Return to the Baltic

by Hilaire Belloc

  He could not have written a sentence more wounding. It was like the murder of a god, for indeed the Codex was worshipped by all those who also worshipped the Teutonic tradition in this country, and that, of course, included the English, learned and unlearned alike, of the last generation, the contemporaries of Freeman and Green. They were convinced to a man that the English came over from Germany in little boats, killed all the people in England, and then settled on the empty land to be happy ever after. This Strange myth was dogma in my youth at Oxford. How much of it remains to-day in that place, I know not, but anyhow the passion for the Codex Argenteus went with the Story of the English coming over in little boats, killing everybody in England, and complacently taking the place of the extirpated ‘Welch.’ It went with the passion for Prussia which filled the Oxford of that day and Still runs Strongly underground in the Oxford of 1938.

  When the Prussians went mad the other day and began persecuting the Jews with a surprising thoroughness, I was at the pains of visiting Oxford (a thing I do not often do) in order to watch the spiritual conflict between love of Prussia and loyalty to the Jewish alliance. I discovered with interest that love of Prussia had won. Not that the Prussian persecution of the unfortunate Jews was accepted by Oxford—far from it. Oxford was all for the Jews in that battle, and is so Still; but Oxford looked on the episode as a sort of lapse on the part of its Prussian heroes who Still retain most of their heroic qualities. Berlin is still a sister, though an erring sister. Berlin is to Oxford to-day much what Rome was to the Puseyites of 100 years ago. Oxford prays secretly for the day when the Prussians will be saved from their anti-Semitism and restored to the old complete sympathy with their ancient cousins.

  Yes, that is so. But the Prussians do not look forward to any such day. They admire England but they do not love her. They have not yet any contempt for England, but they are convinced of England’s decline. They Still regard England as Aryan—which is very good of them. They do not confuse her with the disgusting French, the despicable Italians and the rest. But that Strong alliance which bound Berlin to England for more than two lifetimes, though it was not shaken by the Great War, is to-day shaken by two things: the setting up of an absolute monarchy, a despotism—a thing abhorrent to the aristocratic English temper—and this recent attack of Prussia on the Jewish people.

  §

  The Codex Argenteus which is thus leading me astray from my proper purpose in these pages is not shown to the public save in one specimen open page under glass. This I approached and duly venerated, as being, of all the relics I am prepared to worship, that relic which affects me most.

  ‘Whatever your date may be, old thing,’ said I to myself, ‘whatever truths or falsehoods have been mixed up with you, you are venerable; indeed you are the Ancient of Days. You have a long white beard. You move me to awe and adoration. You ought not to be where you are; you do not belong to Sweden, you belong to Bohemia. You were stolen by that great soldier, Gustavus Adolphus, you were taken away from your native Prague and set down here amid the forests of the North, with which by this time you are so much associated that many people have forgotten your first home. You are not plumb authentic, but you are very, very old, and you lie at the root of many things.’

  I had sworn that I would see with my own eyes before I died the Codex Argenteus, and I have fulfilled my vow.

  It was not a vow very difficult to fulfil, not even so difficult as a vow to drink at the springs of the main European rivers, the Rhone, the Rhine, the Seine, the Loire, the Thames, the Garonne, the Danube, in order to have communion with their tutelary gods—which vow I fulfilled.

  It was not a vow so difficult to carry out as the vow to tell the truth about history, which is a whole-time job and can never be completed though a man should live 1,000 years (and what is more important, keep his faculties to his 999th birthday. For mere living is no good at all if one falls into second childhood, as might well happen to a man after 900).

  It was not a vow so difficult to keep as the vow to cross the Channel in a small boat, single-handed under my own sail, and back again: dozens have done that—hundreds have done that.

  It was not a vow so difficult to keep as the vow to walk from St. Sebastian to Santiago, or as the vow to walk from Toulouse to Saragossa. Anyone can see this page of the Codex Argenteus by paying his railway fare to Upsala. There are no asperities, there are no dragons. Nevertheless I am as glad at having done it as if I had performed a feat.

  And, by the way, in all this wandering round the business of the Codex Argenteus I have not yet told you why it is called by that name. It is because its lettering is painted in silver upon sheets of purple background, and a very fine show it makes even now that it is faded and fatigued.

  Here in this plain of Upsala I recalled Woden. He was certainly a man although, as the chronicler Strikingly says, ‘He became a God.’ Yes! He was a man living here in south Sweden and perhaps of the Gothic blood. Little did he know what fame would be his when he had disappeared! He became Odin; he came to sport two ravens on his shoulders; he got grafted on to tribes far away; he became the Universal Father and at last he became a fine, great Prussian Anti-god.

  He is that to-day and no doubt there are many other adventures before him.

  Saxo Grammaticus, my kind and constant guide in the matters of the early Baltic world—a guide all the more valuable in that some sensible people have translated him into English—Saxo Grammaticus, I say, tells us all about Woden with such particularity that though it was but an ancient legend in his time it certainly came from a real root as do all ancient legends, including, of course, the legend of Glastonbury and of King Arthur and of Joseph of Arimathea and Avalon and tout le tremblement. The old Stories about Woden which Saxo Grammaticus wrote down have a vividness which smells of reality. Also some of his adventures, especially his adventures in matrimony, were ridiculous enough to be true. Also he was the first, apparently, of those who crossed the Baltic to do what mischief they could on the further shore, a Swedish habit which continued till only the other day. As I believe in Hercules and many another hero before him so I believe in Woden. There he lived in his wooden hut in the plain of Upsala and something about him so impressed his contemporaries that his Story became rooted and grew. I say again he would be astonished if he came back and saw what had happened to him. He would think that times had greatly improved.

  Yet in Upsala of all Swedish towns there is the least memory of Woden. There is no permanent memorial of Woden at Upsala. When the missionaries were translating the names of the week for the savages whom they so painfully educated into civilisation they gave Woden the middle of the week, and so we have Wednesday. By right they should have given that name rather to Thursday, for that was the day of Jove and Jove was Woden’s opposite number in the south; but then Jove was the master of thunder and that function was already taken by Thor and so Woden was pushed out till he had to take the day of Mercury instead of the day of Jove, and anyhow Woden was a presiding god for merchants, I believe, so there was something of Mercury about him.

  In these old tales of Saxo’s one has hints of a chronology. Not only in Saxo but in other chroniclers you get the same hints accounting for the generations of half legendary heroes. They do not, of course, correspond even roughly, but scholars have made a sort of average, I am told, and it may be that Woden lived somewhere in the second century. Peace to him anyhow. I bear him no grudge for the follies and extravagances of those who now want to revive him again.

  §

  As I wandered round Upsala Church I first paid obeisance to a dark Sarcophagus on which was the name of Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Visionary; next I admired as fine a piece of post-renaissance woodwork as I have seen in my life—the great Gilded Pulpit, one of the most striking things in the north; then I bought a photograph of the Codex and as I paid for it, trying to explain that I wanted to have three copies, a young man, a Student at the University, came up to me and translated for me into English from Swedish.
For I was here once more after forty-three years even more ignorant of Swedish than I had been on my first visit. It is inexcusable, this blank ignorance of men’s speech in the land one visits; yet I have gone half over the world and all over Europe in that darkness and somehow carried along.

  §

  The learning of languages is a great duty, and certainly a man who is ignorant of languages carries a heavy handicap. I know something about it for there never was such a bad linguist. I have had to do with French people all my life, off and on. I have read plenty of French, yet with what difficulty do I write it! I cannot even send a short message in French without asking someone better at the language than I to read what I have written and correct the mistakes. German I have none, Scandinavian in any form I have none, Flemish I have none, of Italian next to none, of Castilian next to none and of Catalan less. I can read and speak none of the Celtic tongues. Though I once began trying to learn Hebrew I soon gave it up, from laziness or finding other things to do—I forget which. Yet I have travelled far and wide in countries of foreign speech. I have managed it by picking up a very small vocabulary which I would forget again as soon as I had left the place. I say it not in boasting but in shame.

  If you want to get hold of a foreign language when you are travelling your best quarry for a vocabulary is the newspaper. There seems to be a jargon common to all newspapers in the modern world. There are all sorts of fixed phrases recurring throughout the Press of Europe and America. They have no intellectual value but the journalist cannot get on without them and they are at least of this use, that when you have spotted one it helps you to translate the words into your own language.

  Every now and then they get a new word or no phrase into this jargon. Just now they are running ‘ideology ’ and as for the word ‘democracy ’ it has spread like a rash; you cannot get away from it and it is made to Stand for pretty well anything, from the Strange, outrageous and almost incomprehensible barbarism of Communist Moscow to the highly organised system of England with its firm class government based on the worship of rich men: from America with its powerful monarchy to the unfortunate French under their vile Parliamentarians.

  Yet after all the word ‘democracy’ has a meaning. It means government by the people: a thing well enough in very small communities where the citizens can meet in one place and discuss affairs—a system which is excellent and just wherever it is possible to use it. But, alas, those places are very few: secluded mountain valleys, such as lie in the Alpine and Pyrenean hills; certain islands; and that is about all. There has happened to this word ‘democracy’ what has also happened to the word ‘gentleman.’ It connotes vaguely something supposed to be jolly and is made to cover almost anything which the user of it thinks jolly and likes to imagine himself connected with.

  I mourn for the spoiling of the word ‘gentleman’ more than I do for the spoiling of the word ‘democracy’ for a gentleman was a highly definite thing. He was a specially English product; he was an animal peculiar to this island, hateful to most foreigners, admired of his own fellow citizens; and now that highly specialised and useful term is being used sometimes as the equivalent of the word ‘good,’ sometimes the equivalent of the mere word ‘male.’ It cannot be helped. The murder is done. But what a pity!

  Query: Can a man be a gentleman if he cannot ride a horse?

  I leave the point to debaters upon etiquette. George IV said that a gentleman was a man who had a little Greek and did not fiddle with his clothes, but that is too wide a definition. It would apply to Odysseus when he came out of the water after his raft wreck and yet Odysseus was not a gentleman, he was a king which is a very different thing. I think he would have disliked a gentleman, and our gentry would certainly have disliked him. On the other hand there was something of the gentleman about the local ruler whom he was off to meet—Nausicaa’s father. If you will remember, we have seen that big-wig upon a throne and drinking wine out of a golden cup.

  §

  While I am on this point of language, let me urge how useful it would be to the comity of nations if the funny spellings were dropped or translated into some common form—the Welsh ‘w,’ the Slav ‘cz’; and a kind word in passing upon that horrible habit of putting funny little marks over letters: dots, circles, half-moons and strokes.

  There are the Greek accents, of which nobody knows anything to-day except the rough and soft breathings, that is the aspirate and the non-aspirate, and, in some degree, the circumflex. They are, for the rest, worthless; yet people go on printing them in Greek texts though nine times out of ten they are without any meaning to us. What is more, people pride themselves on knowing the Greek accents. The man who cannot get his accents right (and Heaven knows I never can save by laboriously copying a text) is ridiculed for ignorance though they only very rarely make any difference to the meaning and we don’t even know what effect they had on pronunciation. They were invented long after the classical Greek had formed and set. They were invented, I am told, in Alexandria as guides to teach barbarians the right way to talk, but they certainly have failed to do that.

  The French accents are a bit of a bore but at least still in active use over the educated world; the French system of accents is a living thing and the French language is so very widely spread that they are taken for granted everywhere.

  But look at the accents stuck on to the consonants and vowels of the Czechs and the rest of them. Lord, how they confuse counsel! The worst sinners in this matter are the Arabic scholars. Western men who know Arabic are never at rest until they have re-spelled some name to which we had all got used. Even the Koran which we had known for generations as the Koran (I am told it means ’ the book’) appears spelled in a novel fashion with a Q and there are apostrophes and there are all manner of things disfiguring our inherited way of spelling Islamic names. The motive is plain enough. It is effect. It is showing off. They had far better leave the thing alone.

  §

  Thus my ignorance of languages, which I do so deeply and honestly deplore, cuts me off from the literature of half the white world. For translation, save in rare miracles like Bédier’s or Urquhart’s or the English version of Le Sage, never comes off. Here I am in Scandinavia, and I know that I miss worlds by not knowing Scandinavian literature, though, it is true, they accuse it of gloom and for that I have no use: it is an uncreative neutral thing is gloom.

  Some advance the theory that the gloom of modern Scandinavian letters is due to the long nights and the equally inhuman length of the summer days. It may be so, but I doubt it. It is true that there is something despairing and diabolic about the oldest pagan traditions and in the era when that northern world was peopled with fantastic figures of Terror; but during their brief centuries of full Faith the Scandinavians seem to have been happy enough, and certainly the Danes are happy enough to-day. Undoubtedly gloom recaptured them when the Faith waned. There is something about the endless repetitive similar woodland, the endless stretches of dark water, the endless hours of the winter nights, which makes men brood after a fashion unknown to the South.

  UPSALA: THE GOLDEN PULPIT.

  To face page 114.

  I suppose that is why Sweden has produced her famous mystics also. It was a moving thing to come in the Church of Upsala upon that draped sarcophagus: and on it the Striking words ’ Emmanuel Swedenborg.’ He saw things of his own kind, but he saw them late in life: they were very real to him and they have taken root in the minds of others. After a fashion he is a sort of eighteenth-century cousin of St. Brigitt, but I am afraid he was more concerned with devils than she was with angels. Anyhow, they both saw things which were not of this world.

  The most famous of modern Swedes in the way of writing, Ibsen, is, as the Americans put it, ‘no packet of fun.’ He does not cultivate laughter nor provoke it. To quote the Americans again in one of their less known poetical masterpieces:

  ‘That prophet from far Scandinavia

  Was shocked by the world’s bad behaviour.’


  Well, there they are, all in a line, beginning with the witches and trolls and the pagans who fought serpents and the false gods, half sublime, half grotesque, and carrying it into our own time with no great interlude of joy and yet with what a sense of beauty!

  For though he cannot read a hundred words of their tongue the ignorant foreigner can have communion with the Scandinavians through the eye, for in Sweden as in Denmark men have loved and made plastic beauty in marble and bronze.

  The Statues

  §

  Most striking is the way in which both Swedes and Danes have manifested this capacity for creative sculpture. You see it everywhere. It is a tradition dating from rather more than 100 years ago, and typified in that famous name of Thorwaldsen. In the public gardens of their towns, in their newer churches, in their Streets, you have good figure work everywhere, an almost unfailing taste, and even that which they have been reproached for lacking—life.

  But will this last? Will our descendants find the Scandinavians Still possessed of such sobriety, proportion, and native feeling in the Scandinavian Statuary of a lifetime hence?

  There is a good deal to make one doubt it. To begin with, excellence in any art seems, in modern times at least, to have wandered about from place to place and changed from generation to generation. Remember how the Netherlands, and more particularly the northern Netherlands, almost suddenly produced a school of painting more living and more real than any other in Europe. Remember how it rapidly ended.

  There are no laws governing these things. Men paint, draw, build, carve at the very highest level; their sons sink to dull and lifeless things at the best, or mere unnatural ugliness at the worst. The time in which we live would seem to be one in which a reaction against beauty is at work, so that fashion, the most powerful of social agents, leads men to prefer the barbarous and the repulsive for the sake of novelty. More than any other civilisation, the civilisation of modern Europe since the Renaissance has proved unstable in its rules and forms of external expression. There seems to have been no norm save a search for a new Style, and now this has run to its extreme novelty sought for its own sake; novelty boasting of shock as a test of its power; novelty repudiating every tradition simply because tradition, the necessary cement of society, has come to weary the maker and his audience. The thing has gone far in my own trade of writing, and has gone very far in architecture. There, those who retain a faculty for criticism exclaim and protest, but nothing seems to reverse the current, and each new thing is more detestable than the last; so that one knows not whether to compare the Style of something intended for human habitation with a factory, a prison or a nightmare.