362 Moors in Africa. Presently, for a more But Mention of the Calabrian claimant reminds us of the long-cherished hopes of peasants in the Romagna that Cæsar Borgia of all men!-to them a splendid and generous lord, would return again. When, in 1517, the Borgia fell after desperate flight in a dry river bed, his body, pierced by twenty wounds, was stripped for plunder, and so mutilated as only to be recognized by Juanito, his faithful page, 'because of his great love.' The young widow, Charlotte d'Albret, mourned her lord in a chambre ardente hung ever with black, in the Castle of La Motte Feuillée; and of the Apennine peasants M. Sinkiewicz relates that 'Long they refused to believe him dead, but waited for him as a god who should some day return and establish justice in the land, cast down tyrants, and defend the poor.' It was on a river bank also that the gold shoes of Roderick, 'Last of the Goths,' and the carcass of his drowned charger, Orelia, were found. Whether in fact the waters of the Guadalete washed his body out to sea, or whether . the beaten king turned hermit and Dietrich, or Theodoric, sleeps 'till the Turk shall water his horses in the Rhine.' The tomb of Theodoric in Sta. Maria della Rotonda at Ravenna, where he was buried in splendor, in 526, exists still, but unless the skeleton in golden armor, found in 1854 in a rough grave not far off, was his, no man knows his true sepulchre. Nor have the learned finally decided whether Theodoric and Dietrich of Bern, hero of a saga-cycle not less fine than that of Siegfried, though never turned to similar literary account, are absolutely identical. At least, the jejune historical facts of Theodoric's life are interesting enough. A Goth educated at Constantinople, who erected instead of destroying public buildings, and funded money for their upkeep, Theodoric was also an Arian. Consequently, Catholic priests were responsible for varied reports of his fate. His body was carried off by the Evil One, and thrown into a volcano, or the same agency carried him to a desert to fight dragons till the Day of Judgment, or he rode to Hell on a black horse, or on stormy nights he rushed through mountain village streets with Wotan's wild huntsmen. To his persecution of Boethius the world owes The Consolations of Philosophy. In the light of recent warfare, Theodoric's march from Central Germany to the Isonzo, there to crush Odoacer's pretensions to rule Italy, is interesting: a year-long trek of 250,000 persons, including the families of his soldiers, besides much cattle. Legends, too, hung round the personality of Ogier of Ardenne, whose name has sometimes been corrupted into Algar the Dane. Ardenne-mark, Dane-mark, Denmark is the easy process. Nieuport on the Yser is the birthplace of the hero whom Morganela-Fée hides in the customary fairyfashion, and until the present war, in the patronal feasts of Huy, near Dinant-sur-Meuse, the figure of Ogier with lance in fist headed the procession of giants, the Four Sons of Aymon, with the hero-horse, Bayard. The twelfth-century poem of Raimbert de Paris records his gestes, his expeditions to conquer Paynims, his return from the gates of Paradise just in time for a tourney at Huy, his founding of monasteries, and other peerless generosities. From Ogier descended Baldwin Bras-de-Fer, and his cousin was Charlemagne, who after his reign of forty-six years took his rest, in 814, in the great Church of Aix-la-Chapelle. The embalmed body or the tranced sleeper seventy-one years of age, and a warrior even in his seventieth year, was seated on a golden chair, wearing golden sword and chain, and crown, with a piece of the True Cross, a golden volume of the Gospels on his knee. Wise leader and great soldier, representing a culture far in advance of his day, it is no wonder that, as the chronicle records, 'No words can express the lament and sorrow that arose over his death, even by the heathen he was mourned as father of the world,' and some day he was expected to awake and arise. In 1165, Frederick Barbarossa opened Charlemagne's vault. He, too, according to the legend which Rückert has enshrined in verse, sleeps in the Castle of Kyffhausen, in Thuringia, robed and crowned, and throned on an ivory chair, before the marble table into which his flame-colored beard has actually grown. He still lives: Er ist niemahls gestorben, - But now and then his sleep is broken: he beckons to a page, who is sent to see if the old ravens still fly round the mountain, for if they do another century's sleep must pass before the Kaiser can rise to save his country. More often broken is the mystic sleep of the Irish Earl Gerald under the Rath of Mullaghmast. Here, in 1577, some hundreds of Irish, 'well affected' to England, were put to the sword, 'most dishonorably,' says Captain Lee in his memorial to Queen Elizabeth, ‘by the consent and practice of the Lord Deputy for the time being.' Once in seven years Earl Gerald wakes and rides round the Curragh of Kildare, on a horse shod with silver shoes. When the shoes are worn thin, a miller's son with six fingers will blow a blast on his horn and Earl Gerald will conquer the English and be proclaimed king. (Sinn Feiners, please note)! The rosy-cheeked, woolen-comfortered English boy who sings outside frosted English windows of good King Wenceslaus and his doings on the Feast of Stephen' sings a version happier than the real truth. Wenzel of Bohemia at the end of the tenth century was in worse case than Arthur, for his pagan foes included those of his own household. Only the Pope's command had prevented him from abdicating, and entering a monastery. His grandmother, Ludmila, was a Christian, but his mother, Drahomira, and his brother Wratislav, headed the heathen party, and the Christmas-tide banquet was so full of muttered wrath that the king rose, and made his way barefoot to the Benedictine church. He was attended only by his faithful squire, Podiven, shivering with cold, if not with fear. The tenderness of heart that could spare thought in that dread hour to bid the lad find warmth in his own footprints, testifies to the saintly character of the king. He was pursued, and murdered before the altar, and in 997 Ludmila and Podiven were also martyred. Poetical justice declared that Drahomira perished in an earthquake. In the end, when violent oscillations of belief gave way to the acceptance of Christianity, the bones of Archbishop Adalbert, another martyr, were brought in triumph to Blanik for burial beside those of Wenzel, and his banner and Wenzel's spear were long carried before the army, with a war-cry of trust in 'the Holy Martyrs.' Legend, however, maintained that the king was safely hidden to await better times. The list of sleepers might, no doubt, be added to. Legends that Robert Bruce had not really died were current, despite the other legend of his heart The Contemporary Review being cast by Douglas into the fray between Alonzo of Castile and a Moorish host with the cry 'Go first, as thou wert wont to do.' But, in truth, evidence of death counted for very little. The burning of Joan of Arc was a public ceremony, but Mr. Andrew Lang has told the story of more than one most plausible and carefullycoached impostor who traded on the idea that some common criminal had been substituted for the Maid. The cruelty of her death seemed impossible, and similarly, to another age, the cruelty of the murders of sleeping child-princes appeared incredible, so that Perkin Warbeck won more adherents than Arthur Orton. Indeed, but for the discovery of Warbeck's authenticated letter to his mother in Flanders some modern historians might be willing to hold a brief for him. Our day of Armageddon proved powerless to waken any hero in the identity promised by old legend. Halfway between the attitude of the modern poet and the old ballad singer is, perhaps, that which is shown in the lament put by the nineteenth-century poet Clarence Mangan into the mouths of the sixteenth-century mourners for the Irish patriot-hero, Owen Roe O'Neill, in which the spiritual desolation has no overtone of hope: We thought you would not die, we were sure you could not go, And leave us in our utmost need to Cromwell's cruel blow; Sheep without a shepherd, when the snow shuts out the sky, O, why did you leave us, Owen? Why did you die? For now a belief in reincarnation is widespread, and hope feels out toward a growing clarity of communication with a Choir Invisible who may work through suggestion while biding their time to return. Have some, indeed, already come back unrecognized, under new names? THE SPIRITUAL CRISIS OF FRANCE BY PAUL VALERY WE civilizations now know that we are mortal. We had heard tell of whole worlds vanished, of empires gone to the bottom with all their engines; sunk to the inexplorable bottom of the centuries with their gods and their laws, their academies, their science, pure and applied; their grammars, their dictionaries, their classics, their romantics and their symbolists, their critics and their critics' critics. We knew well that all the apparent earth is made of ashes, and that ashes have a meaning. We perceived, through the mists of history, phantoms and huge ships laden with riches and spiritual things. We could not count them. But these wrecks, after all, were no concern of ours. Elam, Ninevah, Babylon, were vague and lovely names, and the total ruin of these worlds meant as little to us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia . . . these would also be lovely names. Lusitania also is a lovely name. And now we see that the abyss of history is large enough for everyone. We feel that a civilization is as fragile as a life. Circumstances. which would send the works of Baudelaire and Keats to rejoin the works of Menander are, no longer in the least inconceivable; they are in all the newspapers. That is not all. The burning lesson is still more complete. It was not enough for our generation to learn by its own experience how the most beautiful things and the most ancient, the most formidable and the best ordered, may perish by an accident; it has seen, in the realm of thought, common sense, and feeling, extraordinary phenomena arise, brusque realizations of paradoxes, brutal contradictions of the evidence. I will quote but a single example. The great virtues of the German peoples have produced more evils than laziness ever produced vices. We have seen seen with our own eyes conscientious work, the most solid education, the most serious discipline and application, adapted to fearful designs. So many horrors would have been impossible without so many virtues. Without doubt, it needed much science to kill so many men, waste so many possessions, and annihilate so many towns in so little time; but it needed no less moral qualities. Are Knowledge and Duty then suspect? Thus the spiritual Persepolis is ravaged equally with the material Susa. All is not lost, but everything has felt itself perish. An extraordinary tremor has run through the spinal marrow of Europe. It has felt, in all its thinking substance, that it recognized itself no longer, that it no longer resembled itself, that it was about to lose consciousness consciousness acquired by centuries of tolerable disasters, by thousands of men of the first rank, by geographical, racial, historical chances innumerable. a Then as though for a desperate defense of its psychological being and heritage all its memory returned confusedly to it. Its great men and its great books returned pell-mell. Never has so much been read or so passionately as during the war; ask the booksellers. Never has so much prayer been offered, nor so fervently; ask the so fervently; ask the priests. All the saviors have been called upon, all the protectors, all the martyrs, all the heroes, the fathers of countries, the holy heroines, the national poets. And, in the same mental disorder, at the summons of the same anguish, cultivated Europe has experienced the rapid resuscitation of its innumerable thoughts: dogmas, philosophies, heterogeneous ideals; the three hundred ways of explaining the world, the thousand and one nuances of Christianity, the score of positivisms: the whole spectrum of intellectual light has displayed its incompatible colors, illuminating with a strange, contradictory gleam the agony of the European soul. While the inventors feverishly sought in their diagrams, in the records of former wars, methods of getting free of barbed wire, of deceiving submarines, or paralyzing the flight of aeroplanes, the soul invoked all the transcendent powers at once, pronounced all the incantations it knew, seriously pondered the most bizarre prophecies; it sought refuges, signs, consolations in the whole gamut of memories, of inward acts, and ancestral attitudes. And these are the familiar effects of anxiety, the disordered enterprises of the brain which runs from the real to the nightmare, and from the nightmare to the real, like a frenzied rat caught in a trap. The military crisis is perhaps at an end; the economic crisis is visibly at its zenith; but the intellectual crisis, more subtle, which in its very nature takes on the most deceptive appearances (since it takes place in the very kingdom of dissimulation) - it is with difficulty that we can seize the true centre, the exact phase, of this crisis. But hope is only the being's mistrust of the precise previsions of its mind. It suggests that every conclusion unfavorable to the being must be an error of its mind. The facts, however, are clear and pitiless: there are thousands of young writers and young artists who are dead. There is the lost illusion of a European culture, and the demonstration of the impotence of knowledge to save anything whatever; there is science, mortally wounded in its moral ambitions, and, as it were, dishonored by its applications; there is idealism, victor with difficulty, grievously mutilated, responsible for its dreams; realism, deceived, beaten, with crimes and misdeeds heaped upon it; covetousness and renunciation equally put out; religions confused among the armies, Cross against Cross, Crescent against Crescent; there are the skeptics themselves, disconcerted by events so sudden, so violent, and so moving, which play with our thoughts as a cat with a mouse the skeptics lose their doubts, re-discover them, lose them again, and can no longer make use of the movement of their minds. The rolling of the ship has been so heavy that at the last the best-hung lamps have been upset. What gives the spiritual crisis its depth and gravity is the state of the patient. I have neither time nor power to describe the intellectual condition of Europe in 1914. Who would dare to trace a picture of that condition? The |