Return to the Baltic

by Hilaire Belloc

  Sweden and England

  §

  There is a remarkable parallel between England and Sweden in the matter which is of primary importance for judging a people and its story: the matter of religious change.

  In both countries the main factor was what is called ‘economic,’ or what may more simply be called greed, for in both countries the violent revolution was effected by a comparatively small group of rich men who had an opportunity of becoming still richer by the loot of the Church. In both countries a section of the Church on its official side had lost the sympathy of the people, for in both countries the higher clerics were themselves corrupted by wealth; in both countries the mass of the people, especially of the countrysides, naturally desired to keep their old traditions, but in both countries those traditions were only vaguely connected in the public mind with the unity of Christendom and with the distant Papacy.

  In both countries there was an effort on the part of the populace to withstand the robbery of endowments which in the past had partly sustained the masses against the rich. In both countries the popular reaction was easily and contemptuously brushed aside. In both countries the ancestral religion was crushed out, and in both countries to-day it appears as something utterly alien, and for that matter, forgotten. It is as difficult for a modern Swede as it is for a modern Englishman to restore in his own mind the mood of his forefathers prior to the Reformation.

  But though the similarity is striking it is far from absolute. The great change had in England one principal agent of genius, William Cecil, and it had no one determined, courageous, unscrupulous military leader such as the Swedish Reformation had in the person of Gustavus. The old religion survived in Sweden in exceptional patches as it were, especially in the case of certain conventual institutions, while in England convents and monasteries went at a blow, and the old religion survived rather through a large minority of families and individuals.

  The death blow to English Catholicism was not given until the last years of the seventeenth century; it had been given to Swedish Catholicism more than 100 years before. In both countries the Reformation largely increased trade, benefiting the towns as against the countrysides, and increased the total wealth of the nation while impoverishing the host of small owners. But though there came the beginnings of a proletariat in Sweden through the Reformation, Sweden never became, as England became, mainly proletarian.

  But perhaps the most striking difference between the inward development of these two Protestant nations is the presence in the one of a strong Calvinist strain and the absence of it in the other.

  English Protestantism had from the beginning the impression of Calvin upon its more clearheaded and more sincere leaders. There was ultimately a compromise, in which Calvinism failed to make itself openly master, but in which the spirit of Calvinism, though not the form, retained a great measure of power under the name of ‘Puritan.’ That power is still felt strongly in England to-day and will continue to be so.

  Sweden escaped this influence in a large measure. Sweden went Lutheran by the orders of the new rich, but did not go Presbyterian; and there is a real difference between those two kinds of Protestant thought and action. As in the case of England, a rival Catholic society beyond the sea was the foil to the new Protestant society of the nation. In the case of Sweden it was Poland that formed the contrast; in the case of England it was France.

  But the Swedes, though they took to arms and fought beyond the seas more than ever the English did during and after the religious Struggle, hardly identified their religion with patriotism as the English did. The independence of Sweden looked with jealousy on the claims of the Danish throne rather than on the claims of foreigners. Again, Sweden had no Catholic dependency and irritant, such as England had: Sweden had no Ireland. In both countries the Reformation had an aristocratic effect, producing class government, but a similar religious change immediately at hand in Denmark acted the other way, and while Sweden retains a strong tradition of class government, Denmark boasts what is perhaps the most egalitarian society in Europe.

  §

  Stockholm makes use of no height to emphasize its architecture. Stockholm has hills, but uses none for the platform of a temple or a palace.

  The nearest thing to such an effect is accidental. It is the rise of land above the main wharf on the north side of the Palace.

  But Stockholm is not peculiar in this failure to use a height as an emplacement.

  We moderns have, for perhaps the first time in history, lost everywhere the sense of the Emplacement Site. Our fathers had it and all antiquity had it. We have it no more, save in exceptions such as Montmatre, but perhaps we shall recover it as we are beginning to recover other aptitudes and faculties of man which had fallen into oblivion. Look what antiquity did with the Capitol, look what it did with the Acropolis, look what the later Middle Ages made of that rock of St. Michael in the bay between Normandy and Brittany, the Mont St. Michael, which is one of the few places which are the better for having been restored. In spite of the crowds of tourists, everyone ought to see that famous hill.

  Yet in this neighbourhood also destruction has been at work, for on the opposite hill of Avranches the great cathedral wherein A’Becket and Henry met and round which a great part of the story of Normandy turned, that cathedral was destroyed in a cruel fury, and though the emplacement stands, the slope of the hill is there, man’s memorial of himself and his religion has gone. The great mass, however, of the site values remain. Perhaps the best of them is, in our country, at Lincoln on its hill.

  The castles, of course, are everywhere perfect examples of site value, but there was here no appreciation of majesty or beauty. They owe their site value simply to this, that a castle was of most value on a hill until siege artillery had grown so strong that men had to take to earth.

  The finest of all the castles (that I have seen, at least), are those on the Syrian belt which the Crusaders and their Mohammedan imitators built all down the coast and its inland neighbourhood—the magnificent pile of Aleppo and the stone mountain of Kerak in Moab. Then there is that other Kerak to the north; but the finest of them all for site value is Markab. There a promontory jutting out from the Syrian range dominating and cutting the coast-road and doing all that fortification should do, stands up into the sky. Go and see that, too, when you have time. It furnishes the mind.

  I have just said that perhaps we shall recover the feeling for a site and begin to use sites properly again. But there is a long way to go. Only the other day the French had occasion to put up a monument on the Pointe de Gave where the Gironde falls into the Atlantic. They desired to commemorate the departure of Lafayette for the American War of Independence and the landing of the first American contingent in Europe during the Great War, both of which took place here at the Pointe de Gave.

  The opportunity has been abominably missed by the French. They have set up one of those horrible negations of beauty, those mere geometrical things in which the modern architect delights, wherein he is worse than the iconoclasts. I have read in one of those papers which devote themselves to highbrow praise of folly a panegyric on this abomination, contrasting it with the poor old Statue of Liberty, its opposite number beyond the Atlantic on the American side in New York Harbour, but I say that the poor old Statue of Liberty is enormously to be preferred. It is commonplace (wait till I come to tell you the glories of the commonplace); it is only a woman in a long gown and wearing a spiky crown; it gets its effect only by gigantic scale—but after all it is like the thing which it represents, a clothed human body holding aloft a light. It is mimetic as all art should be, for all art is a copying of nature. The artist of the New York Liberty tried to be majestic. He failed. It is much better to fail in trying to do your duty than deliberately to do the opposite.

  Then also the French have put up as a sort of welcome to the man entering Paris by the river a most horrible thing calling itself’ St. Geneviève,’ It is a grotesque parody of a human being; it is of about
thirty calibres, a human being hideously tall and thin and rectangular, a human being inhuman. We must console ourselves by hoping that our posterity will blow this thing up. Though it be done in anger and for the wrong reasons it will be well done. Even if the man of the future—and let us hope the near future—who destroys the so-called St. Geneviève on the Bridge of the Notre Dame in Paris does so from a hatred of religion it will be well done. As the Scandinavian (and I believe also the Scotch) proverb goes: ‘If the Devil brought it, it was God sent it.’

  But in travel ‘Site ‘has another meaning, which is,’ the place where something happened.’

  There is one kind of site the interest in which is really inexcusable, but fascinating all the same: and that is the site by sea: places where great things were done upon the sea. There cannot in the nature of things be any mark of permanence here, you can hardly put up monuments on the salt water and the surface changes with every moment. It has even less continuity and true being than the ephemeral human sort by land, and yet here also by sea do I feel the magic of Places.

  When I first sailed in Quiberon Bay (how many years ago) I was full of that battle wherein the ships of Cæsar overcame the Bretons of Vannes, the Veneti, who bore the same name as those other islanders settled on the mudbanks of the Venetian lagoon. Always when I cross the Channel I recall the big Spanish ships anchored in line along that fierce tide which sweeps the lowland coast eastward from Grisnez. So also looking from Plymouth Hoe down southward to the mouth of the Sound one may see creeping round the shoulder of Mount Batten the vast half moon formation of the Spanish convoys labouring up Channel under the west wind and then, when they had passed, the gap opening between them and the land, through that gap the smaller English ships making out into the wind, nimbler and swifter than the big craft which they were to pursue all the way up Channel to the cannonade three days later: the gale under which the Armada swept up the North Sea, failing to land its troops, and so confirmed the Cecils and their transformation of England. It was there at the mouth of Plymouth Sound that the campaign was really decided. For the Spaniards could, had they chosen, have bottled up one-half of the English ships in Plymouth and so neutralised them, having thus in the Straits of Dover only the other half to meet; though I am not so sure that even in the event of that diminished battle they could have landed the Tercios, which, had they touched Kentish soil, would have raised a Catholic rebellion everywhere.

  As for Elizabeth, there is not much doubt what she would have done, poor woman. She would have accepted the Spaniards, and so would Leicester; but that would not have been the end of it, for the foreigner would certainly have bungled this affair. It is thoroughly bad history to think of England in July 1588 as rallying round her Queen and defying the hated foreigner. Half England at least still hoped for release; but because the official history is false, despicably false, one should not fall into the other error nor think it possible that England in the sixteenth century could have accepted foreign rule, however indirect. Even thirty years before, when the great religious change had hardly begun, and when all England took the Mass for granted, Paget was fierce against the interference of Philip of Spain in the domestic affairs of England, when Philip, strongly urged by his father, tried to prevent the prosecution of heresy. He said it would do more harm than good, and hoped the Council would confine itself to the punishment of treason, leaving the ardent little minority of religious dissidents alone. But Paget would have none of that. It was an English affair, to be managed by Englishmen according to their own judgment, and with gusto did those Englishmen demand, with Paget at their head, the suppression of the Calvinist enthusiasts. Would it not have been wiser to support the Emperor’s judgment and his son’s? Then we should have had no fires at Smithfield!

  Upsala

  §

  It is one of the difficulties of writing on travel that while half the interest of places is remembering what happened there, each man has read his own amount of history and his own selection thereof so that only a part of what will interest one traveller will interest that one or this one of his readers. But the writer must take his chance and write upon what appeals to him.

  Thus for me the interest of a site is not only its appeal to the eye and the physical use made of it, but some one or other of the things that have happened there and of the people in the past who acted there and of the history attaching to the appeals one finds there.

  Thus at Upsala I particularly felt the appeal of the Codex Argenteus; but I suppose to ninety-nine readers out of one hundred so special a point has no meaning. It is most unlikely that even that small proportion of one’s readers should have even heard of the Codex and the discussion it has aroused. Before I had read about the Codex, Upsala meant nothing to me, save (vaguely) the name of a Northern University and rather more as the original seed plot of Swedish monarchy. Yet to-day after all the reading I have done on that rather recondite subject Upsala means hardly anything else but the Codex.

  So with battlefields. They interest me passionately when I have read of the action, and the more in proportion as I have read it in detail. When I discovered a few years ago that little fold of land which alone explains Marlborough’s tactic at Ramillies and was the cause of his great victory as well as the proof of his eye for terrain, I felt as enthusiastic as a man who has come on a huge nugget of gold. When I had come in by a Crécy side road and looked over Crécy town on to Crécy wood, I saw on my left Edward’s army deployed upon the right, the baggage behind it, the great unformed mass of feudal cavalry in the Val aux Clercs, as though they were before me, and I was so conscious of that little mound on which the windmill Stood, whence Edward surveyed the battle, that it is not a little mound to me any more, but a windmill actually there, though the real mill has long disappeared. So in the waters of Stockholm I see under the falling dusk the supernatural voyage of that boat which was guided by the light shining from a severed hand and Marie Antoinette’s ring, and in the Streets near the Palace I see the mob surging round to murder poor Fersen.

  Talking of Fersen, how true it is that history cannot be written by those who do not know men: that is the irremovable obstacle to excellence in academic history. That is why no academic histories talk sense, and hardly any are readable, for what do dons know of men? The old saying that readable history is false and true history is unreadable is wrong. You can have highly readable true history (for instance, Houssaye on Waterloo, or the immortal Napier); but it is true that a mass of undigested detail, written without knowledge or relation to how real men feel and behave, what their motives are, history all dates, painfully correct in details and spelling, and absurd in its ideas of human motive, is the worst kind of history conceivable.

  §

  Upsala, like Rosskille, is the spiritual or traditional capital and centre of its people; the seed plot of Sweden as is Roskilde of Denmark. Like Roskilde, Upsala inherits the oldest traditions; like Roskilde it is the crowning place of the kings; like Roskilde it is close to what became the chief city and administrative capital of the country, though Upsala is rather further from Stockholm than Roskilde is from Copenhagen: in each case the old capital and the new are within a day’s ride. In the one, as in the other, you have the tombs of the kings—but the kings of Denmark were of far more venerable and continuous line than the late upstart and soon extinguished Vasas.

  The main difference between Roskilde and Upsala is that Upsala became the seat of a famous university, which remains active and highly productive. Indeed to-day the university is much the chief thing about the little town, and gives it its European importance.

  The Library of that university holds one of the most famous things in the world—that Codex Argenteus! When first I visited Upsala all those years ago, I had never heard of the Codex Argenteus; when I came back to Upsala this year I could think of nothing else. For in between I had read all that I could within my limited range of language upon this ancient and capital thing.

  The Codex Argenteus gives in
mutilated form an early version of the Gospels in a Germanic tongue. If the date of that manuscript were certain we should have some evidence upon early German; we should have a solid foundation for the Study of Teutonic linguistic origins. Those who are enthusiastic over all things German are and have been equally enthusiastic, of course, for the earliest possible date. The manuscript as we have it is ascribed to the fifth century and the lost original from which it derives to the fourth. It is affirmed (without proof, of course, for such is the nature of academic affirmations) to be a translation of the Gospels made by the Aryan monk, Ulfilas. It may be so. But there is no proof. The learned Wiener, who knew more about Teutonic etymology than many of his rivals put together, was convinced that the Codex Argenteus was Carolingian.

  In other words the Codex did not belong to those centuries in which the old Pagan civilisation was yielding to the new, it was not contemporary with the rise of Christian Gaul; it did not date from the origins of our culture: it was at least 400 years later. One supposed argument in favour of its very early origin was the form of ornaments in what are called ‘arcades,’ arch-shaped semicircles illuminated on the vellum. But Wiener has shown that you find the same thing for generations, and he has proved parallels with the Carolingian time. In the summary of his criticism he says triumphantly that the myth is now exposed and with its fall there crumbles the whole edifice of early Gothic etymology in which the nineteenth century so devoutly believed.