So runs the story of Dietrich’s death. It is perfectly natural, and very likely true. His contemporaries, who all believed it, saw in it proof of his enormous guilt, and the manifest judgment of God. We shall rather see in it a proof of the earnest, child-like, honest nature of the man, startled into boundless horror and self-abasement, by the sudden revelation of his crime. Truly bad men die easier deaths than that; and go down to the grave, for the most part, blind and self-contented, and, as they think, unpunished; and perhaps forgiven.
After Dietrich came the deluge. The royal head was gone. The royal heart remained in Amalasuentha ‘the heavenly beauty,’ a daughter worthy of her father.
One of her first acts was to restore to the widows and children of the two victims the estates which Dietrich had confiscated. That may, or may not, prove that she thought the men innocent. She may have only felt it royal not to visit the sins of the fathers on the children; and those fathers, too, her own friends and preceptors. Beautiful, learned, and wise, she too was, like her father, before her age. She, the pupil of Boethius, would needs bring up her son Athalaric in Roman learning, and favour the Romans in all ways; never putting to death or even fining any of them, and keeping down the rough Goths, who were ready enough, now Dietrich’s hand was off them, to ill-use the conquered Italians. The Goths soon grew to dislike her, and her Roman tendencies, her Roman education of the lad. One day she boxed his ears for some fault. He ran crying out into the Heldensaal, and complained to the heroes. They sent a deputation to Amalasuentha, insolent enough. ‘The boy should not be made a scholar of.’ ‘She meant to kill the boy and marry again. Had not old Dietrich forbidden free Goths to go to schoolmasters, and said, that the boy who was taught to tremble at a cane, would never face a lance?’ So they took the lad away from the women, and made a ruffian of him. What with drink, women, idleness, and the company of wild young fellows like himself, he was early ruined, body and soul. Poor Amalasuentha, not knowing whither to turn, took the desperate resolution of offering Italy to the Emperor Justinian. She did not know that her cousin Theodatus had been beforehand with her—a bad old man, greedy and unjust, whose rapacity she had had to control again and again, and who hated her in return. Both send messages to Justinian. The wily Emperor gave no direct answer: but sent his ambassador to watch the course of events. The young prince died of debauchery, and the Goths whispered that his mother had poisoned him. Meanwhile Theodatus went on from bad to worse; accusations flowed in to Amalasuentha of his lawless rapacity: but he was too strong for her; and she, losing her head more and more, made the desperate resolve of marrying him, as the only way to keep him quiet. He was the last male heir of the royal Amalungs. The marriage would set him right in the eyes of the Goths, while it would free her from the suspicion of having murdered her son, in order to reign alone. Theodatus meanwhile was to have the name of royalty; but she was to keep the power and the money—a foolish, confused plan, which could have but one ending. Theodatus married her of course, and then cast her into prison, seized all her treasures, and threw himself into the arms of that party among the Goths, who hated Amalasuentha for having punished their oppressions. The end was swift and sad. By the time that Justinian’s ambassador landed, Amalasuentha was strangled in her bath; and all that Peter the ambassador had to do was, to catch at the cause of quarrel, and declare ‘inexpiable war’ on the part of Justinian, as the avenger of the Queen.
And then began that dreadful East Goth war, which you may read for yourselves in the pages of an eye-witness, Procopius;—a war which destroyed utterly the civilization of Dietrich’s long and prosperous reign, left Italy a desert, and exterminated the Roman people.
That was the last woe: but of it I must tell you in my next Lecture.
Of this truly dreadful Gothic war I can give you but a hasty sketch; of some of the most important figures in it, not even a sketch. I cannot conceive to myself, and therefore cannot draw for you, the famous Belisarius. Was he really the strange compound of strength and weakness which Procopius, and after him Gibbon, represent him?—a caricature, for good and evil, of our own famous Marlborough? You must read and judge for yourselves. I cannot, at least as yet, offer you any solution of the enigma.
Still less can I conceive to myself Narses, living till his grey hairs in the effeminate intrigues of the harem, and then springing forth a general; the Warrior Eunuch; the misanthrope avenging his great wrong upon all mankind in bloody battle-fields; dark of counsel, and terrible of execution; him to whom in after years the Empress Sophia sent word that he was more fit to spin among maids than to command armies, and he answered, that he would spin her such a thread as she could not unravel; and kept his word (as legends say) by inviting the Lombards into Italy.
Least of all can I sketch Justinian the Great, the half-Teuton peasant, whom his uncle Justin sent for out of the Dardanian hills, to make him a demigod upon earth. Men whispered in after years that he was born of a demon, a demon himself, passing whole days without food, wandering up and down his palace corridors all night, resolving dark things, and labouring all day with Herculean force to carry them out. No wonder he was thought to be a demon, wedded to a demon-wife. The man is unfathomable, inexplicable;—marrying deliberately the wickedest of all women, plainly not for mere beauty’s sake, but possibly because he saw in her a congenial intellect;—faithful and loving to her and she to him, amid all the crimes of their following years;—pious with exceeding devotion and orthodoxy, and yet with a piety utterly divorced from, unconscious of, the commonest morality;—discerning and using the greatest men, Belisarius and Narses for example, and throwing them away again, surely not in weak caprice, whenever they served him too well;—conquering Persians, Vandals, Goths; all but re-conquering, in fact, the carcase Roman Empire;—and then trying (with a deep discernment of the value of Roman law) to put a galvanic life into the carcase by codifying that law.
In whatever work I find this man, during his long life, he is to me inexplicable. Louis XI of France is the man most like Justinian whom I know, but he, too, is a man not to be fathomed by me. All the facts about Justinian you will find in Gibbon. I have no theory by which to arrange and explain them, and therefore can tell you no more than Gibbon does.
So to this Gothic war; which, you must remember, became possible for Justinian by Belisarius’ having just destroyed the Vandals out of Africa. It began by Belisarius invading the south of Italy. Witigis was elected war-king of the Goths, ‘the man of witty counsels,’ who did not fulfil his name; while Theodatus (Theod-aht ‘esteemed by the people’ as his name meant) had fallen into utter disesteem, after some last villainy about money; had been struck down in the road by the man he had injured; and there had his throat cut, ‘resupinus instar victimæ jugulatus.’
He had consulted a Jew diviner just before, who had given him a warning. Thirty pigs, signifying the unclean Gentiles, the Jew shut up in three sties; naming ten Goths, ten Romans, and ten Imperialists of Belisarius’ army, and left them to starve. At the end they found dead all the Goths but two, hardly any of the Imperialists, and half the Romans: but the five Roman pigs who were left had lost their bristles—bare to the skin, as the event proved.
After that Theodatus had no heart to fight, and ended his dog’s life by a dog’s death, as we have seen.
Note also this, that there was a general feeling of coming ruin; that there were quaint signs and omens. We have heard of the pigs which warned the Goths. Here is another. There was a Mosaic picture of Theodoric at Naples; it had been crumbling to pieces at intervals, and every fresh downfall had marked the death of an Amal. Now the last remains went down, to the very feet, and the Romans believed that it foretold the end of the Amal dynasty. There was a Sibylline oracle too;
‘Quintili mense Roma nihil Geticum metuet.’
Here, too, we find the last trace of heathenism, of that political mythology which had so inextricably interwoven itself with the life and history of the city. The shrine of Janus was still standing, all of bronze, only just large enough, Procopius says, to contain the bronze image of Janus Bifrons. The gates, during Christian centuries, had never been opened, even in war time. Now people went by night, and tried to force them open: but hardly succeeded.
Belisarius garrisoned Rome, and the Goths attacked it, but in vain. You must read the story of that famous siege in the really brilliant pages of old Procopius, the last good historian of the old world.
Moreover, and this is most important, Belisarius raised the native population against the Goths. As he had done in Africa, when in one short campaign he utterly destroyed the now effeminate aristocracy of the Vandals, so he did in Italy. By real justice and kindness; by proclaiming himself the deliverer of the conquered from the yoke of foreign tyrants, he isolated the slave-holding aristocracy of the Goths from the mass of the inhabitants of Italy.
Belisarius and the Goths met, and the Goths conquered. But to take Rome was beyond their power; and after that a long miserable war struggled and wrangled up and down over the wretched land; city after city was taken and destroyed, now by Roman, now by Goth. The lands lay waste, the people disappeared in tens of thousands. All great Dietrich’s work of thirty years was trampled into mud.
There were horrible sieges and destructions by both parties;—sack of Milan by Goths, sack of Rimini and the country round by Romans; horrors of famine at Auximum; two women who kept an inn, killing and eating seventeen men, till the eighteenth discovered the trap and killed them. Everywhere, as I say, good Dietrich’s work of thirty years trampled into gory mud.
Then Theudebert and his false Franks came down to see what they could get; all (save a few knights round the king) on foot, without bow or lance; but armed with sword, shield, and heavy short-handled double-edged francisc, or battle-axe. At the bridge over the Ticinus they (nominal Catholics) sacrificed Gothic women and children with horrid rites, fought alike Goths and Romans, lost a third of their army by dysentery, and went home again.
At last, after more horrors, Vitigis and his Goths were driven into Ravenna. Justinian treated for peace; and then followed a strange peripeteia, which we have, happily, from an eye-witness, Procopius himself. The Roman generals outside confessed their chance of success hopeless. The Goths inside, tired of the slow Vitigis, send out to the great Belisarius, Will he be their king? King over them there in Italy? He promised, meaning to break his promise; and to the astonishment and delight of the Romans, the simple and honest barbarians opened the gates of Ravenna, and let in him and his Romans, to find themselves betrayed and enslaved. ‘When I saw our troops march in,’ says Procopius, ‘I felt it was God’s doing, so to turn their minds. The Goths,’ he says, ‘were far superior in numbers and in strength; and their women, who had fancied these Romans to be mighty men of valour, spit in the faces of their huge husbands, and pointing to the little Romans, reproached them with having surrendered to such things as that.’ But the folly was committed. Belisarius carried them away captive to Constantinople, and so ended the first act of the Gothic war.
In the moment of victory the envy of the Byzantine court undid all that it had done. Belisarius returned with his captives to Rome, not for a triumph, but for a disgrace; and Italy was left open to the Goths, if they had men and heart to rise once more.
And they did rise. Among the remnant of the race was left a hero, Totila by name;—a Teuton of the ancient stamp. Totilas, ‘free from death’—‘the deathless one,’ they say his name means. Under him the nation rose once more as out of the ground.
A Teuton of the ancient stamp he was, just and merciful exceedingly. Take but two instances of him, and know the man by them. He retook Naples. The Romans within were starving. He fed them; but lest they should die of the sudden repletion, he kept them in by guards at each gate, and fed them up more and more each day, till it was safe to let them out, to find food for themselves in the country. A Roman came to complain that a Goth had violated his daughter. He shall die, said Totila. He shall not die, said the Goths. He is a valiant hero. They came clamouring to the king. He answered them quietly and firmly. They may choose to-day, whether to let this man go unpunished, or to save the Gothic nation and win the victory. Do they not recollect how at the beginning of the war, they had brave soldiers, famous generals, countless treasures, horses, weapons, and all the forts of Italy? And yet under Theodatus, a man who loved gold better than justice, they had so angered God by their unrighteous lives, that—what had happened they knew but too well. Now God had seemed to have avenged himself on them enough. He had begun a new course with them. They must begin a new course with him; and justice was the only path. As for the man’s being a valiant hero: let them know that the unjust and the ravisher were never brave in fight; but that according to a man’s life, such was his luck in battle.
His noble words came all but true. The feeble generals who were filling Belisarius’s place were beaten one by one, and almost all Italy was reconquered. Belisarius had to be sent back again to Italy: but the envy, whether of Justinian himself, or of the two wicked women who ruled his court, allowed him so small a force that he could do nothing.
Totila and the Goths came down once more to Rome. Belisarius in agony sent for reinforcements, and got them; but too late. He could not relieve Rome. The Goths had massed themselves round the city, and Belisarius, having got to Ostia (Portus) at the Tiber’s mouth, could get no further. This was the last woe; the actual death-agony of ancient Rome. The famine grew and grew. The wretched Romans cried to Bessas and his garrison, either to feed them or to kill them out of their misery. They would do neither. They could hardly at last feed themselves. The Romans ate nettles off the ruins, and worse things still. There was not a dog or a rat left. They even killed themselves. One father of five children could bear no longer their cries for food. He wrapped his head in his mantle, and sprang into the Tiber, while the children looked on. The survivors wandered about like spectres, brown with hunger, and dropped dead with half-chewed nettles between their lips. To this, says Procopius, had fortune brought the Roman senate and people. Nay, not fortune, but wickedness. They had wished to play at being free, while they themselves were the slaves of sin.
And still Belisarius was coming,—and still he did not come. He was forcing his way up the Tiber; he had broken Totila’s chain, burnt a tower full of Goths, and the city was on the point of being relieved, when one Isaac made a fool of himself, and was taken by the Goths. Belisarius fancied that Portus, his base of operations, with all his supplies, and Antonia, the worthless wife on whom he doted, were gone. He lost his head, was beaten terribly, fell back on Ostia, and then the end came. Isaurians from within helped in Goths by night. The Asinarian gate was opened, and Rome was in the hands of the Goths.
And what was left? What of all the pomp and glory, the spoils of the world, the millions of inhabitants?
Five or six senators, who had taken refuge in St. Peter’s, and some five hundred of the plebs; Pope Pelagius crouching at Totila’s feet, and crying for mercy; and Rusticiana, daughter of Symmachus, Boethius’ widow, with other noble women, in slaves’ rags, knocking without shame at door after door to beg a bit of bread. And that was what was left of Rome.
Gentlemen, I make no comment. I know no more awful page in the history of Europe. Through such facts as these God speaks. Let man be silent; and look on in fear and trembling, knowing that it was written of old time—The wages of sin are death.
The Goths wanted to kill Rusticiana. She had sent money to the Roman generals; she had thrown down Dietrich’s statues, in revenge for the death of her father and her husband. Totila would not let them touch her. Neither maid, wife, nor widow, says Procopius, was the worse for any Goth.
Next day he called the heroes together. He is going to tell them the old tale, he says—How in Vitigis’ time at Ravenna, 7000 Greeks had conquered and robbed of kingdom and liberty 200,000 rich and well-armed Goths. And now that they were raw levies, few, naked, wretched, they had conquered more than 20,000 of the enemy. And why? Because of old they had looked to everything rather than to justice; they had sinned against each other and the Romans. Therefore they must choose, and be just men henceforth, and have God with them, or unjust, and have God against them.
Then he sends for the wretched remnant of the senators and tells them the plain truth:—How the great Dietrich and his successors had heaped them with honour and wealth; and how they had returned his benefits by bringing in the Greeks. And what had they gained by changing Dietrich for Justinian? Logothetes, who forced them by blows to pay up the money which they had already paid to their Gothic rulers; and revenue exacted alike in war and in peace. Slaves they deserve to be; and slaves they shall be henceforth.
Then he sends to Justinian. He shall withdraw his army from Italy, and make peace with him. He will be his ally and his son in arms, as Dietrich had been to the Emperors before him, or if not, he will kill the senate, destroy Rome, and march into Illyricum.
Justinian leaves it to Belisarius.
Then Totila begins to destroy Rome. He batters down the walls, he is ready to burn the town. He will turn the evil place into a sheep-pasture. Belisarius flatters and cajoles him from his purpose, and he marches away with all his captives, leaving not a living soul in Rome.
But Totila shews himself a general unable to cope with that great tactician. He divides his forces, and allows Belisarius to start out of Ostia and fortify himself in Rome. The Goths are furious at his rashness: but it is too late, and the war begins again, up and down the wretched land, till Belisarius is recalled by some fresh court intrigue of his wicked wife, and another and even more terrible enemy appears on the field, Narses the eunuch, avenging his wrong upon his fellow-men by cunning and courage almost preternatural. He comes upon them with a mighty host: but not of Romans alone. He has gathered the Teuton tribes;—Herules, the descendants probably of Odoacer’s confederates; Gepids, who have a long blood-feud against the Goths; and most terrible of all, Alboin with his five thousand more Burgundians, of whom you will hear enough hereafter. We read even of multitudes of Huns, and even of Persian deserters from the Chosroo. But Narses’ policy is the old Roman one—Teuton must destroy Teuton. And it succeeds.
In spite of some trouble with the Franks, who are holding Venetia, he marches down victorious through the wasted land, and Totila marches to meet him in the Apennines. The hero makes his last speech. He says, ‘There will be no need to talk henceforth. This day will end the war. They are not to fear these hired Huns, Herules, Lombards, fighting for money. Let them hold together like desperate men.’ So they fight it out. The Goths depending entirely on the lance, the Romans on a due use of every kind of weapon. The tremendous charge of the Gothic knights is stopped by showers of Hun and Herule arrows, and they roll back again and again in disorder on the foot: but in spite of the far superior numbers of the Romans, it is not till nightfall that Narses orders a general advance of his line. The Goths try one last charge; but appalled by the numbers of the enemy, break up, and, falling back on the foot, throw them into confusion, and all is lost.
The foot are cut down flying. The knights ride for their lives. Totila and five horsemen are caught up by Asbad the Gepid chief. Asbad puts his lance in rest, not knowing who was before him. ‘Dog,’ cries Totila’s page, ‘wilt thou strike thy lord?’ But it is too late. Asbad’s lance goes through his back, and he drops on his horse’s neck. Scipwar (Shipward) the Goth wounds Asbad, and falls wounded himself. The rest carry off Totila. He dies that night, after reigning eleven stormy years.
The Goths flee across the Po. There is one more struggle for life, and one more hero left. Teia by name, ‘the slow one,’ slow, but strong. He shall be king now. They lift him on the shield, and gather round him desperate, but determined to die hard. He finds the treasure of Totila, hid in Pisa. He sends to Theudebald and his Franks. Will they help him against the Roman, and they shall have the treasure; the last remnant of the Nibelungen hoard. No. The Luegenfelden will not come. They will stand by and see the butchery, on the chance of getting all Italy for themselves. Narses storms Rome—or rather a little part of it round Hadrian’s Mole, which the Goths had fortified; and the Goths escape down into Campania, mad with rage.
That victory of Narses, says Procopius, brought only a more dreadful destruction on the Roman senate and people. The Goths, as they go down, murder every Roman they meet. The day of grace which Totila had given them is over. The Teutons in Narses’ army do much the same. What matter to Burgunds and Herules who was who, provided they had any thing to be plundered of? Totila has allowed many Roman senators to live in Campania. They hear that Narses has taken Rome, they begin to flock to the ghastly ruin. Perhaps there will be once again a phantom senate, phantom consuls, under the Romani nominis umbram. The Goths catch them, and kill them to a man. And there is an end of the Senatus Populusque Romanus.
The end is near now. And yet these terrible Goths cannot be killed out of the way. On the slopes of Vesuvius, by Nuceria, they fortify a camp; and as long as they are masters of the neighbouring sea, for two months they keep Narses at bay. At last he brings up an innumerable fleet, cuts off their supplies; and then the end comes. The Goths will die like desperate men on foot. They burst out of camp, turn their horses loose, after the fashion of German knights—One hears of the fashion again and again in the middle age,—and rush upon the enemy in deep solid column. The Romans have hardly time to form some sort of line; and then not the real Romans, I presume, but the Burgunds and Gepids, turn their horses loose like the Goths. There is no need for tactics; the fight is hand to hand; every man, says Procopius, rushing at the man nearest him.
For a third of the day Teia fights in front, sheltered by his long pavisse, stabbing with a mighty lance at the mob which makes at him, as dogs at a boar at bay. Procopius is awed by the man. Most probably he saw him with his own eyes. Second in valour, he says, to none of the Heroes.
Again and again his shield is full of darts. Without moving a foot, without turning an inch right or left, says Procopius, he catches another from his shield-bearer, and fights on. At last he has twelve lances in his shield, and cannot move it: coolly he calls for a fresh one, as if he were fixed to the soil, thrusts back the enemy with his left hand, and stabs at them with his right. But his time is come. As he shifts his shield for a moment his chest is exposed, and a javelin is through him. And so ends the last hero of the East Goths. They put his head upon a pole, and carry it round the lines to frighten the Goths. The Goths are long past frightening.
All day long, and all the next day, did the Germans fight on, Burgund and Gepid against Goth, neither giving nor taking quarter, each man dying where he stood, till human strength could bear up no longer, while Narses sat by, like an ugly Troll as he was, smiling to see the Teuton slay the Teuton, for the sake of their common enemy. Then the Goths sent down to Narses. They were fighting against God. They would give in, and go their ways peaceably, and live with some other Teuton nations after their own laws. They had had enough of Italy, poor fellows, and of the Nibelungen hoard. Only Narses, that they might buy food on the journey back, must let them have their money, which he had taken in various towns of Italy.
Narses agreed. There was no use fighting more with desperate men. They should go in peace. And he kept his faith with them. Perhaps he dared not break it. He let them go, like a wounded lion crawling away from the hunter, up through Italy, and over the Po, to vanish. They and their name became absorbed in other nations, and history knows the East Goths no more.
So perished, by their own sins, a noble nation; and in perishing, destroyed utterly the Roman people. After war and famine followed as usual dreadful pestilence, and Italy lay waste for years. Henceforth the Italian population was not Roman, but a mixture of all races, with a most powerful, but an entirely new type of character. Rome was no more Senatorial, but Papal.
And why did these Goths perish, in spite of all their valour and patriotism, at the hands of mercenaries?
They were enervated, no doubt, as the Vandals had been in Africa, by the luxurious southern climate, with its gardens, palaces, and wines. But I have indicated a stronger reason already:—they perished because they were a slave-holding aristocracy.
We must not blame them. All men then held slaves: but the original sin was their ruin, though they knew it not. It helped, doubtless, to debauch them; to tempt them to the indulgence of those fierce and greedy passions, which must, in the long run, lower the morality of slaveholders; and which, as Totila told them, had drawn down on them the anger of heaven. But more; though they reformed their morals, and that nobly, under the stern teaching of affliction, that could not save them. They were ruined by the inherent weakness of all slaveholding states; the very weakness which had ruined, in past years, the Roman Empire. They had no middle class, who could keep up their supplies, by exercising for them during war the arts of peace. They had no lower class, whom they dare entrust with arms, and from whom they might recruit their hosts. They could not call a whole population into the field, and when beaten in that field, carry on, as Britain would when invaded, a guerilla warfare from wood to wood, and hedge to hedge, as long as a coign of vantage-ground was left. They found themselves a small army of gentlemen, chivalrous and valiant, as slaveholders of our race have always been; but lessening day by day from battle and disease, with no means of recruiting their numbers; while below them and apart from them lay the great mass of the population, helpless, unarmed, degraded, ready to side with any or every one who would give them bread, or let them earn it for themselves (for slaves must eat, even though their masters starve), and careless of, if not even hostile to, their masters’ interests, the moment those masters were gone to the wars.
In such a case, nothing was before them, save certain defeat at last by an enemy who could pour in ever fresh troops of mercenaries, and who had the command of the seas.
I may seem to be describing the case of a modern and just as valiant and noble a people. I do not mention its name. The parallel, I fear, is too complete, not to have already suggested itself to you.
And now I come to the final settlement of Italy and the Lombard race; and to do that well, I must introduce you to-day to an old chronicler—a very valuable, and as far as we know, faithful writer—Paul Warnefrid, alias Paul the Deacon.
I shall not trouble you with much commentary on him; but let him, as much as possible, tell his own story. He may not be always quite accurate, but you will get no one more accurate. In the long run, you will know nothing about the matter, save what he tells you; so be content with what you can get. Let him shew you what sort of an account of his nation, and the world in general, a Lombard gentleman and clergyman could give, at the end of the 8th century.
You recollect the Lombards, of whom Tacitus says, ‘Longobardos paucitas nobilitat.’ Paulus Warnefrid was one of their descendants, and his history carries out the exact truth of Tacitus’ words. He too speaks of them as a very small tribe. He could not foresee how much the ‘nobilitat’ meant. He knew his folk as a brave semi-feudal race, who had conquered the greater part of Italy, and tilled and ruled it well; who were now conquered by Charlemagne, and annexed to the great Frank Empire, but without losing anything of their distinctive national character. He did not foresee that they would become the architects, the merchants, the goldsmiths, the bankers, the scientific agriculturists of all Europe. We know it. Whenever in London or any other great city, you see a ‘Lombard Street,’ an old street of goldsmiths and bankers—or the three golden balls of Lombardy over a pawnbroker’s shop—or in the country a field of rye-grass, or a patch of lucerne—recollect this wise and noble people, and thank the Lombards for what they have done for mankind.
Paulus is a garrulous historian, but a valuable one, just because he is garrulous. Though he turned monk and deacon in middle life, he has not sunk the man in the monk, and become a cosmopolite, like most Roman ecclesiastics, who have no love or hate for human beings save as they are friends or enemies of the pope, or their own abbey. He has retained enough of the Lombard gentleman to be proud of his family, his country, and the old legends of his race, which he tells, half-ashamed, but with evident enjoyment.
He was born at beautiful Friuli, with the jagged snow-line of the Alps behind him, and before him the sun and the sea, and the plains of Po; he was a courtier as a boy in Desiderius’ court at Pavia, and then, when Charlemagne destroyed the Lombard monarchy, seems to have been much with the great king at Aix. He certainly ended his life as a Benedictine monk, at Monte Casino, about 799; having written a Life of St. Gregory; Homilies long and many; the Appendix to Eutropius (the Historia Miscella, as it is usually called) up to Justinian’s time; and above all, this history of the Lombards, his forefathers, which I shall take as my text.
To me, and I believe to the great German antiquaries, his history seems a model history of a nation. You watch the people and their story rise before you out of fable into fact; out of the dreary darkness of the unknown north, into the clear light of civilized Roman history.
The first chapter is ‘Of Germany, how it nourishes much people, and therefore many nations go forth of it.’ The reason which he gives for the immense population is significant. The further to the north, and the colder, the more healthy he considers the world to be, and more fit for breeding human beings; whereas the south, being nearer to the heat of the sun, always abounds with diseases. The fact really is, I presume, that Italy (all the south which he knew), and perhaps most of the once Roman empire, were during the 6th and 7th centuries pestilential. Ruined cities, stopt watercourses, cultivated land falling back into marsh and desert, a soil too often saturated with human corpses—offered all the elements for pestilence. If the once populous Campagna of Rome be now uninhabitable from malaria, what must it have been in Paul Warnefrid’s time?
Be that as it may, this is his theory.
Then he tells us how his people were at first called Winils; and how they came out of Scania Insula. Sweden is often, naturally, an island with the early chroniclers; only the south was known to them. The north was magical, unknown, Quenland, the dwelling-place of Yotuns, Elves, Trolls, Scratlings, and all other uncanny inhumanities. The Winils find that they are growing too many for Scanland, and they divide into three parties. Two shall stay behind, and the third go out to seek their fortunes. Which shall go is to be decided by lot. The third on whom the lot falls choose as war-kings, two brothers, Ayo and Ibor, and with them their mother, Gambara, the Alruna-wife, prudent and wise exceedingly—and they go forth.
But before Paul can go too, he has a thing or two to say, which he must not forget, about the wild mysterious north from which his forefathers came. First how, in those very extreme parts of Germany, in a cave on the ocean shore, lie the seven sleepers. How they got thither from Ephesus, I cannot tell, still less how they should be at once there on the Baltic shore, and at Ephesus—as Mohammed himself believed, and Edward the Confessor taught—and at Marmoutier by Tours, and probably elsewhere beside. Be that as it may, there they are, the seven martyrs, sleeping for ever in their Roman dresses, which some wild fellow tried to pull off once, and had his arms withered as a punishment. And Paul trusts that they will awake some day, and by their preaching save the souls of the heathen Wends and Finns who haunt those parts.
The Teutonic knights, however, and not the seven sleepers, did that good work.
Only their dog is not with them, it appears;—the sacred dog which watches them till the judgment day, when it is to go up to heaven, with Noah’s dove, and Balaam’s ass, and Alborah the camel, and all the holy beasts. The dog must have been left behind at Ephesus.
Then he must tell us about the Scritofinns of the Bothnia gulf; wild Lapps and Finns, who have now retreated before the Teutonic race. In Paul Warnefrid’s eyes they are little wild hopping creatures—whence they derive their name, he says—Scritofinns, the hopping, or scrambling Finns.
Scrattels, Skretles, often figure in the Norse tales as hopping dwarfs, half magical [158]. The Norse discoverers of America recognized the Skrællings in the Esquimaux, and fled from them in panic terror; till that furious virago Freydisa, Thorvard’s wife, and Eirek the Red’s daughter, caught up a dead man’s sword, and put to flight, single-handed, the legion of little imps.
Others, wiser, or too wise, say that Paul is wrong; that Skrikfins is the right name, so called from their ‘screeking’, screaming, and jabbering, which doubtless the little fellows did, loudly enough.
Be that as it may, they appear to Paul (or rather to his informants, Wendish merchants probably, who came down to Charlemagne’s court at Aix, to sell their amber and their furs) as hopping about, he says, after the rein-deer, shooting them with a little clumsy bow, and arrows tipt with bone, and dressing themselves in their skins. Procopius knew these Scritfins too (but he has got (as usual) addled in his geography, and puts them in ultima Thule or Shetland), and tells us, over and above the reindeer-skin dresses, that the women never nursed their children, but went out hunting with their husbands, hanging the papoose up to a tree, as the Lapps do now, with a piece of deer’s marrow in its mouth to keep it employed; and moreover, that they sacrificed their captives to a war-god (Mars he calls him) in cruel ugly ways. All which we may fully believe.
Then Paul has to tell us how in the Scritfin country there is little or no night in midsummer, little or no day in winter; and how the shadows there are exceeding long, and shorten to nothing as they reach the equator,—where he puts not merely Egypt, but Jerusalem. And how on Christmas days a man’s shadow is nine feet long in Italy, whereas at Totonis Villam (Thionville), as he himself has measured, it is nineteen feet and a half. Because, he says, shrewdly enough, the further you go from the sun, the nearer the sun seems to the horizon. Of all which if you answer—But this is not history: I shall reply—But it is better than history. It is the history of history. It helps you to see how the world got gradually known; how history got gradually to be written; how each man, in each age, added his little grain to the great heap of facts, and gave his rough explanation thereof; and how each man’s outlook upon this wondrous world grew wider, clearer, juster, as the years rolled on.
And therefore I have no objection at all to listen to Paul in his next chapter, concerning the two navels of the ocean, one on each side Britain—abysses which swallow up the water twice a day, and twice a day spout it up again. Paul has seen, so he seems to say, the tide, the ’Ωκεανοιο ροας, that inexplicable wonder of the old Greeks and Romans, running up far inland at the mouths of the Seine and Loire; and he has to get it explained somehow, before he can go forward with a clear conscience. One of the navels seems to be the Mahlstrom in Norway. Of the place of the other there is no doubt. It is close to Evodia insula, seemingly Alderney. For a high noble of the French told him so; he was sucked into it, ships and all, and only escaped by clinging to a rock. And after awhile the margins of that abyss were all left bare, leaving the Frenchman high and dry, ‘palpitating so with fear,’ says Paul, ‘that he could hardly keep his seat.’ But when all the water had been sucked in, out and up it came pouring again, in huge mountains, and upon them the Frenchman’s ships, to his intense astonishment, reappeared out of the bottomless pit; into one of which he jumped; being, like a true Frenchman, thoroughly master of the situation; and got safe home to tell Paul the deacon. It is not quite the explanation of the tides which one would have wished for: but if a French nobleman of high rank will swear that he saw it with his own eyes, what can Paul do, in common courtesy, but believe him?
Paul has observed, too, which is a fact, that there is a small tide in his own Adriatic; and suggests modestly that there may be a similar hole in the bottom of that sea, only a little one, the tide being very little. After which, ‘his prælibatis,’ he will return, he says, to his story. And so he goes back to the famous Langbard Saga, the old story, which he has turned out of living Teutonic verse into dead Latin prose, and calls De Woden et Frea quædam ridicula fabula; but can’t help for the life of him telling it, apologizing all the time. How the Winils (his own folk) went out to fight the Wendels, many more than them in number; and how Gambara, the Alruna-wife, cried to Freia the goddess, and Freia told her that whichsoever of the two armies first greeted Woden at the sunrise should win. But the Winils are far away on the war-road, and there is no time to send to them. So Freia bids her take the Winil women, and dress them as warriors, and plait their tresses over their lips for beards, and cry to Woden; and Woden admires their long beards, and thinks them such valiant ‘war-beasts,’ that he grants them the victory.
Then Freia tells him how he has been taken in, and the old god laughs till the clouds rattle again, and the Winils are called Langbardr ever after.
But then comes in the antiquary, and says that the etymology is worthless, and that Langbardr means long axes—(bard=an axe)—a word which we keep in halbert, a hall-axe, or guard’s pole-axe; and perhaps the antiquary is right.
But again comes in a very learned man, Dr. Latham [162], and more than hints that the name is derived from the Lange Börde, the long meadows by the side of the Elbe: and so a good story crumbles to pieces, and
‘All charms do fly
Beneath the touch of cold philosophy.’
Then follows another story, possibly from another saga. How by reason of a great famine they had to leave Scoringia, the shore-land, and go into Mauringia, a word which Mr. Latham connects with the Merovingi, or Meerwing conquerors of Gaul. Others say that it means the moorland, others something else. All that they will ever find out we may see for ourselves already.—A little tribe of valiant fair-haired men, whether all Teutons, or, as Mr. Latham thinks, Sclavonians with Teuton leaders, still intimately connected with our own English race both by their language and their laws, struggling for existence on the bleak brown bogs and moors, sowing a little barley and flax, feeding a few rough cattle, breeding a few great black horses; generation after generation fighting their way southward, as they exhausted the barren northern soils, or became too numerous for their marches, or found land left waste in front of them by the emigration of some Suevic, Vandal, or Burgund tribe. We know nothing about them, and never shall know, save that they wore white linen gaiters, and carried long halberts, or pole-axes, and had each an immortal soul in him, as dear to God as yours or mine, with immense unconscious capabilities, which their children have proved right well.
Then comes another saga, how they met the Assipitti, of whom, whether they were Tacitus’s Usipetes, of the Lower Rhine, or Asabiden, the remnant of the Asen, who went not to Scandinavia with Odin, we know not, and need not know; and how the Assipitti would not let them pass; and how they told the Lombards that they had dogheaded men in their tribe who drank men’s blood, which Mr. Latham well explains by pointing out, in the Traveller’s Song, a tribe of Hundings (Houndings) sons of the hound; and how the Lombards sent out a champion, who fought the champion of the Assipitti, and so gained leave to go on their way.
Forward they go, toward the south-east, seemingly along the German marches, the debateable land between Teuton and Sclav, which would, mechanically speaking, be the line of least resistance. We hear of Gothland—wherever that happened to be just then; of Anthaib, the land held by the Sclavonian Anten, and Bathaib, possibly the land held by the Gepidæ, or remnant of the Goths who bided behind (as Wessex men still say), while the Goths moved forward; and then of Burgundhaib, wherever the Burgunds might be then. I know not; and I will dare to say, no man can exactly know. For no dates are given, and how can they be? The Lombards have not yet emerged out of the dismal darkness of the north into the light of Roman civilization; and all the history they have are a few scraps of saga.
At last they take a king of the family of the Gungings, Agilmund, son of Ayo, like the rest of the nations, says Jornandes; for they will be no more under duces, elective war-kings. And then follows a fresh saga (which repeats itself in the myths of several nations), how a woman has seven children at a birth, and throws them for shame into a pond; and Agilmund the king, riding by, stops to see, and turns them over with his lance; and one of the babes lays hold thereof; and the king says, ‘This will be a great man;’ and takes him out of the pond, and calls him Lamissohn, ‘the son of the fishpond,’ (so it is interpreted;) who grows to be a mighty Kemper-man, and slays an Amazon. For when they come to a certain river, the Amazons forbid them to pass, unless they will fight their she-champion; and Lamissohn swims over and fights the war-maiden, and slays her; and they go on and come into a large land and quiet, somewhere about Silesia, it would seem, and abode there a long while.
Then down on them come the savage Bulgars by night, and slay king Agilmund, and carry off his daughter; and Lamissohn follows them, and defeats them with a great slaughter, and is made king; and so forth: till at last they have got—how we shall never know—near history and historic lands. For when Odoacer and his Turklings and other confederates went up into Rugiland, the country north of Vienna, and destroyed the Rugians, and Fava their king, then the Lombards went down into the waste land of the Rugians, because it was fertile, and abode there certain years.
Then they moved on again, we know not why, and dwelt in the open plains, which are called feld. One says ‘Moravia;’ but that they had surely left behind. Rather it is the western plain of Hungary about Comorn. Be that as it may, they quarrelled there with the Heruli. Eutropius says that they paid the Herules tribute for the land, and offered to pay more, if the Herules would not attack them. Paul tells a wild saga, or story, of the Lombard king’s daughter insulting a Herule prince, because he was short of stature: he answered by some counter-insult; and she, furious, had him stabbed from behind through a window as he sat with his back to it. Then war came. The Herules, old and practised warriors, trained in the Roman armies, despised the wild Lombards, and disdained to use armour against them, fighting with no clothes save girdles. Rodulf their king, too certain of victory, sat playing at tables, and sent a man up a tree to see how the fight went, telling him that he would cut his head off if he said that the Herules fled; and then, touched by some secret anxiety as to the end, spoke the fatal words himself; and a madness from God came on the Herules; and when they came to a field of flax, they took the blue flowers for water, and spread out their arms to swim through, and were all slaughtered defencelessly.
Then they fought with the Suevi; and their kings’ daughters married with the kings of the Franks; and then ruled Aldwin (a name which Dr. Latham identifies with our English Eadwin, or Edwin, ‘the noble conqueror,’ though Grotius translates it Audwin, ‘the old or auld conqueror’), who brought them over the Danube into Pannonia, between the Danube and the Drave, about the year 526. Procopius says, that they came by a grant from the Emperor Justinian, who gave as wife to Aldwin a great niece of Dietrich the Good, carried captive with Witigis to Byzant.
Thus at last they too have reached the forecourt of the Roman Empire, and are waiting for their turn at the Nibelungen hoard. They have one more struggle, the most terrible of all; and then they will be for a while the most important people of the then world.
The Gepidæ are in Hungary before them, now a great people. Ever since they helped to beat the Huns at Netad, they have been holding Attila’s old kingdom for themselves and not attempting to move southward into the Empire; so fulfilling their name.
There is continual desultory war; Justinian, according to Procopius’ account, playing false with each, in order to make them destroy each other. Then, once (this is Procopius’ story, not Paul’s) they meet for a great fight; and both armies run away by a panic terror; and Aldwin the Lombard and Thorisend the Gepid are left alone, face to face.—It is the hand of God, say the two wild kings—God does not mean these two peoples to destroy each other. So they make a truce for two years. Then the Gepidæ call in Cutuguri, a Hunnic tribe, to help them; then, says Procopius, Aldwin, helped by Roman mercenaries, under Amalfrid the Goth, Theodoric’s great nephew, and brother-in-law of Aldwin, has a great fight with the Gepidæ. But Paul knows naught of all this: with him it is not Aldwin, but Alboin his son, who destroys the Gepidæ. Alboin, Grotius translates as Albe-win, ‘he who wins all:’ but Dr. Latham, true to his opinion that the Lombards and the Angles were closely connected, identifies it with our Ælfwine, ‘the fairy conqueror.’
Aldwin, Paul says, and Thorisend fought in the Asfeld,—wherever that may be,—and Alboin the Lombard prince slew Thorisend the Gepid prince, and the Gepidæ were defeated with a great slaughter.
Then young Alboin asked his father to let him sit at the table with him. No, he could not do that, by Lombard custom, till he has become son-at-arms to some neighbouring king.
Young Alboin takes forty thanes, and goes off to Thorisend’s court, as the guest of his enemy. The rites of hospitality are sacred. The king receives him, feasts him, seats him, the slayer of his son, in his dead son’s place. And as he looks on him he sighs; and at last he can contain no longer. The seat, he says, I like right well: but not the man who sits in it. One of his sons takes fire, and begins to insult the Lombards and their white gaiters. You Lombards have white legs like so many brood mares. A Lombard flashes up. Go to the Asfeld, and you will see how Lombard mares can kick. Your brother’s bones are lying about there like any sorry nag’s. This is too much; swords are drawn; but old Thorisend leaps up. He will punish the first man who strikes. Guests are sacred. Let them sit down again, and drink their liquor in peace. And after they have drunk, he gives Alboin his dead son’s weapons, and lets them go in peace, like a noble gentleman.
This grand old King dies in peace. Aldwin dies likewise, and to them succeed their sons, Alboin and Cunimund—the latter probably the prince who made the jest about the brood-mares—and they two will fight the quarrel out. Cunimund, says Paul, began the war—of course that is his story. Alboin is growing a great man; he has married a daughter of Clotaire, king of the Franks: and now he takes to his alliance the Avars, who have just burst into the Empire, wild people who afterwards founded a great kingdom in the Danube lands, and they ravage Cunimund’s lands. He will fight the Lombards first, nevertheless: he can settle the Avars after. He and his, says Paul, are slain to a man. Alboin makes a drinking-cup of his skull, carries off his daughter Rosamund (‘Rosy-mouth’), and a vast multitude of captives and immense wealth. The Gepidæ vanish from history; to this day (says Paul) slaves either of the Lombards or the Huns (by whom he rather means Avars); and Alboin becomes the hero of his time, praised even to Paul’s days in sagas, Saxon and Bavarian as well as Lombard, for his liberality and his glory. We shall see now how he has his chance at the Nibelungen hoard.
He has heard enough (as all Teutons have) of Italy, its beauty, and its weakness. He has sent five thousand chosen warriors to Narses, to help him against Totila and the Ostrogoths; and they have told him of the fair land and large, with its vineyards, olive-groves, and orchards, waste by war and pestilence, and crying out for human beings to come and till it once more.
There is no force left in Italy now, which can oppose him. Hardly any left in the Roman world. The plague is come; to add its horrors to all the other horrors of the time—the true old plague, as far as I can ascertain; bred, men say, from the Serbonian bog; the plague which visited Athens in the time of Socrates, and England in the seventeenth century: and after the plague a famine; woe on woe, through all the dark days of Justinian the demon-emperor. The Ostrogoths, as you know, were extinct as a nation. The two deluges of Franks and Allmen, which, under the two brothers Buccelin and Lothaire, all on foot (for the French, as now, were no horsemen), had rolled into Italy during the Gothic war, had been swallowed up, as all things were, in the fatal gulf of Italy. Lothaire and his army, returning laden with plunder, had rotted away like sheep by Lake Benacus (Garda now) of drink, and of the plague. Buccelin, entrenched among his plunder-waggons by the Volturno stream in the far south, had waited in vain for that dead brother and his dead host, till Narses came on him, with his army of trained Herules and Goths; the Francisc axe and barbed pike had proved useless before the arrows and the cavalry of the Romans; and no more than five Allmen, says one, remained of all that mighty host. Awful to think of: 75,000 men, they say, in one column, 100,000 in the other: and like water they flowed over the land; and like water they sank into the ground, and left no trace.
And now Narses, established as exarch of Ravenna, a sort of satrap, like those of the Persian Emperors, and representing the Emperor of Constantinople, was rewarded for all his conquests and labours by disgrace. Eunuch-like, he loved money, they said; and eunuch-like, he was harsh and cruel. The Empress Sophia, listening too readily to court-slanders, bade him ‘leave to men the use of arms, and come back to the palace, to spin among the maids.’—‘Tell her,’ said the terrible old imp, ‘I will spin her such a thread as she shall not unravel.’
He went, superseded by Longinus; but not to Constantinople. From Naples he sent (so says Paul the Deacon) to Alboin, and bade him come and try his fortune as king of Italy. He sent, too, (so says old Paul) presents to tempt the simple Lombard men—such presents as children would like—all fruits which grew in Italian orchards. Though the gold was gone, those were still left. Great babies they were, these Teutons, as I told you at the first; and Narses knew it well, and had used them for his ends for many a year.
Then were terrible signs seen in Italy by night; fiery armies fighting in the sky, and streams of blood aloft, foreshadowing the blood which should be shed.
Sent for or not, King Alboin came; and with him all his army, and a mighty multitude, women, and children, and slaves; Bavarians, Gepidæ, Bulgars, Sarmatæ, Pannonians, Sueves, and Noricans; whose names (says Paul) remain unto this day in the names of the villages where they settled. With Alboin, too, came Saxons, twenty thousand of them at the least, with wife and child. And Sigebert king of the Franks put Suevic settlers into the lands which the Saxons had left.
Alboin gave up his own Hungarian land to his friends the Avars, on the condition that he should have them back if he had to return. But return he never did, he nor his Lombard host. This is the end. The last invasion of Italy. The sowing, once for all, of an Italian people. Fresh nations were still pressing down to the rear of the Alps, waiting for their turn to enter the Fairy Land—not knowing, perhaps, that nothing was left therein, but ashes and blood:—but their chance was over now: a people were going into Italy who could hold what they got.
On Easter Tuesday, in the year of grace 568, they came, seemingly by the old road; the path of Alaric and Dietrich and the rest; the pass from Carniola, through which the rail runs now from Laybach to Trieste. It must have been white, in those days, with the bones of nigh 200 years. And they found bisons, aurochsen, in the mountains, Paul says, and is not surprised thereat, because there are plenty of them in Hungary near by. An old man told him he had seen a skin in which fifteen men might lie side by side. None, you must know, are left now, save a very few in the Lithuanian forests. Paul goes out of his way to note this fact, and so shall I.
Alboin left a strong guard in Friuli, and Paul’s ancestor among them, under Gisulf his nephew, and Marphrais or master of the horse, who now became duke of Friuli and warden of the marches, bound to prevent the Avars following them into their new abode. Then the human deluge spread itself slowly over the Lombard plains. None fought with them, and none gainsaid; for all the land was waste. The plague of three years before, and the famine which followed it had, says Paul, reduced the world into primæval silence. The villages had no inhabitants but dogs; the sheep were pasturing without a shepherd; the wild birds swarmed unhurt about the fields. The corn was springing self-sown under the April sun, the vines sprouting unpruned, the lucerne fields unmown, when the great Lombard people flowed into that waste land, and gave to it their own undying name.
The scanty population, worn out with misery, fled to rocks and islands in the lakes, and to the seaport towns; but they seem to have found the Lombards merciful masters, and bowed their necks meekly to the inevitable yoke. The towns alone seem to have offered resistance. Pavia Alboin besieged three years, and could not take. He swore some wild oath of utter destruction to all within, and would have kept it. At last they capitulated. As Alboin rode in at St. John’s gate, his horse slipped up; and could not rise, though the grooms beat him with their lance-butts. A ghostly fear came on the Lombards. ‘Remember, lord king, thy cruel oath, and cancel it; for there are Christian folk in the city.’ Alboin cancelled his oath, and the horse rose at once. So Alboin spared the people of Pavia, and entered the palace of old Dietrich the Ostrogoth, as king of Italy, as far as the gates of Rome and Ravenna.
And what was his end? Such an end as he deserved; earned and worked out for himself. A great warrior, he had destroyed many nations, and won a fair land. A just and wise governor, he had settled North Italy on some rough feudal system, without bloodshed or cruelty. A passionate savage, he died as savages deserve to die. You recollect Rosamund his Gepid bride? In some mad drinking-bout (perhaps cherishing still his old hatred of her family) he sent her her father’s skull full of wine, and bade her drink before all. She drank, and had her revenge.
The story has become world-famous from its horror: but I suppose I must tell it you in its place.—How she went to Helmichis the shield-bearer, and he bade her get Peredeo the Kemper-man to do the deed: and how Peredeo intrigued with one of her bower-maidens, and how Rosamund did a deed of darkness, and deceived Peredeo; and then said to him, I am thy mistress; thou must slay thy master, or thy master thee. And how he, like Gyges in old Herodotus’s tale, preferred to survive; and how Rosamund bound the king’s sword to his bedstead as he slept his mid-day sleep, and Peredeo did the deed; and how Alboin leapt up, and fought with his footstool, but in vain. And how, after he was dead, Rosamund became Helmichis’ leman, as she had been Peredeo’s, and fled with him to Ravenna, with all the treasure and Alpswintha, Alboin’s daughter by the Frankish wife; and how Longinus the exarch persuaded her to poison Helmichis, and marry him; and how she gave Helmichis the poisoned cup as he came out of the bath, and he saw by the light of her wicked eyes that it was poison, and made her drink the rest; and so they both fell dead. And then how Peredeo and the treasure were sent to the Emperor at Constantinople; and how Peredeo slew a great lion in the theatre; and how Tiberius, when he saw that he was so mighty a man of his hands, bade put his eyes out; and how he hid two knives in his sleeves, and slew with them two great chamberlains of the Emperor; and so died, like Samson, says old Paul, having got good weregeld for the loss of his eyes—a man for either eye.
And old Narses died at Rome, at a great age; and they wrapt him in lead, and sent him to Byzant with all his wealth. But some say that while he was still alive, he hid his wealth in a great cistern, and slew all who knew of it save one old man, and swore him never to reveal the place. But after Narses’ death that old man went to Constantinople to Tiberius the Cæsar, and told him how he could not die with that secret on his mind; and so Tiberius got all the money, so much that it took many days to carry away, and gave it all to the poor, as was his wont.
A myth—a fable: but significant, as one more attempt to answer the question of all questions in a Teuton’s mind—What had become of the Nibelungen hoard? What had become of all the wealth of Rome?
I asked in my first lecture, ‘What would become of the forest children, unless some kind saint or hermit took pity on them?’
I used the words saint and hermit with a special purpose. It was by the influence, actual or imaginary, of such, that the Teutons, after the destruction of the Roman empire, were saved from becoming hordes of savages, destroying each other by continual warfare.
What our race owes, for good and for evil, to the Roman clergy, I shall now try to set before you.
To mete out to them their due share of praise and blame is, I confess, a very difficult task. It can only be fulfilled by putting oneself, as far as possible, in their place, and making human allowance for the circumstances, utterly novel and unexpected, in which they found themselves during the Teutonic invasions. Thus, perhaps, we may find it true of some of them, as of others, that ‘Wisdom is justified of all her children.’
That is a hard saying for human nature. Justified of her children she may be, after we have settled which are to be her children and which not: but of all her children? That is a hard saying. And yet was not every man from the beginning of the world, who tried with his whole soul to be right, and to do good, a child of wisdom, of whom she at least will be justified, whether he is justified or not? He may have had his ignorances, follies, weaknesses, possibly crimes: but he served the purpose of his mighty mother. He did, even by his follies, just what she wanted done; and she is justified of all her children.
This may sound like optimism: but it also sounds like truth to any one who has fairly studied that fantastic page of history, the contrast between the old monks and our own heathen forefathers. The more one studies the facts, the less one is inclined to ask, ‘Why was it not done better?’—the more inclined to ask, ‘Could it have been done better?’ Were not the celibate clergy, from the fifth to the eighth centuries, exceptional agents fitted for an exceptional time, and set to do a work which in the then state of the European races, none else could have done? At least, so one suspects, after experience of their chronicles and legends, sufficient to make one thoroughly detest the evil which was in their system: but sufficient also to make one thoroughly love many of the men themselves.
A few desultory sketches, some carefully historical, the rest as carefully compiled from common facts, may serve best to illustrate my meaning.
The monk and clergyman, whether celibate or not, worked on the heathen generally in one of three capacities: As tribune of the people; as hermit or solitary prophet; as colonizer; and in all three worked as well as frail human beings are wont to do, in this most piecemeal world.
Let us look first at the Hermits. All know what an important part they play in old romances and ballads. All are not aware that they played as important a part in actual history. Scattered through all wildernesses from the cliffs of the Hebrides to the Sclavonian marches, they put forth a power, uniformly, it must be said, for good.
Every one knows how they appear in the old romances.—How some Sir Bertrand or other, wearied with the burden of his sins, stumbles on one of these Einsiedler, ‘settlers alone,’ and talks with him; and goes on a wiser and a better man. How he crawls, perhaps, out of some wild scuffle, ‘all-to bebled,’ and reeling to his saddlebow; and ‘ever he went through a waste land, and rocks rough and strait, so that it him seemed he must surely starve; and anon he heard a little bell, whereat he marvelled; and betwixt the water and the wood he was aware of a chapel, and an hermitage; and there a holy man said mass, for he was a priest, and a great leech, and cunning withal. And Sir Bertrand went in to him and told him all his case—how he fought Sir Marculf for love of the fair Ellinore, and how the king bade part them, and how Marculf did him open shame at the wineboard, and how he went about to have slain him privily, but could not; and then how he went and wasted Marculf’s lands, house with byre, kine with corn, till a strong woman smote him over the head with a quern-stone, and all-to broke his brain-pan;’ and so forth—the usual story of mad passion, drink, pride, revenge.
‘And there the holy man a-read him right godly doctrine, and shrived him, and gave him an oath upon the blessed Gospels, that fight he should not, save in his liege lord’s quarrel, for a year and a day. And there he abode till he was well healed, he and his horse.’
Must not that wild fighting Bertrand have gone away from that place a wiser and a better man? Is it a matter to be regretted, or otherwise, that such men as the hermit were to be found in that forest, to mend Bertrand’s head and his morals, at the same time? Is it a matter to be regretted, or otherwise, that after twenty or thirty years more of fighting and quarrelling and drinking, this same Sir Bertrand—finding that on the whole the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, were poor paymasters, and having very sufficient proof, in the ends of many a friend and foe, that the wages of sin are death—‘fell to religion likewise, and was a hermit in that same place, after the holy man was dead; and was made priest of that same chapel; and died in honour, having succoured many good knights, and wayfaring men’?
One knows very well that it would not be right now; that it is not needed now. It is childish to repeat that, when the question is, was it right then—or, at least, as right as was possible then? Was it needed then—or, at least, the nearest thing to that which was needed?
If it was, why should not wisdom be justified of all her children?
One hopes that she was; for certainly, if any men ever needed to be in the right, lest they should be of all men most miserable, it was these same old hermits. Praying and preaching continually, they lived on food which dogs would not eat, in dens in which dogs ought not to live. They had their reasons. Possibly they knew their own business best. Possibly also they knew their neighbour’s business somewhat; they knew that such generations as they lived in could not be taught, save by some extravagant example of this kind, some caricature, as it were, of the doctrines which were to be enforced. Nothing less startling, perhaps, could have touched the dull hearts, have convinced the dull brains, of fierce, ignorant, and unreasoning men.
Ferocity, lawlessness, rapine, cruelty, and—when they were glutted and debauched by the spoils of the Roman empire—sensuality, were the evils which were making Europe uninhabitable for decent folk, and history—as Milton called it—a mere battle of kites and crows. What less than the example of the hermit—especially when that hermit was a delicate and high-born woman—could have taught men the absolute superiority of soul to body, of spiritual to physical force, of spiritual to physical pleasure, and have said to them, not in vain words, but solid acts—‘All that you follow is not the way of life. The very opposite to it is the way of life. The wages of sin are death; and you will find them so,—in this life the victims of your own passions, and of the foes whom your crimes arouse, and in life to come of hell for ever. But I tell you I have no mind to go to hell. I have a mind to go to heaven; and I know my mind right well. If the world is to be such as this, and the rulers thereof such as you, I will flee from you. I will not enter into the congregation of sinners, neither will I cast in my lot with the bloodthirsty. I will be alone with God and His universe. I will go to the mountain cave or to the ocean cliff, and there, while the salt wind whistles through my hair, I will be stronger than you, safer than you, richer than you, happier than you. Richer than you, for I shall have for my companion the beatific vision of God, and of all things and beings God-like, fair, noble, just, and merciful. Stronger than you, because virtue will give me a power over the hearts of men such as your force cannot give you; and you will have to come to my lonely cell, and ask me to advise you, and teach you, and help you against the consequences of your own sins. Safer than you, because God in whom I trust will protect me: and if not, I have still the everlasting life of heaven, which this world cannot give or take away. So go your ways, fight and devour one another, the victims of your own lusts. I am minded to be a good man; and to be that, I will give up—as you have made all other methods impossible for me—all which seems to make life worth having’? Oh! instead of finding fault with such men; instead of, with vulturine beak, picking out the elements of Manichæism, of conceit, of discontent, of what not human frailty and ignorance, which may have been in them, let us honour the enormous moral force which enabled them so to bear witness that not the mortal animal, but the immortal spirit, is the Man; and that when all which outward circumstance can give is cast away, the Man still lives for ever, by God, and in God.
And they did teach that lesson. They were good, while other men were bad; and men saw the beauty of goodness, and felt the strength of it, and worshipped it in blind savage admiration. Read Roswede’s Vitæ Patrum Eremiticorum; read the legends of the hermits of the German forests; read Colgan’s Lives of the Irish Saints; and see whether, amid all fantastic, incredible, sometimes immoral myths, the goodness of life of some one or other is not the historic nucleus, round which the myths, and the worship of the saint, have crystallized and developed.
Take, for instance, the exquisite hymn of St. Bridget, which Colgan attributes to the sixth century: though it is probably much later; that has nothing to do with the argument:—
‘Bridget, the victorious, she loved not the world;
She sat on it as a gull sits on the ocean;
She slept the sleep of a captive mother,
Mourning after her absent child.She suffered not much from evil tongues;
She held the blessed faith of the Trinity;
Bridget, the mother of my Lord of Heaven,
The best among the sons of the Lord.She was not querulous, nor malevolent;
She loved not the fierce wrangling of women;
She was not a backbiting serpent, or a liar;
She sold not the Son of God for that which passes away.She was not greedy of the goods of this life;
She gave away without gall, without slackness;
She was not rough to wayfaring men;
She handled gently the wretched lepers.She built her a town in the plains (of Kildare);
And dead, she is the patroness of many peoples.’
I might comment much on this quotation. I might point out how St. Bridget is called the mother of the Lord, and by others, the Mary of the Irish, the ‘Automata coeli regina,’ and seems to have been considered at times as an avatar or incarnation of the blessed Virgin. I might more than hint how that appellation, as well as the calling of Christ ‘the best of the sons of the Lord,’ in an orthodox Catholic hymn, seems to point to the remnants of an older creed, possibly Buddhist, the transition whence towards Catholic Christianity was slow and imperfect. I might make merry over the fact that there are many Bridgets, some say eleven; even as there are three or four St. Patricks; and raise learned doubts as to whether such persons ever existed, after that Straussian method of pseudo-criticism which cometh not from above, from the Spirit of God, nor yet indeed from below, from the sound region of fact, but from within, out of the naughtiness of the heart, defiling a man. I might weaken, too, the effect of the hymn by going on with the rest of it, and making you smile at its childish miracles and portents; but I should only do a foolish thing, by turning your minds away from the broad fact that St. Bridget, or various persons who got, in the lapse of time, massed together under the name of St. Bridget, were eminently good women.
It matters little whether these legends are historically correct. Their value lies in the moral of them. And as for their real historical correctness, the Straussian argument that no such persons existed, because lies are told of them, is, I hold, most irrational. The falsehood would not have been invented unless it had started in a truth. The high moral character ascribed to them would never have been dreamed of by persons who had not seen living instances of that character. Man’s imagination does not create; it only reproduces and recombines its own experience. It does so in dreams. It does so, as far as the moral character of the saint is concerned, in the legend; and if there had not been persons like St. Bridget in Ireland, the wild Irish could never have imagined them.
Therefore it matters little to a wise man, standing on the top of Croagh Patrick, the grandest mountain perhaps, with the grandest outlook, in these British isles, as he looks on the wild Irish there on pattern days, up among the Atlantic clouds, crawling on bare and bleeding knees round St. Patrick’s cell,—it matters little, I say, to the wise man, whether St. Patrick himself owned the ancient image which is worshipped on that mountain peak, or the ancient bell which till late years hung in the sanctuary,—such a strange oblong bell as the Irish saints carried with them to keep off the demons—the magic bells which appear (as far as I am aware) in the legends of no country till you get to Tartary and the Buddhists;—such a bell as came (or did not come) down from heaven to St. Senan; such a bell as St. Fursey sent flying through the air to greet St. Cuanady at his devotions when he could not come himself; such a bell as another saint, wandering in the woods, rang till a stag came out of the covert, and carried his burden for him on his horns. It matters as little to the wise man whether that bell belonged to St. Patrick, as whether all these child’s dreams are dreams. It matters little to him, too, whether St. Patrick did, or did not stand on that mountain peak, ‘in the spirit and power of Elias’ (after whom it was long named), fasting, like Elias, forty days and forty nights, wrestling with the demons of the storm, and the snakes of the fen, and the Peishta-more (the monstrous Python of the lakes), which assembled at the magic ringing of his bell, till he conquered not by the brute force of a Hercules and Theseus, and the monster-quellers of old Greece, but by the spiritual force of which (so the text was then applied) it is written, ‘This kind cometh not out but by prayer and fasting,’ till he smote the evil things with ‘the golden rod of Jesus,’ and they rolled over the cliff, in hideous rout, and perished in the Atlantic far below. But it matters much to a wise man that under all these symbols (not childish at all, but most grand, to the man who knows the grand place of which they are told), there is set forth the victory of a good and beneficent man over evil, whether of matter or of spirit. It matters much to him that that cell, that bell, that image are tokens that if not St. Patrick, some one else, at least, did live and worship on that mountain top, in remote primæval times, in a place in which we would not, perhaps could not, endure life a week. It matters much to him that the man who so dwelt there, gained such a power over the minds of the heathen round him, that five millions of their Christian descendants worship him, and God on account of him, at this day.