Return to the Baltic

by Hilaire Belloc

  The Canal

  I have just spoken of the Tower of Gustavus Vasa along the road across from sea to sea. When I say ‘road,’ I do not mean a hard road, I mean a passage or way.

  It was, like all communications in Sweden, a waterway, which after all sorts of adventures, withdrawals, renewed attempts, and so on, was completed at last in the eighteenth century, if I remember right, possibly the last bit of work in the nineteenth.

  It is an artificial linking-up of four rivers and the two great lakes, and is called the Gotha Canal. It is very well known nowadays because it is well served by tourist Steamers. The Americans who come to Europe have heard all about it, and wisely use it, for it is a fine piece of travel, taking one from the Baltic to the North Sea in about two days, sleeping on board, and stopping at many places on the way.

  You Start from Stockholm, you go down the Molar till you get to the sea, then you come across down the coast to the entry of the next river. You go up that as far as it is navigable and it is there that the Tower of Gustavus Vasa was built, to command the main traffic across Sweden from east to west.

  At the end of the navigable water the road took up the task and joined the headwaters of another Stream, and this led you down to the first of the great lakes, the Wetter. To-day the Canal crosses the watershed by a series of little locks and you thread through fields and orchards, high up above the world, in the little steamer which just fits the locks and serves this traffic. It is a leisurely and charming way of seeing the country. I do not know whether it existed (this passenger Steamer service, I mean, not the Canal) when I was first in Stockholm, at any rate I did not see it, and I was glad to see it now.

  The Castle of Vadstena is not at the mouth of this Canal, which comes out on the lake at Motala, but it is close by and I fancy it was this passage across from sea to sea combining the river and the road which suggested the fortification of Vadstena. Perhaps there was a natural harbour here, though small, or perhaps it was the European reputation of the place through St. Brigitt. I do not know, but anyhow Vadstena became the jumping-off place for crossing the lake.

  Vadstena

  §

  The Castle of Vadstena is a noble thing indeed. And if one may say so, without offending the pride of Sweden, exceptional for the landscape in which it Stands. It has all the strength of that Renaissance in which it arose. The moat about it and the sheer walls, their unbroken height, give a unity which most defensive works of that age lack.

  It was, like most royal castles of the Transition from the Middle Ages, as much a Palace as a stronghold, but a Stronghold it was, and a formidable one.

  The lake may indeed be crossed from any point, but the main passage from sea to sea running as it did down the Motala River close at hand, justified the building of Vadstena here. It fulfils its ancient purpose no longer, but its grandeur endures: the sense of creative power and of man impressing his seal.

  Vadstena Castle went half out of use in its first grandeur: it has never recovered the old part which it played in the life of the country, and that is a pity. I hope its use will be restored. The Bernadottes should be highly praised if they bring Vadstena to life again, and they may be better known by it a century hence than by the name of Wagram, on which field began the quarrel between the Marshal and his maker. Also the Bernadotte of Wagram said a biting thing which must have wounded the Emperor. For after the Archduke had withdrawn safely enough but cut off from his capital, the disappointed Bernadotte decried that day, saying, ‘What a victory! No prisoners; no guns!’ And Wagram is one more out of a million warnings against prophecy. Who, on the evening of that battle, guessed in all Europe that the man commanding on the right would end by providing yet another dynasty far off beyond the Baltic? Or for that matter could have imagined in 1809 that only four years later the man who so commanded the right wing would betray his master at Leipzic; wherein (but as a fruit of Moscow) the remaking of Europe crumbled. And Lord! the chaos into which it has fallen now!

  §

  Vadstena Castle is wonderful enough. But there is in Vadstena something more wonderful and perhaps even more enduring: it is the presence of St. Brigitt.

  The relics of the old civilised time when all Western Christendom was Catholic are like submerged rocks under the sea in that they have disappeared from the eye, and the superficial observer knows nothing about them; also in that no one even hears of them unless it is his business to chart those waters. But where they differ from submerged rocks is that it is a pleasure, though a melancholy pleasure, to discover them.

  I discovered one such in Vadstena, the home of a woman who was once as famous as it is possible for any woman to be and who is now half forgotten, though not, I am glad to say, in her own place.

  This woman is St. Brigitt of Sweden, and her centre of action whence her influence radiated, and, I suppose, in a hidden way radiates Still, was Vadstena, on that great lake which is almost an inland sea and under the shadow of that great castle which is one of the noblest buildings in Europe.

  §

  There are two St. Bridgets, and they often get mixed up in people’s minds. There is St. Bridget of Ireland, who lived in the very moment of the Conversion, at the origins of universal Christendom, and who was a sort of twin pillar with St. Patrick; and there is this other St. Brigitt of Sweden.

  I suppose the two names are the same, and perhaps the second was called after the first, but most people nowadays who write on the subject at all are great sticklers for a separate spelling and for calling the one Bridget and the other Brigitt. But I care not. May both of them bridge the gulf for me between this world and the next.

  I came upon St. Brigitt in Vadstena, by a sort of accident, not expecting her. I had heard of her all my life but I knew nothing of her connection, for I had never read details of her life. She was one of those people who counted so enormously at the very end of united Christendom and were then half eclipsed by the earthquake and ruin called the Reformation. She belonged to quite the end of the Middle Ages, as did the perhaps unknown and much debated (or perhaps recently established) author of the Imitation.

  §

  She was not what one might call your ordinary saint by any means. She was a woman of the world, a lady of great family by birth and by marriage and the mother of eight children. And, by the way, for rank ignorance of the past and of the nature of their own country commend me to people who wonder why so many names in the list of saints come from the wealthier classes of the Middle Ages

  You might as well wonder why so many talked-about politicians (who are not to be compared with saints) come from the wealthier classes in England.

  How many saints there are not canonised Heaven only knows (in the literal sense of that phrase); but obviously in a society such as that of the Middle Ages the names that would be publicly and commonly known would be the names of those who had leisure, whether through social position or through the monastic institution and the widespread and beneficent endowments of the Church—which covered every class of society. But all this is by the way. To return to St. Brigitt.

  Her point was that she had revelations and visions and that they had a vast effect upon her contemporaries. I have read none of them and even if I had I should not speak of them, for revelations are a kind of thing I do not understand—which is not to say that I do not believe in their reality, for I do. There is plenty of room for illusion in such matters, but it is far more unintelligent to deny visions than to examine them, and if you examine them you are often forced to admit them. Things of this sort have reality behind them half the time, whether they be common ghost stories or exalted experiences of supernatural things.

  VADSTENA CASTLE.

  To face page 138.

  St. Brigitt was, I am glad to say, an ugly woman. She was therefore presumably fairly happy. It has been said that two things destroy character through vanity—literary fame in a man and beauty in a woman. St. Brigitt had plenty of literary fame before she died, but no beauty—if I am to judge
by a remarkable wooden statue of her, most lively and capturing, which the Swedes have set up again in her poor old desecrated convent church. For the Swedes, being Lutherans and not Calvinists, have a certain attachment to images in worship, and they are returning to them, which is a point in their favour. It is always worth while remembering the formula that ‘The Faith was saved and continued by the use of images.’ It is a phrase to be repeated, because it challenges and tells the truth.

  But no matter: St. Brigitt is there now again, carved, it is thought, by a German who may have been nearly contemporary; it is certainly a living portrait of a real person. It is the portrait of one not pretending to looks at all: heavy, and what used to be called ‘homely ’; an excellent matron with a broad quiet face. She is sitting, and has on her lap an open book, to symbolise her title to fame, the record of her visions. She impressed me very much, and I think she would impress anyone who saw her thus, returned to her native place. She is not actually smiling, but she might smile at any moment were she not of wood. Her people have returned not only to the image of her, but to a more lively memory of her, in which they are to be congratulated.

  §

  She is overshadowed by the Vasa Dynasty, just as her convent and shrine here is overshadowed by the castle.

  I wonder what she would have thought of Gustavus and his loot, of his usurpation and the glory of his nephew as a champion for the destruftion of all that she had cherished?

  I should like to have heard her in a vision giving me her views of all that, of the patrimony of the poor destroyed and of her country torn away from the unity of Christendom.

  Particularly would I have liked to hear her on the subject of Christina who gave up her throne partly in protest against the wrong turning her family had taken, but more I think because she wanted to be free. St. Brigitt on the Vasas would be much more interesting than the Vasas on St. Brigitt.

  §

  A great many things are happening by way of change in these our days and one of them is the partial recovery of things long lost and submerged. Among these things much the most important are the forgotten, or half-forgotten, saints. The worse the world gets (and it is putting on pace in that direction) the more we have need of them.

  §

  The name of St. Brigitt recalls to me that constantly recurring thing, the ‘fault’ in the succession of human moods, like the geological ‘faults ’ in the rocks of the earth.

  The European mind comes to a sudden break, Starts all over again and begins doing quite new things. The men who were old men when Luther pinned his interesting (and, on the whole, orthodox) theses on the University chapel gates at Wittenberg had been full of St. Brigitt. Her fame overshadowed all the men of the last Middle Ages; her very great figure was part of their minds. The men who were boys when Luther pinned up his (on the whole, orthodox) theses (there is not one that has not been defended by the orthodox in its time) lived to see a generation which knew nothing of St. Brigitt. There had been an earthquake and a big fall of Strata: a ‘fault’ in European history. Yet she endures, as do all those who have founded orders.

  I have not the scholarship to discuss the origin of her foundation, but I know that it is a living thing to-day, and that you find it throughout Christendom—but not in her own country.

  In so much she has survived (and indeed the saints tend to survive) in the Brigittine nuns. Yes, the saints survive. Their names live among men and when those names are eclipsed for a time they shine out again. But that great change which put up a screen between us and the Middle Ages makes one wonder whether, after the earthquake of our own time, which is still proceeding, there will not be another such fault?

  If you were to come back to Europe in the year 2100 what would you see and hear and feel?

  When next you go to Sweden call upon St. Brigitt; leave your card upon her before leaving.

  Not that the leaving of cards is a good habit, it is a bad one; and, now that calls are dead, cards, perhaps, visiting cards, also will die in due time. They say that the telephone has killed calling, as they also say that it has killed letter writing. It may be true of calling. It may be that men will never revive the habit of paying calls except those formal diplomatic calls which are the most deathly boring, unreal, things in the world, a ritual, as dry as dry—but letter writing is not dead, and that is a very good thing for history. There are, and I think always will be, men and Still more women who are for ever writing letters, and what an excellent thing for history it is that the itch to do so should be so Strong and so permanent!

  VADSTENA.

  To face page 142.

  For in the letters written by dead men and women you get a far better picture of the past than in any other form of writing. Letters are not, as a rule, written with a view to the general audience which they occasionally reach. They are written to individuals and they mention things casually which are of the first value in explaining what the people of the time really thought and did. The official view, the newspaper, the Chronicle says: ‘His Royal Highness then proceeded to Lucifer House.’ But the woman writing the letter says: ‘Boo-boo was lifted into his car blind drunk, and when he got to Old Satan’s he couldn’t get out, so they drove him home.’ It is always unconscious effect that is the best.

  Diaries are very little use here. I have known not a few diarists in my life, and I can bear testimony that they were nearly all of them liars. Men publish their diaries with an object; they see their public as it were in their mind’s eye, and they pose accordingly. Even when they mean to tell the truth they are often writing of a thing half forgotten.

  There is a Story which you all of you know (and which I will therefore here repeat with gusto and at proper length) of the centenary of the Battle of the Moskowa, which is also called the Battle of Borodino, the battle which permitted Napoleon to advance on Moscow and enter it. When the centenary festivities were on, in 1912, someone came and told the Czar that there survived a man of immense age who as a child had seen Napoleon. The man was sent for and was proud to tell his tale. ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘I remember the Emperor well, young though I was.’

  ‘What did he look like? ’ said they.

  ‘Why, he was a tall, thin man with a red beard. That is what I remember best.’

  Yet even diaries have their uses when they mention something which has nothing to do with the glory of the writer, nor is intended to produce a particular effect. A special example of this, which I have often quoted and will therefore here quote again, is the passage in Evelyn’s diary when he was going through London to call on Grinling Gibbons, the sculptor. On his way he passed through Smithfield, and there he saw a woman being burned alive for poisoning her husband. If I remember right, he talks of the incident casually but not without pity. At any rate, he sees nothing extraordinary in it. Does not that sharply illustrate the mind of man in the later seventeenth century?

  THE STEGEBORG.

  To face page 144.

  Poland

  And now about Poland:—

  The word ‘Baltic’ suggests to-day to the English mind Scandinavia, or, at the widest, Scandinavia plus (more vaguely) Russia. But there is another connection of equal, or greater, historical importance with the word ‘Baltic’ and that is the word ‘Poland.’ It was a close thing whether, with the development of the modern world, the Baltic should not be overshadowed, dominated, by Poland rather than by Prussia as it is at the moment; rather than by the culture of Sweden which has, in the past, encircled the inland sea by the Swedish hold upon both shores. Perhaps in the long run the Baltic will be Polish.

  The modern European of the West has little appreciation of what is meant by that word ‘Poland.’ and an English reader probably less appreciation of it than anybody else. I know that by the end of the Great War the average English professional politician thought of Poland as a Russian province which had somehow been artificially carved out and made into a temporary State—he did not quite know why.

  I have not infrequently to
ld the Story of two bets which I had in the year 1919 with two men, both now dead—a professional politician high up in his lucrative, not very reputable, trade, and a high-brow journalist, the editor of the best high-brow paper we had in England at that day —which is the best to-day it would be difficult to say, for the word ‘best’ is not easy to apply in that connection. At any rate this high-brow editor (first rate at his trade), and this other man, the professional politician, each laid a bet with me in 1919 that Poland could not survive ten years. I was never paid—but then, I did not expect to be.

  I remember yet another interesting thing about the resurrection of Poland. This time it is about neither a scribbler nor a parliament man, but a money-dealer, and very high up also!—too high up. He was an honest man and intelligent, and he told me, as everybody else did in those days, that Poland was doomed.

  Poland was, as the French say, ‘pas viable.’ Just before we parted he looked over his shoulder at me with great cunning in his eyes, said a word in praise of the Polish aristocracy (for he was an educated man and knew something of the past), but added, ‘As for business 1 . . . ‘; and then he shook his head.

  Oddly enough the one man, I think the only man then in the public eye, who wrote in English something sufficient about Poland, was Lord d’Abernon. He understood the full significance of the Battle of Warsaw and you would do well to read his book on that sharp turning-point in the history of the world.

  For the resurrection of Poland is one of the half-dozen major events of our time. Perhaps a lifetime hence it will Stand out as the greatest of all those events, or, at any rate, the most formative. It will depend upon what happens to Prussia.