MODERN ICELAND.

BY

PROF. CHAS. SPRAGUE SMITH,

History is the resultant of the interaction of two forces, man and his environment. In the pathless forests, the closely pressed, massive firs, birches and maples with their tufted crests, forming a canopy one hundred feet above us, shut away well-nigh completely all of earth and all of sky. All sense of direction is lost. The level sun cannot force its rays through the interspaces in the wall of trees; the vertical sun, unless poised absolutely above our heads, cannot indicate to us the midpoint in its diurnal arc. We ask of the blue patches of cloudland above and of the dim aisles about us in vain whither we shall turn.

But the experienced woodsman, allowing his eye to follow the ragged trunk of the birch or the firm brown bole of the maple, observes carefully in which direction the souple crests bend.

"Yonder lies our course," he says, "for the trees bend -eastward." We know almost a sense of pity, of fellowfeeling, for our brothers the children of the forest, when we also observe that, despite their erect might, the proud crests have been compelled to do obeisance. to a superior force. For, unless our life course has been very brief, we also, amidst all the pride of conscious strength and eager insatiate aspiration, have been forced

to bow. From whatsoever source or sources the race dispersion moved, that has given its populations to the two hemispheres, every pebble in the stream-bed, every zephyr that ruffled the surface, every influence from without, whether silent or sonorous in its manifestation, has left its impress. Thus children of one stock, one blood, one heritage, became differentiated into races. widely separate in character and customs.

And when the mighty west wind sends forth its phalanxes and, in charge on charge, urges on the assault upon the firm erectness of the forest kings, we sit beneath their shadow, in the safe shelter of their marshalled hosts, and listen to the sounds of the conflict. Bending before the shock of the assault, the tree-tops hold the winds and, as it were, repel them. And the hoarse voices die gradually away into a distant moan or forest murmur. Then anew, far above, we hear the advance of the vanguard, a whirring as of wings in the foliage, growing clearer, louder each instant; until, with a roar, as when the surf breaks upon a rocky coast, the attack is renewed. The multitudinous crisp fluttering of the leaves, intermingled with the hoarse creaking of the boughs, follows, and the force of the onset is again spent.

Even more of charm is offered to the student of history. From the safe eyrie of the present, he can look backward and downward upon the struggles of the past. There man wrestling with nature succumbed. Here in azure girdled, azure roofed Hellas, he led nature captive, reading her laws of beauty and immortalizing them in marble and words.

And, as the student's eye sweeps with affectionate in

terest the horizon, it turns at last northward. As from an inexhaustible spring of native unsullied energy, there flowed southward, during the first centuries of our era, streams of humanity to revitalize, renew the decadent, exhausted South. So through myriad waterways the fertilizing Nile is led into the parched fields of Egypt.

And amongst all the Germanic tribes, the northernmost perhaps contributed most of stimulus, most of energy, tipped with the fire of enthusiasm, and held to the tense bow-string of determination. Away it whirrs and wherever it falls, its magnificent life is infused into the dor mant or decadent societies.

Instinctively we ask, if the Norse energy transplanted could and did communicate such vitality to the masses of life with which it was brought into contact, what did it effect at home?

Norway cannot answer this question, for the wasting of its best life in wars, or the loss occasioned by emigration, combined with other forces, operating from without, stunted and held back the natural development.

Iceland answers it. That answer is distinct among histories, alone among literatures, rugged, masculine, powerful. The Norse life found here its just expression almost entirely free from foreign influence. And, as in the forest, nay, more than in any forest, that struggle between the creature, the life, and its environment is filled for us with human interest.

It was not a fertile promised land, not even a rockbound New England, that the Norseman discovered and occupied. It was an old battle-ground, where the

giants of frost and fire had been contending ever since it emerged from the sea. Seamed, scarred, blasted, the pores of earth sealed with congealed lava or choked with volcanic sand, that whole island the giant of fire claimed as his domain. Only a narrow interrupted strip of verdure surrounded the waste central plateau. The frost giant, silently, constantly at work, hooded the volcanoes with ice-caps, or ever their fires were extinguished, and, compressing the summer within the narrowest limits, chilled the heart of nature. Her enfeebled vital-force could only yield a close short grass and a low shrubbery of birch, fir, or willow.

In favored localities the kernels deposited in her bosom might be warmed into living-life, and green spires of grain rise through the broken soil.

But such conditions were rarely present, and fruit or timber-yielding tree was unknown. No wealth from soil, none stored up in the veins of the mountains; a region exposed to the inclemencies of a northern winter, tempered by the equatorial stream, it seemed rather adapted by nature to become the Labrador of the Old World. We might have expected that the fisherman would build his hut upon its shores, and perhaps pasture his sheep in its intervales. But that men in numbers, sufficient to form a state, should voluntarily select this island as their home, with the whole world open to them, seems indeed surprising.

The struggle with the environment was a protracted one. Only Norse energy could have wrested from the surrounding conditions so much of permanent value in manly effort and achievements. Iceland had organized a united democratic state, controlled by a senate of

chieftains, France.

before Hugh Capet became king of

While in Mediæval feudal Europe the common man was esteemed little better than the beast of burden, the common freeman in Iceland, save for his exclusion from the ruling assemblies, enjoyed equal recognition with any. As the tales of the first settlers were told at the yule-feasts, or in the booths at the Althing, no one's blood flowed in prouder waves than his. They were his countrymen, his kinsmen, his brothers, equal, not superior, in birth-rights. In all the literature of modern Europe, I find nothing that leads me back to nature, into the immediate presence of her rugged primal forms, so directly and entirely as the Old Norse literature, whose almost exclusive home was Iceland. And, to me at least, it seems a source to which it were well for much of our emasculated thought and expression of the present day to turn. But the picture, rude and vigorous, in outline and coloring, of that age, I shall not attempt to hold up before in these pages.

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Iceland's life, as a free state, ceased in 1262-64 through voluntary submission to Norway. All the forms of her democratic state-organization were replaced by crownoffices. Self-government vanished, and with it died the Norse buoyancy of spirit and dauntless energy, The six centuries following upon the union with Norway are essentially barren of interest. Without unfolding the volume of her records during that long period, we turn therefore to the Iceland of to-day.

And now I shall invite you to embark with me upon the Laura, the larger of two Royal Danish mail-steamers plying between Copenhagen, the Faroe Islands and