The Klafter (chat) Klubb is an institution even more primitive than that of Madeira, which, greatly to feminine and connubial satisfaction, used to close at six P.M. The many-windowed wooden building in Hafnarstræti is the store kept by Hr Möller, who manages the club, and allows it three small rooms somewhat higher in the ceiling than usual. It opens only on Wednesday evenings, when the principal merchants congregate to drink “toddy.” The yearly subscription is $12; and strangers, after being presented, may visit it three times gratis—unless the usual sharp practice rule otherwise. In such matters there is a conventional honesty; even in London the secretary will sometimes do for the institution what he would not think of doing for himself.
At the first opportunity I called upon M. l’Abbé Baudouin, now the only Catholic missionary in the island, which formerly had two. The road leads past the Hospital, and we can inspect the tarn whose southern bank is the Paseo for “beauty and fashion”—I rarely met any there but English. The little piece of water in former days was covered with wild fowl; now it supports nothing but yellow-green weed, especially when it shrinks in July and August. It drains large peat bogs at the southern or inland end, and when swollen it passes to the sea by the foul ditch before mentioned, fit only for stickle-backs. In winter it serves for skating, but it is not always frozen over, another proof of unexpectedly mild climate despite high latitudes. Of course it is very variable under the influence of the volcano and the iceberg: in 1845, the last eruption of Hekla covered the adjacent valleys with abundant vegetation; in 1869 and 1873, the greater part of the island was ice-bound for months.
On the western bank of the tarn are two targets for rifle practice, one at 95, the other at 112 paces. I never saw shooting there; in fact the only soldiering known to Reykjavik is when the Danish “Fylla” disembarks her short, stout, dapper, little crew, averaging twenty-two years of age, for drill under a tall quartermaster. On the other side of the road is the cemetery, guarded by posts and rails; the mortuary chapel, with its dwarf steeple, all wood, and lighter than those of the Sienna country, faces east. Crosses are everywhere, from the deadhouse to the parva domus: some of the tombs are not to be despised, and the epitaphs beginning with “Hver Hvílir” (here lies) are not the comedies of our country churchyards. It is a peculiar custom to keep the dead unburied sometimes for three to six weeks; and the measure can hardly be precautionary, as the bodies are screwed down in the coffins, and stored at the solitary cemetery. A resident foreigner lately exposed himself to prosecution because he interred his servant only six days after death.
Turning rightwards we pass a windmill to the south-west of the town. On its eminence the people assembled in May 1860 to see the flames and flashes proceeding from the “aqua-igneous” fissure of Kötlu-gjá, which, distant some eighty miles, shot up, they say, a pillar of smoke, steam, and scoriæ some 24,000 feet high (?). From this point also, we are assured, the gleam of the Vatnajökull volcano could be detected in 1867. The country beyond the mill is a barren stretch of stone, where dodgy plovers lay their eggs, and where swarms of gnats put the promenader to flight. A few steps lead us to the house of M. Baudouin, which is the best in the island; it was built by Bishop Helgi Thordursson, predecessor of the present dignitary, and the use to which it was converted gave some scandal. The Abbé fenced himself in with a railing and turnstile, levelled the warts, and manured the ground—the shells and the sea-wrack offer excellent compost, but they are never used. This was done seven years ago, yet double crops are still produced: the inordinate price of labour, $2 a day being the wage of a field hand, prevented further operations. Truly a few Trappist establishments scattered over the island would do an immensity of good.
M. Baudouin then built to the west of his dwelling-place a cross-crowned chapel, and preached to full congregations, who attended regularly—I should mention that he is an excellent Icelandic scholar. This proceeding aroused the wrath of the Reformed. Strange to say, in this section of the nineteenth century, a country which boasts of “liberal institutions” will not permit version; and, although the Althing has been strongly in favour of extending everywhere freedom of faith, propagandism is allowed only to commercial settlements. The house being out of town, Monsieur l’Abbé was warned that he was not en règle: the code of Denmark authorises a “subvention” to those who build places of worship, but “subvention” was altered by Icelandic interpretation to “permission,” and thus the good missionary was assured that he required permission to do what the law permitted—which is absurd. His opponents then tried to revive against him the obsolete tyrannical ordinances of the old Protestant world: he is an outlaw, he may be flogged, and even killed with impunity, whilst harbouring a Papist is punishable by a heavy fine—six ounces of silver doubled every day.
The Abbé wanted nothing better than to be a martyr, but of course he wanted in vain. Laws in Iceland are somewhat flexible things, exceptionally applied at times, and liable to be broken with impunity: so in England “law” contrasts pleasantly with the rigidity of “la loi” of France. In this island, where people cannot afford paupers, families are dispersed even more cruelly than in our inhuman workhouse system, and each member is transferred to his or her Sýsla (county): the country, however, can plead necessity for these severe conditions. M. Baudouin chose to lodge and board an unhappy household subject to forcible separation. Thereupon the mayor imposed upon the paupers a fine, which they refused to pay, and lastly, he ordered their protector to expel them. The Abbé stoutly refused, and asked what would result if the affair came before Chief Justice Thorður Jonassen? The reply was, “It will be as he sees it.” Presently, the authorities perhaps remembered that when something of the same kind happened in the north, the case was quashed by the Court of Cassation in Denmark—nothing more was said. As Rome proposes to establish a Vicar Apostolic for Scandinavia,[385] M. Baudouin bides his time. For two years he has been in bad health, and wears a frostbitten look; he now proposes to sun himself for a time in France, and after his return, to preach in Icelandic when he pleases and where he pleases. The Protestant party boldly hopes never to see him again.
I was pleased to hear from the Abbé a Catholic version of the Reformed movement which followed the proclamation of Christian III. in 1540, and more especially of the murder or just execution of that “illiterate and turbulent prelate” who ended the “dismal ages of papal darkness,” Jón Arason (Are’s son), whom foreigners call Aræson and Areseni, the last occupant of the northern see, Hólar.[386] His enemies declare that at eighty he had a concubine; that he unmercifully seized and otherwise persecuted, his opponents; that he never went south without an armed retinue of two hundred bravos; that he refused to go to Copenhagen, and that he was a rebel against the Crown. His friends refute the charges preferred against him; deny the hólmganga or duel which he is fabled to have fought with Bishop Ögmund; assert that the “Historia Ecclesiastica” contains no less than three contradictions, and persistently declare that J. A. was simply a martyr to Catholicism. The Reformers, acting under the Danish Government, were headed by Oddur Gottswálksson and Gizurr Einarson. The former, a son of the Bishop of Hólar, when studying at Wittenberg, had been strongly imbued by Luther and Melancthon with the spirit of the new faith; he afterwards became the first translator of the Bible, and lawyer for the northern division of the island till he was drowned in 1556. The latter was in turn secretary to Ögmund, Catholic Bishop of Skálholt, Lutheran priest, and, finally, first Lutheran bishop of the southern see. They suborned against J. A. one Daði, a peasant of Mýra Sýsla, in the Borgarfjörð; and Judas, as usual, pretending to be his friend, betrayed him to his foes. The house in which he was arrested is still shown a little south of the Kvennabrekka chapel: he was carried to Skálholt, the southern see, already Lutheran, and was incontinently beheaded.
Followed the usual scenes of persecution and destruction: we might be reading a History of England. The Reformers became deformers. Cruel laws were passed against the priests; the churches were plundered of their wealth; the various religious houses,—four monasteries, two priories, and two nunneries,—each of which, after the excellent fashion of El Islam and its mosques, had a school attached, were suppressed, whilst the lands were either sold, vested in the Crown, or made over to Lutheranism. It was a case of “non licet esse vos,” and the proceeding was exactly that of our Act of 1537.
Let me briefly remark that in treating of matters which happened three centuries ago, both Catholic and Protestant writers are too apt to look upon them from the stand-point of the present. Catholics see only the use of their establishments; they will not accept the consequences of defeat, and yet they know that by the rule “Væ victis” they would have dealt, had they been conquerors, the same measure which was dealt to them. Protestants note only the abuses which marked the age; they look upon the old system with a jaundiced eye, and they misrepresent, undoubtedly, often without knowing it, the state of the ancient Church. Thus, we find it chronicled that many of the Icelandic bishops were married, without being told that they might have been married before they were ordained. And if there is anything in the present day which draws English Protestants to Catholicism, it is the fact that honest inquirers find they have been brought up in gross ignorance, to say nothing more, of the rival creed.
The Abbé Baudouin is strong in the belief that by virtue of the jewel Fair Play he would soon revive Catholicism in one of its old seats. And looking at the lukewarm action of the Lutheran faith, the scanty hold it has upon the affections and the passions of the people, the laical lives of the clergy, the prevalence of the “squarson,” and the growth of “free thinking,” I cannot but agree with him. Indeed the revival of Catholicism is one of the phenomena of the later nineteenth century, which time only can explain. Is it a steady flame or a fitful flicker preceding the final darkness? Its statistics are wonderful. During the last eighty-five years in the United States, it has risen from 25,000 to 9,600,000, a proportion of 1:4 of the population; whilst the faith of the nineteenth century, spiritualism (R. D. Owen), numbers only 7,500,000. In Holland, the very cradle of the Reformation, Catholics and Protestants are now about equal; and, whilst the census of Victoria gives 121 religions to less than three-quarters of a million, Catholicism in England seems bent upon forcing men into the extremes so distasteful to the English mind, upon dividing the country into two great camps, Catholicism and its complement Methodism. In Iceland the result of free propagandism would probably result in making all the people Catholics or Rationalists.