ICELAND.

Otago Witness, Issue 2056, 20 July 1893, Page 41

ICELAND.

Almost the first building that attracts the eye of a stranger in Reykjavik is the solidlybuilt stone structure that overlooks the little green'sqnare in the centre of the town. This is the Althing House, the only building in Iceland of any architectural pretensions, and one that would do no discredit to Berlin or Paris. The upper storey contains the National Museum, the middle storey is occupied by the two branches of the Althing, and on the ground floor is the National Library, the largest collection of books in Iceland. Here are between 25,000 and 30,000 printed books, and 1300 manuscripts. The collection is miscellaneous, with unexpected riches in some directions, and equally unexpected poverty in others. The richest department is naturally that of Icelandic history and literature, though even this is not complete.

First and foremost, we mast note that the country is little better than a desert. The peculiar configuration renders intercourse difficult, and along with the barrenness of the soil makes the conditions of existence strangely hard. People with so little to make life attractive might be pardoned if they were to sink into a stolid indifference to everything but the struggle to keep alive. The size of Iceland is greater than that of Ireland, and the population numbers 70,000 souls ; but the o&ly inhabitable portion is a narrow strip of pasture land extending like a green girdle round the coast and up the deep, narrow fiords. The interior of the country is a howling waste of eand and ice, traversed by darting glacier rivers, and utterly incapable of supporting more than a few scattered inhabitants. Grass is the only considerable crop. The hills and valleys are treeless, and afford at best but scanty pasturage for horses, cows, and sheep. Roads and bridges scarcely exist. A Danish merchant at Reykjavik has a wheeled carriage; but in the interior such a conveyance is unknown, and would be useless if known. The backs of hor£63 are the only means of transportation across country. Small boats carry travellers over dangerous river 3, while the horses swim on ahead. Hardly anything that ministers to comfort, to say nothing of luxury, is produced in Iceland. Every nail in an Icelandic house, every pane of glass, every bit of wooden flooring, every insignificant bit of furniture has to be transported laboriously from one of the seaports to its destination. That the Icelanders are poor goes without saying. There is little or no home market ; for almost every Icelander has the same produce to sell as his neighbour. The circulation of money is therefore very small. If a farmer has direct dealings with the agents for foreign markets, and is sufficiently prosperous to have a little surplus each year, he may handle actual money, but in general the trading at the seaports is literally trading. An Icelander barters a certain number of horses, or sheep, or rolls of dried fish, or balls of hay, for a supply of groceries and other necessaries of life. If he buys books under such conditions, he must want them more than do the rural inhabitants of most countiies. ' From their books the Icelanders seem to have absorbed the soothing and restful part of culture— the part that gives help and comfort ; but their modern writers appear to have no burning message for the world. Reykjavik is not a Weimar ; and the intellectual life there, though attractive and to a certain degree stimulating, does not stir one to the depths. We have glanced at the general conditions of life in Iceland, and at the number of books collected for the purposes of the scholar. We have found the conditions on the whole unfavourable for great original scholarship or great literary productiveness. But, on the other hand, Iceland can boast an unusually high standard of intelligence, and can justly be called a nation of readers. The people in the remote countiy districts have caught the reading habit, and during a considerable part of the year they have every excuse for indulging it. In winter they cannot travel, for they are shut in by drifted snow. They may feed the sheep and cows and horses, and attend to the dairy products. They may spin and weave wool; but otherwise they have little to do except to read and talk and play chess. Fortunately they have no manufacturing and no business ; for mental exertion is almost the only activity that they do not dread. Culture ia popular in Iceland, and cultivated men receive due recognition. In material things the Icelanders are far behind the rest of the world. One may question whether, in most parts of the island, counting out a few of the towns, the material civilisation was not on as high a plane a thousand years ago. On any other assumption one can scarcely understand the old sagas, with their tales of the long ships with dragon prows ; of feasts in the great halls, through which marched warriors and queenly women to the carved high seats ; and of the glitter of gold and precious stones on garments of red and purple and blue. Barbaric display is certainly not the crying sin of the Icelander of to-day. He is contented with a surprisingly short list of the necessaries of life. Diogenes and Thoreau would have felt at home in Iceland, though Diogenes would have been cold in his tub, and Thoreau might have tired a little of dried cod-fish.

Politically and socially, the Icelanders are working out their own salvation. They are so far from the sweep of modern political and social questions that they are not perplexed with socialism and anarchism; but the Liberal party is progressive, and is now urging the complete emancipation of women. Icelanders appear for [the most part to lhave little appreciation of foreign politics. Those who have been abroad and have returned to Iceland rapidly lose their grasp of current facts; while those who have remained at home have never had the facts to lose. The great majority of the people have so few facts to deal with at any one time that they do not generalise well on the world at large. Nearly everyone with whom I talked had singular ideas concerning England, Germany, France, Italy, to say nothing about America. The standard is lacking for measuring a country like the United States. The income of our Government for a single day would support the Government of Iceland for 10 .years. Other comparisons would yield a similar result. A civilisation so simple as the Icelandic does not furnish the rudimentary data for understanding an organism so wonderfully complex as a great modern city like Berlin or Paris or London

Books of the sort that Icelanders can afford to buy can give no adequate idea of the outside world. The false impressions are in few cases corrected by travel; and the natural* result is a distorted view of the un- Icelandic world. Yet I hasten to add that the Icelander has a more correct idea of America than most Americans have of Iceland ; for the average Icelander has at leaßt a glimmer of the truth about America, while the average American takes for granted an imaginary Iceland, as unlike the real one as possible.— W. E. Mead, in the Atlantic Monthly.