided with Buchanan and his friends, but in those who most opposed
them. The Roman Catholic preachers, who at first asserted Mary's
right to impurity while they allowed her guilt, grew silent for
shame, and set themselves to assert her entire innocence; while the
Scots who have followed their example have, to their honour, taken
up the same ground. They have fought Buchanan on the ground of
fact, not on the ground of morality: they have alleged--as they
had a fair right to do--the probability of intrigue and forgery in
an age so profligate: the improbability that a Queen so gifted by
nature and by fortune, and confessedly for a long while so strong
and so spotless, should as it were by a sudden insanity have proved
so untrue to herself. Their noblest and purest sympathies have been
enlisted--and who can blame them?--in loyalty to a Queen, chivalry
to a woman, pity for the unfortunate and--as they conceived--the
innocent; but whether they have been right or wrong in their view of
facts, the Scotch partisans of Mary have always--as far as I know--
been right in their view of morals; they have never deigned to admit
Mary's guilt, and then to palliate it by those sentimental, or
rather sensual, theories of human nature, too common in a certain
school of French literature, too common, alas! in a certain school
of modern English novels. They have not said, "She did it; but
after all, was the deed so very inexcusable?" They have said, "The
deed was inexcusable: but she did not do it." And so the Scotch
admirers of Mary, who have numbered among them many a pure and
noble, as well as many a gifted spirit, have kept at least
themselves unstained; and have shown, whether consciously or not,
that they too share in that sturdy Scotch moral sense which has been
so much strengthened--as I believe by the plain speech of good old
George Buchanan.
Footnotes:
{1} This lecture was delivered in America in 1874.
{2} Black, translator of Mallett's "Northern Antiquities,"
Supplementary Chapter I., and Rafn's "Antiquitates Americanae."
{3} On the Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz.
{4} This lecture was given in America in 1874.
{5} This lecture was given in America in 1874.
{6} This lecture and the two preceding ones, being published after
the author's death, have not had the benefit of his corrections.
{7} A Life of Rondelet, by his pupil Laurent Joubert, is to be
found appended to his works; and with an account of his illness and
death, by his cousin, Claude Formy, which is well worth the perusal
of any man, wise or foolish. Many interesting details beside, I owe
to the courtesy of Professor Planchon, of Montpellier, author of a
discourse on "Rondelet et vies Disciples," which appeared, with a
learned and curious Appendix, in the "Montpellier Medical" for 1866.
{8} This lecture was given at Cambridge in 1869.
{9} This lecture was given at Cambridge in 1869.
{10} I owe this account of Bloet's--which appears to me the only
one trustworthy--to the courtesy and erudition of Professor Henry
Morley, who finds it quoted from Bloet's "Acroama," in the
"Observationum Medicarum Rariorum," lib. vii., of John Theodore
Schenk. Those who wish to know several curious passages of
Vesalius's life, which I have not inserted in this article, would do
well to consult one by Professor Morley, "Anatomy in Long Clothes,"
in "Fraser's Magazine" for November, 1853. May I express a hope,
which I am sure will be shared by all who have read Professor
Morley's biographies of Jerome Carden and of Cornelius Agrippa, that
he will find leisure to return to the study of Vesalius's life; and
will do for him what he has done for the two just-mentioned writers?
{11} Olivarez's "Relacion" is to be found in the Granvelle State
Papers. For the general account of Don Carlos's illness, and of the
miraculous agencies by which his cure was said to have been
effected, the general reader should consult Miss Frere's "Biography
of Elizabeth of Valois," vol. i. pp. 307-19.
{12} In justice to poor Doctor Olivarez, it must be said that,
while he allows all force to the intercession of the Virgin and of
Fray Diego, and of "many just persons," he cannot allow that there
was any "miracle properly so called," because the prince was cured
according to "natural order," and by "experimental remedies" of the
physicians.
{13} This lecture was given at Cambridge in 1869, and has not had
the benefit of the author's corrections for the press.
{14} Delrio's book, a famous one in its day, was published about
1612.
{15} For a true estimate of Paracelsus you must read "Fur Philippus
Aureolus Theophrarstus von Hohenheim," by that great German
physician and savant, Professor Marx, of Gottiingen; also a valuable
article founded on Dr. Marx's views in the "Nouveau Biographie
Universelle;" and also--which is within the reach of all--Professor
Maurice's article on Paracelsus in Vol. II. of his history of
"Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy." But the best key to Paracelsus
is to be found in his own works.
{16} So says Dr. Irving, writing in 1817. I have, however, tried
in vain to get a sight of this book. I need not tell Scotch
scholars how much I am indebted throughout this article to Mr. David
Irving's erudite second edition of Buchanan's Life.
{17} From the quaint old translation of 1721, by "A Person of
Honour of the Kingdom of Scotland."
End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Historical Lecturers and Essays