Christianity and the Decline of Rome by Arnaldo Momigliano

 

.  .  . It is the modest purpose of this paper to reassert the view that there is a direct relation between the triumph of Christianity and the decline of the Roman Empire. But, of course, it will not be a simple return to Gibbon. What Gibbon saw as merely a destructive power must be understood on its own terms of Civitas dei – a new commonwealth of men for men. Christianity produced a new style of life, created new loyalties, gave people new ambitions and new satisfactions. So far nobody has written a realistic evaluation of the impact of Christianity on the structure of pagan society. I will not attempt such a task here. I shall confine myself to a few elementary remarks on the impact of Christianity on political life between the fourth and the sixth centuries A. D.

                                                     II

 

In the third century the Roman Empire had faced disintegration. It survived thanks to the strenuous efforts at reconstruction which are connected with the names of Claudius Gothicus, Diocletian, and Constantine. The result was an organization founded on compulsion. For reasons which have not yet been entirely explained, money economy collapsed in the third century; there were moments in which barter and taxation in kind seemed destined to replace money transactions in the empire. This crisis was overcome. Constantine introduced gold coins, the solidi, which remained the standard for about 800 years and served as an ultimate basis both for the fiscal system and private transactions. But there was a debased currency for everyday use, and the fluctuations in the rates of exchange between  gold and debased currency were a source of uncertainty and an excuse for extortion. The middle class emerged from the crisis demoralized and impoverished. Civil servants and soldiers were paid less in the fourth century than in the third. They came to rely on fees and bribery to supplement their salaries. Whatever the explanation may be, there developed also a shortage of manpower, while ordinary activities were made more burdensome by excessive taxation and the general unpleasantness of life. Barbarian invasions and civil wars must have destroyed a great deal of wealth. People tended to drift away from their work; and the government answered by binding the peasant to the land, making compulsory and heredity certain activities and transforming the city councils into compulsory and heredity corporations responsible for the collection of taxes.

The army needed men. About 500,000 men seem to have been required by the army, and there were not enough volunteers to make up this number. Recruitment was no easy matter. Landed proprietors had to supply recruits from among their serfs or at least had to compound by paying money. The son of a soldier was bound, at least under certain circumstances, to follow his father’s profession. But the best soldiers were recruited among the barbarians, mainly Germans and Sarmatians, who were settled within the empire either individually or in communities. The army was therefore organized on uneconomic lines. It was made even more uneconomic by the division between frontier and central army. The frontier were guarded by soldiers who were less well paid and less respected than their colleagues of the mobile force in the center.

To pay such an army a prosperous empire was needed. The empire was not prosperous, and there are reasons to believe that insecurity and inflation curtailed traffic. We have not enough evidence about the volume of trade circulating in the Roman empire at any given moment. We are therefore in no position to state in figures that there was less trade in the fourth century than , for instance, in the second century. But we can infer from the decline of the bourgeoisie in the fourth century and from the exclusive importance of the great landowners that prosperous traders were few. One has the impression that long-distance trade was increasingly in the hands of small minorities of Syrian and Jews.

Two capitals have replaced one, there were more unproductive expenses than before. Constantinople, the new Rome, grew up a marvel to see. But, as in the older Rome, the citizens of Constantinople enjoyed the privilege of a free supply of bread – the corn being provided by Egypt.

Preachers in their sermons painted in violence colors the contrast between wealth and poverty, and invariably intimated that wealth was the root of oppression. St. Ambrose in the West and St. John Chrysostom in the East attacked the rich who bought house after house and field after field, throwing out the former owners. What they say seems to be confirmed by the few data we have about individual estates in the fourth and fifth centuries. Some families had princely possessions spread over several provinces of the empire. They lived more and more, though not yet exclusively, in the country, and their estates were self-sufficient units. The wealthiest landowners were members of the senatorial class. Here again, the change from the third century is evident and important. In the third century the class of senators was definitely declining. The senators were deprived of the command of the armies and to a certain extent of the provincial government. The conditions of the fourth century did not allow the senators to recover control of the army: professional soldiers, most frequently of German origin, took over. But the senatorial class absorbed their former rivals, the knights, and developed into a powerful clique of great landowners who, especially in the West, monopolized what was left of of civilized life outside the church and played an increasing part in the church itself. Senators and great landowners became almost synonymous terms. These people knew the comforts and amenities of life; they cultivated rhetoric and poetry. In Rome, under the guidance of Symmachus, they provided the last bastion of paganism. Elsewhere they turned to the Church.


                                                    III

The fact that the aristocracy played a role of increasing importance in the affairs of the Church is only one aspect of what is perhaps the central feature of the fourth century: the emergence of the Church as an organization competing with the State itself and become attractive to educated and influential persons. The Sate, though trying to regiment everything, was most able to prevent or suppress the competition of the Church. A man could in fact escape from the authority of the State if he embraced the Church. If he like power he would soon discover that there was more power to be found in the Church than in the State. The Church attracted the most creative minds – St. Ambrose, Sty Jerome, Hilarius of Poitiers, St Augustine in the West; Athanasius, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basil of Caesarea in the East: almost all born rulers, rulers of a type which, with the exception of the scholarly emperor Julian, it has hard to find on the imperial throne. They combined Christian theology with pagan philosophy, worldly political abilities with a secure faith in immortal values. They could tell both the learned and the unlearned how they should be behave, and consequently transformed both the external features and the inner meaning of the daily existence of an increasing number of people.

Gibbon was simplifying a very complicated issue when he insinuated that Christianity was responsible for the fall of the empire. But he perceived that the Church attracted many men who in the past would have become excellent generals, governors of provinces, adviser to the emperors. Moreover, the Church made ordinary people proud, not of their old political institutions, but of their new churches, monasteries, ecclesiastical charities. Money which would have gone to the building of a theater or of an aqueduct now went to the buildings of churches and monasteries. The social equilibrium changed – to the advantage of the spiritual and physical conditions of monks and priests, but to the disadvantage of the ancient institutions of the empire.

The expanding and consolidating hierarchical organization of the Church offered scope for initiative, leadership, ambition. With Theodosius’ law of A. D. 392 pagan cults became illegal. Other laws were directed against heretics. Catholic priests obtained all sorts of privileges, including that of being judged by their own bishops in the case of criminal offences. This was the outcome of a century of struggles. St. Ambrose, having thrown the whole weight of his powerful and fearless personality into the struggle, compelled the aging Theodosius to yield to the demands of the Church. St. Ambrose’s victory can be considered final in so far as paganism is concerned. When Alaric captured Rome in 410 many people asked themselves whether the ruin of Rome was not the sign that Christianity was bad for the empire. The Christian answer to these doubts prevailed. It opened a new epoch in the philosophy of history. The political disaster was real enough, but more real was the faith which inwardly transformed the lives of the multitudes and which was now given its intellectual justification in his City of God.

If paganism was dying, this did not mean that the unity of the Church, willed by St. Ambrose and St Augustine and accepted by Theodosius, was entirely safe.  The great episcopal churches of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria were maneuvering against each other. Nobody seriously challenged the hegemony of Rome in the West (perhaps because the claims of the Roman bishops were still vague), but even in Rome we meet rival bishops fighting each other with the support of excited crowds. And there were heresies. If Arianism was a lost cause inside the Empire, it prospered among the barbarians pressing on it borders. Other heresies, such as Priscillianism in Spain and Donatism in Africa, kept their appeal for a long time.

Much can be said about the internal conflicts, the worldly ambitions, the intolerance of the Church. Yet the conclusion remains that while the political organization of the empire became increasingly rigid, unimaginative, and unsuccessful, the Church was mobile and resilient and provided space for those whom the State was unable to absorb. The bishops were the centers of large voluntary organizations. They founded and controlled charitable institutions. They defended their flocks against state officials. When the military situation grew worse, they often organized armed resistance against the barbarians. It seems to me impossible to deny that the prosperity of the Church was both a consequence and a cause of the decline of the state. People escaped from the state into the Church and weakened the state by giving their best to the Church. This is a situation which in its turn requires analysis and explanation. But its primary importance cannot be overlooked. The best men were working for the Church, not for the state.

Monasticism provides the most telling test of the capacity of the Church in the fourth century. The first hermits of the third century were Christians who in order to live a perfect Christian life abandoned both the pagan world and Christian communities and retired to the desert. This was no simple revolt against society. It was born out of a deep experience of struggle against the temptations of the flesh. Where there is a hermit, there is the devil. The devil was a powerful reality in late antiquity, and the hermit was both obsessed by the devil and determined to fight him. The devil pursued the hermit, but the hermit believed he had the right weapons to counter-attack. St. Anthony was the model hermit, and his biography written by St. Athanasius became the model for all lives of saints, one of the most influential books of any time. But the hermits were a clear menace to orderly Christian society. Each of them organized his life on his own lines, defying the authority of the bishops and claiming to be the embodiment of the perfect Christian. While official Christianity was now bent on organizing the world and on achieving a working compromise with worldly ambitions, the hermits expressed contempt for the world. On the other hand, as Athanasius himself recognized when he chose to write the life of St. Anthony, the hermits were the true representatives of Christian asceticism. They could not be eliminated. A solution of the dilemma was found in creating monastic orders were collective life according to strict ascetic rules replaced the hermit’s individual escape from the this world. First Pachomius, then Basil laid down the rules for the monasteries they founded and controlled.  St. Basil’s Rule inspires Eastern monastic rules even today.

Monasticism was introduced to the West in the second part of the fourth century. St. Jerome was the popularizer of the Eastern monastic ideals and found disciples among the most aristocratic lades of Rome. Later St. Augustine dictated rules for people inclining to monastic life both in his Regula ad servos dei (the authenticity of which is disputed) and in his ascetic treatises, such as De opere Monachorum and De saneta Virginitate. So his contemporary John Casssian in France. All these rules provided approved patterns of life and introduced manual work as a normal part of a monk’s day. They also established direct or indirect control by the ecclesiastical authorities over the monasteries. This is not to say that the sting was taken entirely out of monastic life. The monks, especially in the East, proved often to be unruly, rebellious, disturbingly fanatical, and ignorant. Much social discontent contributed to their psychology. But monasticism as a whole ceased to be a danger and became a source of power and inspiration for the Church. Ultimately, monasticism became a constructive force in society: it united men in a new form of communal life and gave them a considerable amount of economic independence and political self-government. When Cassiodorus added specific cultural activities to the ordinary life of his monks, a new chapter opened in the intellectual history of Europe. The monks were not helping the Empire to survive. Judged from the traditional point of view of the pagan society they were a subversive force. But they provided an alternative to pagan city life.

 

                                                     IV

 

Monasticism is the most obvious example of the way in which Christianity built something of its own which undermined the military and political structure of the Roman empire. Yet this is only part of the story.

As soon as the barbarians were let into the empire, the conflict between pagan society and Christian society changed its aspect. A new factor was introduced. It remained to be seen whether pagans or Christians would succeed better in dealing with the barbarians. From the end of the fourth century A.D. the Christian Church was asked not only to exorcise the devils, but to tame the barbarism. Next to Satan, the barbarians were the problem of the day. Like the devils, the barbarians could be found everywhere, but unlike the devils no simple  formula could chase them away. Here the Church had to cooperate with subtlety in a variety of situations: it had to prove itself superior to the pagans.

It was soon evident that the East was safer than the West. The main German pressure was on the Rhine and Danube. Asia was fairly secure. The military reservoir of Asia Minor provided enough solders for the emperors of Constantinople to counterbalance the influence of German mercenaries and to help to keep them in their place. Constantinople proved to be an impregnable fortress. But the military aspects of the situation cannot be separated from the social ones. The East was after not only because it was stronger, but also because it was less dissatisfied with the Roman administration. The concentration of wealth in a few hands did not go quite as far as in the West. City life survived better in the East, and consequently the peasants there were less hard pressed. If we except Egypt, the Easy had no parallel to the endemic revolts of the Bagaude and the circumcelliones* of Gaul, Spain, and Africa. In the West there were people wondering whether their lot would not be better under the barbarians. The French priest Salvianus, the author of the De gubernations dei, written in 450, was deeply impressed by the quality of the Germans; and there was the famous story of a Roman who lived among the Huns and explained why he was better off with them.

This evidence does not of course mean that the barbarians were greeted as liberators in any part of the empire. The slaves and serfs were not freed by the barbarians. They simply changed masters and had to bear the consequences of all the destructions and revolutions. It is true that the curiales** were progressively relieved of their burdens and that the corporate system of the late Roman empire fell into desuetude. But the curiales disappeared only because city life disappeared. The picture of the barbarians arriving as a liberation army is a fantastic travesty of the facts. What must be taken to account, however, is that in the West the psychological resistance to the barbarians was less strong than in the East. Not only military weakness, but defeatism paved the way for the German invasion of Italy and the western provinces.

We badly need systematic research on the regional differences in the attitude of the Church towards the Roman state. Generalizations are premature. But some facts are apparent. The Greek Fathers never produced searching criticisms of the Roman state comparable with those of St. Augustine and Salvian. On the contrary, St. John Chrysostom supported the anti-German party in Constantinople, and Synesius became a convert and a bishop after having outlined the programme of that party. It would seem that in the West, after having contributed to the weakening of the empire, the Church inclined to accept collaboration with the barbarians and even replacement of the Roman authorities by barbarian leaders. In the East (with the partial exception of Alexandria) the Church appreciated the military strength of the Roman state and the loyalties it commanded. No doubt the Eastern churches, too, did not hesitate to deprive Roman administration of the best men and of the best revenue whenever they could, but, at least from the second part of the fourth century, they threw in their weight with the new Rome.

Looking at both sides of the empire, one conclusion seems inescapable. The Church managed to have it both ways. It could help the ordinary man either in his fight against the barbarian or in his compromise with them. It succeeded where pagan society had little to offer either way. The educated pagan was by definition afraid of barbarians. There was no bridge between the aristocratic ideals of a pagan and the primitive violence of the German invader. In theory the barbarians could be idealized. Primitivism has always had its devotees. Alternatively, a few select barbarians could be redeemed by proper education and philosophical training. There was no objection to barbarians on racial grounds. But the ordinary barbarian as such was nothing more than a nightmare to the educated pagan.

The Christians had a different attitude and other possibilities. They could convert the barbarians and make them members of the Church. They had discovered a bridge between barbarians and civilization. Alternatively, the Church gave its moral support to the struggle against the barbarians: the defense of the empire could be presented as the defense of the Church. It is obvious tat if we had to analyze the process in detail we should have to take account the complications caused by the existence of doctrinal differences within the Church. It was commonly felt that an heretic was worse than a pagan. Thus the fight against German Arians was even more meritorious than the fight against German pagans. What really matters to us is that in the West the Church gradually replaced the dying State in dealing with the barbarians. In the East, on the other hand, the Church realized that the Roman state was much more vital and supported it in its fight against the barbarians. In the West, after having weakened the Roman state, the Church accepted its demise and acted independently in taming them. In the East, the Church almost identified itself with the Roman State of Constantinople.

In both cases, ordinary people needed protection and guidance. The wealthy classes were capable of looking after themselves either under the Roman emperor or under barbarian kings. But ordinary people wanted leaders. They found them in their bishops.

Above all, something had to be done in order to establish a communal life which both Romans and barbarians could share. A glance at the life of St. Severinus*** by Eugippius is enough to give the impression of what a courageous and imaginative Christian leader could do in difficult circumstances. In the fourth and fifth centuries the bishops did not make much of an effort to convert the barbarians who were living outside the borders of the Roman empire. But the were deeply concerned with the religion of the barbarians who settled in the empire. In other words, the conversion to Christianity  was part of the process whereby Germans  were, at least to some extent, romanized and made capable of living together with the citizens of the Roman empire. The process of romanizing the barbarians by christianizing them is an essential feature of the Roman empire between Constantine and Justinian. If it did not save the empire, at least in the West, it saved many features of Roman civilization.

The superiority of Christianity over paganism in dynamism and efficiency was already evident in the fourth century. The Christians could adapt themselves better to the new political and social situation and deal more efficiently wit the barbarians. A closer analysis of the relations between the pagans and Christians in the fourth century is therefore the necessary presupposition for any further study of the decline of the Roman Empire. Such analysis may show that in these field as well as in other fields the solitary Jacob Burckhardt was nearer the truth than any other historian of the 19th century. His book on Constantine was inspired by Gibbon and merciless in  its judgement of the emperor who christianized the empire, but was very careful to avoid confusion between Constantine and the cause he embraced. Burckhardt tried to understand what the Church had given to a declining empire and under what conditions it was prepared to do so. We are still wrestling with the same problem.


* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagaudae
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcellions

**  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiales

***  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severinus_of_Noricum

Barthes Ventriloquizes Michelet

 

Michelet-as-Oedipus

The historian is not at all a ‘reader’ of the past, and if he reorganizes History, it is not on the level of ideas, of forces, of causes or systems, but on the level of each carnal death. The historian’s duties are not established in terms of the general concept of historical truth, but only confronting each dead man of history; his function is not of an intellectual order, it is at once of a social and a sacred order. The historian is in fact a civil magistrate in charge of administering the estate of the dead. This civil magistracy is doubled of course by a priesthood: it is less a matter of keeping vigil over the memory of the dead than of completing by a magical action what in their lives may have been absurd or mutilated. The historian is an Oedipus ( he retrospectively solves human enigmas). History’s dead never understand why they have lived, for, according to the Sophoclean formula, life is intelligible only when death has provided it with an irremissible goal. The historian is precisely the magus who receives from the dead their actions, their sufferings, their sacrifices, and gives them a place in History’s universal memory.


Truth of Assassinated Men

Caesar under Brutus’s knife, Becket under that of Reginald  Fitzurse, the Duke of Orleans under those of the Burgundians, the Duke of Guise under that of Henri III –each of these  has been himself, achieved his true stature, only once he was dead, lying at his assassin’s feet like a new man, mysterious, unaccustomed, different from the old one by all the distance of a revelation, that relation produced by the ultimate coherence of destiny. The new man is the historical man. If these prone and still-warm dead men are saved from nothingness, it is because Michelet was already gazing upon them, the historian was already taking them over, already explaining their lives to them. He was drawing from them a raw, blind, chaotic, incomplete, absurd life, and restoring to them a clear life, a full life, embellished by an ultimate signification, linked to the great (i.e. genetic) surface of History.

Thus, the historian is the man who has reversed Time, who turns back to the place of the dead and recommences their life in a clear and useful direction; he is the demiurge who links what was scattered, discontinuous, incomprehensible: he weaves together the threads of all lives, he knits up the great fraternity of the dead, whose formidable displacement, through Time, forms the extension of History which the historian leads while walking backwards, gathered within his gaze which decides and discloses.

To Live Out Death

The historian, funeral magistrate, must therefore approach death more closely than others. He must live out death, i.e., he must love it; it is at this price alone that, having entered into a sort of primitive communion with the dead, he can exchange with them the signs of life. This ceremonial of the approach to death is Michelet’s entire history.

And this approach is exorcism. Death becomes the necessary and sufficient object of the historian’s life. Michelet devours the dead ( ‘I have drunk the black blood of the dead’); he is therefore one of them. Under the moral finality of Micheletist History, there is an intimate finality which designates the entire past as Michelet’s nourishment. All of History discloses itself so Michelet may live on. A magical relationship consecrates the world as the history as the historian’s nourishment, marks it out as the goal of a consummation. ‘The gods’, Homer had already said, ‘determine human fates and decide the fall of men, in order that future generations can compose their songs.’ At the heart of every resurrectional myth ( and we know too well this ambition of Micheletist History),  there is a ritual of assimilation. The resurrection of the past it is not a metaphor; it is actually a kind of sacred manducation  [eating], a domestication of Death. The life Michelet restores to the dead is assigned a funereal coefficient so heavy that resurrection becomes the  original essence, absolutely fresh and virgin of death, as in whose dream where one sees a dead person living, while knowing perfectly well that the person is dead.

In the Micheletist  resurrection of the past, death is heavy. It is neither paradise nor grave, it is the very existence of the dead person, but dreamed, reconciling in itself the familiar (touching) features of life and the solemn knowledge of death. In this fashion, every flaw is connected, every misstep conquered between life and death, between the timorous solitude of the living historian and the communion of all the dead who are no longer afraid. It is for this that Michele so readily shifted his own organism to the countless people of the dead; constantly touching death, like Antaeus his mother earth, he attached himself to History as to the apprenticeship of his own death.


Death-as-Sleep

 

Unfortunately, not all deaths possess that revealing virtue which discloses the style of an existence. Some are false deaths, apparent deaths, half deaths, neither death nor life, and these are the worst, for they cannot enter into the historian’s resurrectional system.

Michelet always had a panic terror of such death-as-sleep; not only for his own family, whose death he always verified by systematic scarifications and obsessive  exhumation, but also for the objects of History, whose subsidence into sleep he always described as an irremissible death, to the very degree where the motionless escapes transmutation ( the corruption of corpses, a favorite theme, (‘too-alluring subject’). The sleep of Rome, that of Provence, even that of Christianity – so many phenomena lost to History. To these sinister torpors, Michelet opposes the frank deaths of India and of Egypt – honest deaths, ‘at peace and resting in their graves –legible deaths, the regular nutrient of the historian.


Solar Death

Here, then, on one side is death-as-sleep, which stupefies the sites and clogs the sense of history, and, on the other, death-as-clarity, which floods the historical object with the very evidence of its signification. Michelet is said to have desired this death-as-sun for himself and wanted his own body, upon his death, to be exposed to the sun until dissolution. This wish has been compared to Goethe’s last words : mehr licht. Yet this desire for a solar death had nothing aesthetic or even mythic about it. Michele could only demand an open death, i.e., a total death: this dead historian could seek no other paradise than history itself.

We know that such a death was in part stolen from Michelet: not only is his wish, apparently, apocryphal, but instead of the grave of flaming sunshine which he was to have at Hyeres, Michelet’s widow chose to give him an official and elaborate mausoleum at Pere-Lachaise. Here Jules Ferry spoke a now forgotten oration: the radical-socialist subsidence into sleep was beginning, and Michelet enter into that motionless enchantment of which he had always been afraid.

Commemorations of Jules Michelet:
https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/33/3/399/5509324

 

Mud Pond Carry by Henry David Thoreau

1857

Umbazookskus Lake is the head of the Penobscot in this direction, and Mud Pond is the nearest bend of the Allegash, one of the chief sources of the St. John. Mud Pond I about halfway from Umbazookskus to Chamberlain Lake, into which it empties, and to which we were bound.  The Indian said that this was the wettest carry in the State, and as the season was a very wet one, we anticipated an unpleasant walk. As usual he made one large bundle of the pork-keg, cooking utensils, and other loose traps, by tying them up in his blanket. We should be obliged to go over the carry twice, and our method was to carry one half part way, and then go back for the rest.

Our path ran close by the door of a log-hut in a clearing at the end of the carry, which the Indian, who alone entered it, found to be occupied by a Canadian and his family, and that the man had been blind for a year. He seemed peculiarly unfortunate to be taken blind there, where there were so few eyes to see for him. He could not even be lead out of that country by a dog, but must be taken down the rapids as passively as a barrel of flour. This was the first house above Chesuncock, and the last on the Penobscot waters, and was built here, no doubt, because it was the route of the lumberers in the winter and spring.

After a slight ascent from the lake through the springy soil of the Canadian’s clearing. We entered on a level and very wet and rocky path through universal dense evergreen forest, a loosely paved gutter merely, where we went leaping from rock to rock and from side to side in the vain attempt to keep out of the water and mud. We concluded that it was yet Penobscot water, though there was no flow to it .It was on this carry that the white hunter whom I met in the stage, as he told me, had shot two bears a few months before.. They stood directly in the path, and did not turn out for him. They might be excused for not turning out there, or only taking the right as the law directs. He said that at this season bears were found on the mountains and hillsides, in search of berries, and were apt to be saucy, - that we might come across them up Trout Stream; and he added, what I hardly credited, that many Indians slept in their canoes, not daring to sleep on land, on account of them.

Here commences what was called, twenty years ago, the best timber land in the State. This very spot was described as ‘covered with an abundance of pine,’ but now this appears to me, comparatively, an uncommon tree there, - and yet you did not see where any more could have stood, amid the dense growth of cedar, fir, etc. It was then proposed to cut a canal from lake to lake here, but the outlet was made further east, at Telos Lake, as we shall see.

The Indian with his canoe soon disappeared before us; but erelong he came back and told us to take a path which turned off westward, it being better walking, and , at my suggestion, he agreed to leave a bough in the regular carry at that place, that we might not pass it by mistake. Thereafter, he said, we were to keep the main path, and he added, ‘You see ‘em my tracks.’ But I had not much faith that we could distinguish his tracks, since others had passed over the carry within a few days.

We turned off at the right place, but were soon confused by numerous logging-paths, coming into the one we were on, by which lumberers had been to pick out those pines which I have mentioned. However, we kept what we considered the main path, though it was a winding one, and this, at long intervals, we distinguished a faint trace of a footstep. This, though comparatively unworn, was at first a better, or, at least, a drier road  than the regular carry which we had left. It led through an arbor-vitae wilderness of the grimmest character. The great fallen and rotten trees had been cut  through and rolled aside, and  their huge trunks abutted on the path on each side, while others still lay across it two or three feet high.

 

It was impossible for us to discern the Indian’s trail in the elastic moss, which, like a thick carpet, covered every rock and fallen tree, as well as the earth. Nevertheless, I did occasionally detect the track of a man, and I gave myself some credit for it. I carried my whole load at once, a heavy knapsack,  and a large India-rubber bag, containing our bread and a blanket, swung on a paddle; in all, about sixty pounds; but my companion preferred to make two journeys, by short stages, while I waited for him. We could not be sure that we were not depositing our loads each time further of from the true path.

As I was waiting for my companion, he would seem to be gone for a long time, and I had ample opportunity to make observations on the forest. I now first began to be seriously molested by the black-fly, a very small but perfectly formed fly of that color, about one tent of an inch long, which I first felt, and the saw, in swarms around me, as I sat by a wider  and more than usually double fork in this dark forest path. The hunters tell bloody stories about them, - how they settle in a ring about your neck, before you know it, and are wiped off in great numbers with your blood. But remembering I had a wash in my knapsack, prepared by a thoughtful hand in Bangor, I made hate to apply it to my face and hands, and was glad to find it effectual, as long as it was fresh, or for twenty minutes, nor only against black-flies, but all the insects that molested us. They would not alight on the part thus defended. It was composed of sweet-oil and oil of turpentine, with a little oil of spearmint, and camphor. However, I finally concluded that the remedy was worse than the disease. It was so disagreeable and inconvenient to have your face and hands covered with such a mixture.

Three large slate-colored birds of the jay genus, the Canada jay, moose-bird, meat-bird, or what not, came flitting silently and by degrees towards me, and hopped down the limbs inquisitively to within seven or eight feet. They were more clumsy and not nearly so handsome as the blue-jay. Fish-hawks, from the lake, uttered their sharp whistling notes low over the top of the forest near me, as if they were anxious about a nest there.

After I had sat there some time, I noticed at this fork in the path a tree which had been blazed, and the letters ‘Chamb. L.’ written in it with red chalk. This I knew to be Chamberlain Lake. So I concluded that on the whole we were on the right course, though we had come nearly two miles, and saw no signs of Mud Pond. I did harbor a suspicion that we might be on the direct course to Chamberlain Lake, leaving out Mud Pond. This I found on my map would be about five miles northeasterly, and I then took the bearing by my compass.

My companion having returned with his bag, and also defended his face and hands with the insect wash, we set forward again. The walking rapidly grew worse, and the path more indistinct, and at length, after passing trough a patch of Calla palustris [water arum], still abundantly in bloom, we found ourselves in a more open and regular swamp, made less passable than ordinary by the unusual wetness of the season. We sank a foot deep in water and mud at every step, and sometimes up our knees, and the trail was almost obliterated, being no more than a musquash [muskrat] leaves in similar places, when he parts the floating sedge. In fact, it was probably was a musquash trail in some places. We concluded that if Mud Pond was as muddy as the approach to it was wet, it certainly deserved its name.

It would have been amusing to behold the dogged and deliberate pace at which we entered the swamp, without interchanging a word, as if determined to go through it, though it should come up to our necks. Having penetrated a considerable distance into this, and found a tussock on which we could deposit our loads, though there was no place to sit, my companion went back for the rest of his pack. I thought to observe on this carry when we crossed the dividing line between the Penobscot and St. John, but as my feet had hardly been out of the water the whole distance, and it was all level and stagnant, I began to despair of finding it.

I remember hearing a good deal about the ‘highlands’ dividing the waters of the Penobscot from those of the St. John, as well as the St. Lawrence, at the time of the north-east boundary dispute, and I observed by my map, that the line claimed by Great Britain as the boundary prior to 1824 passed between Umbazookskus Lake and Mud Pond, so that we had either crossed or were then on it. These, then, according to her interpretation of the treaty of ’83, were the ‘highlands which divide those rivers that empty into  the  St. Lawrence from those that fall into the Atlantic Ocean.’ Truly an interesting spot to stand on, - if that were it, - though you could not sit down there. I thought that if the commissioners themselves, and the king of Holland with them, had spent a few days here, with their packs upon their backs, looking for that ‘highland, they would have had an interesting time, and perhaps it would have modified their views of the question somewhat. The king of Holland would have been in his element. Such were my meditations while my companion was gone back for his bag.

It was a cedar swamp, through which the peculiar note of the white-throated sparrow rang loud and clear. There grew the side-saddle flower, Labrador tea, Kalmia glauca [pale laurel], and, what was new to me, the Low Birch [Betula pumila], a little round-leaf shrub, two or three feet high only. We thought to name this swamp after the latter.

After a long while my companion came back, and the Indian with him. We had taken the wrong road, and the Indian had lost us. He had very wisely gone back to the Canadian’s camp, and asked him which way we had probably gone, since he could better understand the ways of white men, and he told him correctly that we had undoubtedly taken the supply road to Lake Chamberlain (slender supplies they would get over such a road at this season). The Indian was greatly surprised that we should have taken what he called a ‘tow’ (i.e., tote or toting or supply) road, instead of a carry path – that we had not followed his tracks, -said it was ‘strange,’ and evidently though little of our woodcraft.

Having held a consultation, and eaten a mouthful of bread, we concluded that it would perhaps be nearer for us two now to keep onto Chamberlain Lake, omitting Mud Pond, than to go back and start anew for the last place, though the Indian had never been through this way, and knew nothing about it. In the meantime he would go back and finish carrying his canoe and bundle to Mud Pond, cross that and go down its outlet and up Chamberlain Lake, and trust to meet us there before night. It was now a little after noon. He supposed that the water in which we stood had flowed back from Mud Pond which could not be far off eastward, but was unapproachable through the dense cedar swamp.

Keeping on, we were erelong agreeably disappointed by reaching firmer ground, and we crossed a ridge where the path was more distinct, but there was never any outlook the forest. While descending the last, I saw many specimens of the great round-leaf orchis, of large size, one which I measured had leaves, as usual, flat on the ground, nine and  a half inches long, and nine wide, and was two feet high. The dark, damp wilderness is favorable to some of these orchidaceous plants, though they are too delicate for cultivation. I also saw the swamp gooseberry (Ribes lacustre), with green fruit, and all in low ground, where it was not too wet, the Rubus triflorus [dwarf raspberry] in fruit. At one place I heard a very clear and piercing note from a small hawk, like a single note from a white-throated sparrow, only very much louder, as he dashed through the tree-tops over my head. I wondered that he had allowed himself to be disturbed by our presence, since it seemed as if he could not easily find his nest again himself in that wilderness.

We saw and heard several times the red squirrel, and often, as before observed, the bluish scales of the fir cones which it had left on a rock or fallen tree. This, according to the Indian, is the only squirrel found in those woods, except for a very few striped ones. It must have a solitary time in that dark evergreen forest, where there is so little life, seventy-five miles from a road as we had come. I wondered how he could call any particular tree there his home; and yet he would run up the stem of one out of myriads, as if it were an old road known to him. How can a hawk ever find him there? I fancied that he must be glad to see us, though he did seem to chide us. One of those somber fir and spruce woods is not complete unless you hear from out of its cavernous mossy and twiggy recesses his fine alarum, -his spruce voice, like the working of the sap through some crack in a tree – the working of the spruce-beer. Such an impertinent fellow would occasionally try to alarm the wood about me. “Oh, ‘ said I, ‘I am well acquainted with your family, I know our cousins in Concord very well. Guess the mail’s irregular in these parts, and you’d like to hear from ‘em.’ But my overtures were in vain, for he would withdraw by his aerial turnpikes into a more distant cedar-top, and spring his rattle again.

We entered another swap, at a necessarily low pace, where the walking was worse than ever, not only on account of the water, but the fallen timber, which often obliterated the indistinct trail entirely. The fallen trees were so numerous, that for long distances the route was through a succession of small yards, where we climbed over fences as high as out heads, down into water often up to out knees, and then over another fence into a second yard, and so on; and going back for his bag my companion once lost his way and came back without it. In many places the canoe would have run except for the fallen timber. Again it would be more open, but equally wet, too wet for trees to grow, and no place to sit down.

It was a mossy swamp, which required the long legs of a moose to traverse, and it is very likely that we scared some in our transit, though we saw none. It was ready to echo the growl of a bear, the howl of a wolf, or the scream of a panther; but we you get fairly into the middle of these grim forests, you are surprised to find that the larger inhabitants are not at home commonly, but have left only a puny red squirrel to bark at you. Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling. I did, however, see one dead porcupine; perhaps he has succumbed to the difficulties of the way. These bristly fellows are a very suitable small fruit of such unkempt wildernesses.

Making a logging road in the Maine woods is called ‘swamping it,’ and they that do the work are called ‘swampers.’ I now perceive the fitness of the term. This was the most perfectly swamped of all the roads I ever saw. Nature must have cooperated with art here. However, I suppose they would tell you that this name took its origin from the fact that the chief work of road-makers in those woods is to make swamps passable. We came to a stream where the bridge, which had been made of logs tied together with cedar bark, had been broken up, and we got over it as we could. This probably emptied into Mud Pond, and perhaps the Indian might have come up it and taken us in there if he had known it. Such as it was, this ruined bridge was the chief evidence that we were on a path of any kind.

We then crossed another low rising ground, and I , who wore shoes, had the opportunity to wring out my stockings, but my companion, who used boots, had found that this was not a safe experiment for him, for he might not be able to get his wet boots on again. He went over the whole ground, or water, three times, for which reason our progress was very slow; beside that the water softened our feet, and to some extent unfitted them for walking. As I sat waiting for him, it would naturally seem an unaccountable time that he was gone. Therefore, as I could see through the woods that the sun was getting low, and it was uncertain how far the lake might be, even if we were on the right course, and in what part of the world we should find ourselves nightfall, I proposed that I should push through with what speed I could, leaving boughs to mark my path, and find the lake and Indian, if possible, before night, and send the latter back to carry my companions bag.

Having gone about a mile, and got into low ground again, I heard a noise like the note of an owl, which I soon discovered to be made by the Indian, and, answering him, we soon came together. He had reached the lake, after crossing Mud Pond, and running some rapids below it, and had come up about a mile and a half on our path. If he had not come back to meet us, we probably should not have found him that night, for the path branched once or twice before reaching this particular part of the lake. So he went back for my companion and his bag, while I kept on.

Having waded trough another steam, where the bridge of logs had been broken up and half floated away, - and this was not altogether worse than our ordinary walking, since it was less muddy, - we continued on, through alternate mud and water, to the shore of Apmoojenegamook Lake, which wee reached in season for a late supper, instead of dining there, as we expected, having gone without our dinner. It was at least five miles by the way we had come, and as my companion had gone over most of it three time, he had walked full a dozen miles, bad as it was. In the winter, when the water is frozen, and the snow I four feet deep, it is no doubt a tolerable path to a footman. As it was, I would not have missed that walk for a good deal.

If you want an exact recipe for making such a road, take one part Mud Pond, and dilute it with equal parts of Umbazookskus and Apmoojenegamook; then send to family of musquash through to locate it, look after the grades and culverts, and finish it to their minds, and let a hurricane follow to do the fencing.