Much attention has been excited this year by the alleged fulfilment
of a prophecy that the Papal power was to receive its death-blow--in
temporal matters, at least--during the past year 1848. For
ourselves, we have no more faith in Mr. Fleming, the obsolete author,
who has so suddenly revived in the public esteem, than we have in
many other interpreters of prophecy. Their shallow and bigoted views
of past history are enough to damp our faith in their discernment of
the future. It does seem that people ought to understand what has
been, before they predict what will be. History is "the track of
God's footsteps through time;" it is in His dealings with our
forefathers that we may expect to find the laws by which He will deal
with us. Not that Mr. Fleming's conjecture must be false; among a
thousand guesses there ought surely to be one right one. And it is
almost impossible for earnest men to bend their whole minds, however
clumsily, to one branch of study without arriving at some truth or
other. The interpreters of prophecy therefore, like all other
interpreters, have our best wishes, though not our sanguine hopes.
But, in the meantime, there are surely signs of the approaching ruin
of Popery, more certain than any speculations on the mystic numbers
of the Revelation. We should point to recent books--not to books
which merely expose Rome, that has been done long ago, usque ad
nauseam--but to books which do her justice: to Mr. Maitland's "Dark
Ages;" Lord Lindsay's "Christian Art;" and last, but not least, to
the very charming work of Mrs. Jameson, whose title heads this
review. In them, and in a host of similar works in Germany, which
Dr. Wiseman's party hail as signs of coming triumph, we fancy we see
the death-warrant of Romanism; because they prove that Rome has
nearly done her work--that the Protestants are learning the lesson
for the sake of which Providence has so long borne with that
monstrous system. When Popery has no more truth to teach us, but not
till then, will it vanish away into its native night.
We entreat Protestant readers not to be alarmed at us. We have not
the slightest tendency toward the stimulants of Popery, either in
their Roman unmixed state, or in their diluted Oxford form. We are,
with all humility, more Protestant than Protestantism itself; our
fastidious nostril, more sensitive of Jesuits than even those of the
author of "Hawkstone," has led us at moments to fancy that we scent
indulgences in Conduit-street Chapel, and discern inquisitors in
Exeter Hall itself. Seriously, none believe more firmly than
ourselves that the cause of Protestantism is the cause of liberty, of
civilisation, of truth; the cause of man and God. And because we
think Mrs. Jameson's book especially Protestant, both in manner and
intention, and likely to do service to the good cause, we are setting
to work herein to praise and recommend it. For the time, we think,
for calling Popery ill names is past; though to abstain is certainly
sometimes a sore restraint for English spirits, as Mrs. Jameson
herself, we suspect, has found; but Romanism has been exposed and
refuted triumphantly, every month for centuries, and yet the Romish
nations are not converted; and too many English families of late have
found, by sad experience, that such arguments as are in vogue are
powerless to dissuade the young from rushing headlong into the very
superstitions which they have been taught from their childhood to
deride. The truth is, Protestantism may well cry: "Save me from my
friends!" We have attacked Rome too often on shallow grounds, and
finding our arguments weak, have found it necessary to overstate
them. We have got angry, and caught up the first weapon which came
to hand, and have only cut our own fingers. We have very nearly
burnt the Church of England over our heads, in our hurry to make a
bonfire of the Pope. We have been too proud to make ourselves
acquainted with the very tenets which we exposed, and have made a
merit of reading no Popish books but such as we were sure would give
us a handle for attack, and not even them without the precaution of
getting into a safe passion beforehand. We have dealt in
exaggerations, in special pleadings, in vile and reckless imputations
of motive, in suppressions of all palliating facts. We have outraged
the common feelings of humanity by remaining blind to the virtues of
noble and holy men because they were Papists, as if a good deed was
not good in Italy as well as in England. We have talked as if God
had doomed to hopeless vileness in this world and reprobation in the
next millions of Christian people, simply because they were born of
Romish and not of Protestant fathers. And we have our reward; we
have fared like the old woman who would not tell the children what a
well was for fear they should fall into one. We see educated and
pious Englishmen joining the Romish communion simply from ignorance
of Rome, and have no talisman wherewith to disenchant them. Our
medicines produce no effect on them, and all we can do is, like
quacks, to increase the dose. Of course, if ten boxes of Morison's
pills have killed a man, it only proves that--he ought to have taken
twelve of them. We are jesting, but, as an Ulster Orangeman would
say, "it is in good Protestant earnest."
In the meantime some of the deepest cravings of the human heart have
been left utterly unsatisfied. And be it remembered, that such
universal cravings are more than fancies; they are indications of
deep spiritual wants, which, unless we supply them with the good food
which God has made for them, will supply themselves with poison--
indications of spiritual faculties, which it is as wicked to stunt or
distort by mis-education as it is to maim our own limbs or stupefy
our understanding. Our humanity is an awful and divine gift; our
business is to educate it throughout--God alone must judge which part
of it shall preponderate over the rest. But in the last generation--
and, alas! in this also--little or no proper care has been taken of
the love for all which is romantic, marvellous, heroic, which exists
in every ingenuous child. Schoolboys, indeed, might, if they chose,
in play-hours, gloat over the "Seven Champions of Christendom," or
Lempriere's gods and goddesses; girls might, perhaps, be allowed to
devour by stealth a few fairy tales, or the "Arabian Nights;" but it
was only by connivance that their longings were satisfied from the
scraps of Moslemism, Paganism--anywhere but from Christianity.
Protestantism had nothing to do with the imagination--in fact, it was
a question whether reasonable people had any; whether the devil was
not the original maker of that troublesome faculty in man, woman, and
child. Poetry itself was, with most parents, a dram, to be given,
like Dalby's Carminative, as a pis-aller, when children could not
possibly be kept quiet by Miss Edgeworth or Mrs. Mangnall. Then, as
the children grew up, and began to know something of history and art,
two still higher cravings began to seize on many of them, if they
were at all of deep and earnest character: a desire to associate
with religion their new love for the beautiful, and a reverence for
antiquity; a wish to find some bond of union between themselves and
the fifteen centuries of Christianity which elapsed before the
Reformation. They applied to Protestant teachers and Protestant
books, and received too often the answer that the Gospel had nothing
to do with art--art was either Pagan or Popish; and as for the
centuries before the Reformation, they and all in them belonged
utterly to darkness and the pit. As for the heroes of early
Christianity, they were madmen or humbugs; their legends, devilish
and filthy puerilities. They went to the artists and literary men,
and received the same answer. The medieval writers were fools.
Classical art was the only art; all painters before the age of
Raphael superstitious bunglers. To be sure, as Fuseli said,
Christianity had helped art a little; but then it was the
Christianity of Julio and Leone--in short, of the worst age of
Popery.
These falsehoods have worked out their own punishment. The young are
examining for themselves, and finding that we have deceived them, a
revulsion in their feelings has taken place, similar to that which
took place in Germany some half-century ago. They are reading the
histories of the Middle Ages, and if we call them barbarous--they
will grant it, and then quote instances of individual heroism and
piety, which they defy us or any honest man not to admire. They are
reading the old legends, and when we call them superstitious--they
grant it, and then produce passages in which the highest doctrines of
Christianity are embodied in the most pathetic and noble stories.
They are looking for themselves at the ante-Raphaellic artists, and
when we tell them that Fra Angelico's pictures are weak, affected,
ill-drawn, ill-coloured--they grant it, and then ask us if we can
deny the sweetness, the purity, the rapt devotion, the saintly
virtue, which shines forth from his faces. They ask us how beautiful
and holy words or figures can be inspired by an evil spirit. They
ask us why they are to deny the excellence of tales and pictures
which make men more pure and humble, more earnest and noble. They
tell us truly that all beauty is God's stamp, and that all beauty
ought to be consecrated to his service. And then they ask us: "If
Protestantism denies that she can consecrate the beautiful, how can
you wonder if we love the Romanism which can? You say that Popery
created these glorious schools of art; how can you wonder if, like
Overbeck, "we take the faith for the sake of the art which it
inspired?"
To all which, be it true or false (and it is both), are we to answer
merely by shutting our eyes and ears tight, and yelling "No Popery!"
or are we to say boldly to them: "We confess ourselves in fault; we
sympathise with your longings; we confess that Protestantism has not
satisfied them; but we assert that the only cause is, that
Protestantism has not been true to herself; that Art, like every
other product of the free human spirit, is her domain and not
Popery's; that these legends, these pictures, are beautiful just in
as far as they contain in them the germs of those eternal truths
about man, nature, and God, which the Reformation delivered from
bondage; that you can admire them, and yet remain thorough
Protestants; and more, that unless you do remain Protestants, you
will never enter into their full beauty and significance, because you
will lose sight of those very facts and ideas from which they derive
all their healthy power over you"?
These thoughts are not our own; they are uttered all over England,
thank God! just now, by many voices and in many forms; if they had
been boldly spoken during the last fifteen years, many a noble
spirit, we believe, might have remained in the Church of its fathers
which has now taken refuge in Romanism from the fruits of mis-
education. One great reason why Romanism has been suffered to drag
on its existence is, we humbly think, that it might force us at last
to say this: We have been long learning the lesson; till we have
learnt it thoroughly Romanism will exist, and we shall never be safe
from its allurements.
These thoughts may help to explain our opening sentences, as well as
the extreme pleasure with which we hail the appearance of Mrs.
Jameson's work.
The authoress has been struck, during her examination of the works of
Christian artists, with the extreme ignorance which prevails in
England on the subjects which they portray.
We have had (she says, in an introduction, every word of which we
recommend as replete with the truest Christian philosophy)--
Inquiries into the Principles of Taste, treatises on the Sublime and
Beautiful, Anecdotes of Painting, and we abound in antiquarian essays
on disputed pictures and mutilated statues; but up to a late period
any inquiry into the true spirit and significance of works of art, as
connected with the history of religion and civilisation, would have
appeared ridiculous or, perhaps, dangerous. We should have had
another cry of "No Popery!" and Acts of Parliament prohibiting the
importation of saints and Madonnas.--P. xxi.
And what should we have gained by it, but more ignorance of the
excuses for Popery, and, therefore, of its real dangers? If
Protestantism be the truth, knowledge of whatsoever kind can only
further it. We have found it so in the case of classical literature.
Why should we strain at a gnat and swallow a camel? Our boys have
not taken to worshipping Jupiter and Juno by reading about them. We
never feared that they would. We knew that we should not make them
pagans by teaching them justly to admire the poetry, the philosophy,
the personal virtues of pagans. And, in fact, the few who since the
revival of letters have deserted Christianity for what they called
philosophic heathenism, have in almost every case sympathised, not
with the excellences, but with the worst vices of the Greek and
Roman. They have been men like Leo X. or the Medici, who, ready to
be profligates under any religion, found in heathenism only an excuse
for their darling sins. The same will be the fruits of a real
understanding of the medieval religion. It will only endanger those
who carried already the danger in themselves, and would have fallen
into some other snare if this had been away. Why should we fancy
that Protestantism, like the Romanism which it opposes, is a plant
that will not bear the light, and can only be protected at the
expense of the knowledge of facts? Why will we forgot the great
spiritual law which Mrs. Jameson and others in these days are fully
recognising, that "we cannot safely combat the errors of any man or
system without first giving them full credit for whatever excellences
they may retain"? Such a course is the true fruit of that free
spirit of Protestantism which ought to delight in recognising good to
whatever party it may belong; which asserts that every good gift and
perfect gift comes directly from above, and not through the channel
of particular formularies or priesthoods; which, because it loves
faith and virtue, for their own sakes, and not as mere parts of a
"Catholic system," can recognise them and delight in them wherever it
finds them.
Upon these creations of ancient art (as Mrs. Jameson says) we cannot
look as those did for whom they were created; we cannot annihilate
the centuries which lie between us and them; we cannot in simplicity
of heart, forget the artist in the image he has placed before us, nor
supply what may be deficient in his work through a reverentially
excited fancy. We are critical, not credulous. We no longer accept
this polytheistic form of Christianity; and there is little danger, I
suppose, of our falling again into the strange excesses of
superstition to which it led. But if I have not much sympathy with
modern imitations of medieval art, still less can I sympathise with
that narrow puritanical jealousy which holds the monuments of a real
and earnest faith in contempt: all that God has permitted to exist
once in the past should be considered as the possession of the
present; sacred for example or warning, and held as the foundation on
which to build up what is better and purer.--Introd. p. xx.
Mrs. Jameson here speaks in the name of a large and rapidly-
increasing class. The craving for religious art, of which we spoke
above, is spreading far and wide; even in dissenting chapels we see
occasional attempts at architectural splendour, which would have been
considered twenty years ago heretical or idolatrous. And yet with
all this there is, as Mrs. Jameson says, a curious ignorance with
regard to the subject of medieval art, even though it has now become
a reigning fashion among us.
We have learned, perhaps, after running through half the galleries
and churches in Europe, to distinguish a few of the attributes and
characteristic figures which meet us at every turn, yet without any
clear idea of their meaning, derivation, or relative propriety. The
palm of victory, we know, designates the martyr, triumphant in death.
We so far emulate the critical sagacity of the gardener in "Zeluco,"
that we have learned to distinguish St. Laurence by his gridiron, and
St. Catherine by her wheel. We are not at a loss to recognise the
Magdalene's "loose hair and lifted eye," even when without her skull
and her vase of ointment. We learn to know St. Francis by his brown
habit, and shaven crown, and wasted ardent features; but how do we
distinguish him from St. Anthony, or St. Dominick? As for St. George
and the Dragon--from the St. George of the Louvre--Raphael's--who
sits his horse with the elegant tranquillity of one assured of
celestial aid, down to him "who swings on a sign-post at mine
hostess's door"--he is our familiar acquaintance. But who is that
lovely being in the first blush of youth, who, bearing aloft the
symbolic cross, stands with one foot on the vanquished dragon? "That
is a copy after Raphael." And who is that majestic creature holding
her palm-branch, while the unicorn crouches at her feet? "That is
the famous Moretto at Vienna." Are we satisfied? Not in the least!
but we try to look wiser and pass on.
In the old times, the painters of these legendary scenes and subjects
could always reckon securely on certain associations and certain
sympathies in the minds of the spectators. We have outgrown these
associations, we repudiate these sympathies. We have taken these
works from their consecrated localities, in which they once held each
their dedicated place, and we have hung them in our drawing-rooms and
our dressing-rooms, over our pianos and our sideboards, and now what
do they say to us? That Magdalene weeping amid her hair, who once
spoke comfort to the soul of the fallen sinner,--that Sebastian,
arrow-pierced, whose upward ardent glance, spoke of courage and hope
to the tyrant-ridden serf--that poor tortured slave to whose aid St.
Mark comes sweeping down from above--can they speak to us of nothing
save flowing lines, and correct drawing, and gorgeous colour? Must
we be told that one is a Titian, the other a Guido, the third a
Tintoret, before we dare to melt into compassion or admiration? or
the moment we refer to their ancient religious signification and
influence, must it be with disdain or with pity? This, as it appears
to me, is to take not a rational, but rather a most irrational, as
well as a most irreverent, view of the question: it is to confine
the pleasure and improvement to be derived from works of art within
very narrow bounds; it is to seal up a fountain of the richest
poetry, and to shut out a thousand ennobling and inspiring thoughts.
Happily there is a growing appreciation of these larger principles of
criticism as applied to the study of art. People look at the
pictures which hang round their walls, and have an awakening
suspicion that there is more in them than meets the eye--more than
mere connoisseurship can interpret; and that they have another, a
deeper significance than has been dreamed of by picture dealers and
picture collectors, or even picture critics.--Introd. xxiii.
On these grounds Mrs. Jameson treats of the Poetry of Sacred and
Legendary Art. Her first volume contains a general sketch of the
legends connected with angels, with the scriptural personages, and
the primitive fathers. Her second, the histories of most of "those
sainted personages who lived, or are supposed to have lived, in the
first ages of Christianity, and whose real history, founded on fact
or tradition, has been so disfigured by poetical embroidery that they
have in some sort the air of ideal beings." Each story is followed
by a series of short but brilliant criticisms on those pictures in
which the story has been embodied by painters of various schools and
periods, and illustrated by numerous spirited etchings and woodcuts,
which add greatly to the value and intelligibility of the work. A
future volume is promised which shall contain the "legends of the
monastic orders, and the history of the Franciscans and the
Dominicans, considered merely in their connection with the revival
and the development of the fine arts in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries"--a work which, if it equal the one before us, will
doubtless be hailed by those conversant with that wonderful phase of
human history as a valuable addition to our psychologic and aesthetic
literature.
We ought to petition, also, for a volume which should contain the
life of the Saviour, and the legends of the Virgin Mary; though this
latter subject, we are afraid, will be too difficult for even Mrs.
Jameson's tact and delicacy to make tolerable to English readers, so
thoroughly has the Virgin Mary, as especial patroness of purity, been
intermixed in her legends with every form of prudish and prurient
foulmindedness. {199}
The authoress has wisely abstained from all controversial matters.
In her preface she begs that it may be clearly understood, "that she
has taken throughout the aesthetic and not the religious view of
these productions of art; which, in as far as they are informed with
a true and earnest feeling, and steeped in that beauty which emanates
from Genius inspired by Faith, may cease to be religion, but cannot
cease to be poetry; and as poetry only," she says, "I have considered
them." In a word, Mrs. Jameson has done for them what schoolmasters
and schoolboys, bishops and Royal Academicians, have been doing for
centuries, by Greek plays and Greek statues, without having incurred,
as we said above, the slightest suspicion of wanting to worship
heathen gods and goddesses.
Not that she views these stories with the cold unbelieving eye of a
Goethe, merely as studies of "artistic effect;" she often
transgresses her rule of impartiality, and just where we should wish
her to do so. Her geniality cannot avoid an occasional burst of
feeling, such as concludes her notice of the stories about the
Magdalene and the other "beatified penitents."
Poets have sung, and moralists and sages have taught, that for the
frail woman there was nothing left but to die; or if more remained
for her to suffer, there was at least nothing left for her to be or
do--no choice between sackcloth and ashes and the livery of sin. The
beatified penitents of the early Christian Church spoke another
lesson--spoke divinely of hope for the fallen, hope without self-
abasement or defiance. We, in these days, acknowledge no such
saints; we have even done our best to dethrone Mary Magdalene; but we
have martyrs--"by the pang without the palm"--and one, at least,
among these who has not died without lifting up a voice of eloquent
and solemn warning; who has borne her palm on earth, and whose starry
crown may be seen on high even now amid the constellations of
Genius.--Vol. ii. p. 386.
To whom the authoress may allude in this touching passage our
simplicity cannot guess in the least. We may, therefore, without the
suspicion of partiality, say to the noble spirit of purity,
compassion, and true liberality which breathes throughout this whole
chapter, "Go on and conquer."
Nor again can Mrs. Jameson's English honesty avoid an occasional slip
of delicate sarcasm; for instance, in the story of St. Filomena, a
brand-new saint, whose discovery at Rome, in 1802, produced there an
excitement which we should suspect was very much wanted, which we
recommend to all our readers as an instance of the state into which
the virtues of honesty and common sense seem to have fallen in the
Eternal City--of humbugs.
No doubt there are many such cases of imposture among the list of
saints and martyrs; yet, granting all which have been exposed, and
more, there still remains a list of authentic stories, sadder and
stranger than any romance of man's invention, to read which without
deep sympathy and admiration our hearts must be callous or bigoted
indeed. As Mrs. Jameson herself well says (vol. ii. p. 137):
When in the daily service of our Church we repeat these words of the
sublime hymn ("The noble army of martyrs praise Thee!"), I wonder
sometimes whether it be with a full appreciation of their meaning?
whether we do really reflect on all that this noble army of martyrs
has conquered for us? Did they indeed glorify God through their
courage, and seal their faith in their Redeemer with their blood?
And if it be so, how is it that we Christians have learned to look
coldly upon the effigies of those who sowed the seed of the harvest
which we have reaped?--Sanguis martyrum semen Christianorum! We may
admit that the reverence paid to them in former days was unreasonable
and excessive; that credulity and ignorance have in many instances
falsified the actions imputed to them; that enthusiasm has magnified
their numbers beyond all belief; that when the communion with martyrs
was associated with the presence of their material remains, the
passion for relics led to a thousand abuses, and the belief in their
intercession to a thousand superstitions. But why, in uprooting the
false, uproot also the beautiful and the true?
Thoroughly and practically convinced as we are of the truth of these
words, it gave us some pain when, in the work of a very worthy
person, "The Church in the Catacombs," by Dr. Maitland (not the
author of "The Dark Ages"), we found, as far as we could perceive, a
wish "to advance the Protestant cause," by throwing general doubt on
the old martyrologies and their monuments in the Roman catacombs. If
we shall have judged hastily, we shall be ready to apologise. None,
as we have said before, more firmly believe that the Protestant cause
is the good cause; none are more reverentially inclined toward all
honest critical investigations, more anxious to see all truth, the
Bible itself, sifted and tested in every possible method; but we must
protest against what certainly seems too contemptuous a rejection of
a mass of historic evidence hitherto undoubted, except by the school
of Voltaire; and of the hasty denial of the meaning of Christian and
martyrologic symbols, as well known to antiquaries as Stonehenge or
Magna Charta.
At the same time, Dr. Maitland's book seems the work of a righteous
and earnest man, and it is not its object, but its method, of which
we complain. The whole question of martyrology, a far more important
one than historians generally fancy, requires a thorough
investigation, critical and historical; it has to be done, and
especially just now. The Germans, the civil engineers of the
intellectual world, ought to do it for us, and no doubt will. But
those who undertake it must bring to the work, not only impartiality,
but enthusiasm; it is the spirit only, after all, which can quicken
the eye, which can free the understanding from the idols of laziness,
prejudice, and hasty induction. To talk philosophically of such
matters a man must love them; he must set to work with a Christian
sympathy, and a manly admiration for those old spiritual heroes to
whose virtue and endurance Europe owes it that she is not now a den
of heathen savages. He must be ready to assume everything about them
to be true which is neither absurd, immoral, nor unsupported by the
same amount of evidence which he would require for any other historic
fact. And, just because this very tone of mind--enthusiastic but not
idolatrous, discriminating but not captious--runs through Mrs.
Jameson's work, we hail it with especial pleasure, as a fresh move in
a truly philosophic and Christian direction. Indeed, for that branch
of the subject which she has taken in hand, not the history, but the
poetry of legends and of the art which they awakened, she derives a
peculiar fitness, not merely from her own literary talents and
acquaintance with continental art, but also from the very fact of her
being an English wife and mother. Women ought, perhaps, always to
make the best critics--at once more quicksighted, more tasteful, more
sympathetic than ourselves, whose proper business is creation.
Perhaps in Utopia they will take the reviewer's business entirely off
our hands, as they are said to be doing already, by-the-bye, in one
leading periodical. But of all critics an English matron ought to be
the best--open as she should be, by her womanhood, to all tender and
admiring sympathies, accustomed by her Protestant education to
unsullied purity of thought, and inheriting from her race, not only
freedom of mind and reverence for antiquity, but the far higher
birthright of English honesty.
And such a genial and honest spirit, we think, runs through this
book.
Another difficult task, perhaps the most difficult of all, the
authoress has well performed. We mean the handling of stories whose
facts she partly or wholly disbelieves, while she admires and loves
their spirit and moral; or doctrines, to pronounce on whose truth or
falsehood is beyond her subject. This difficulty Mr. Newman, in the
"Lives of the English Saints," edited and partly written by him,
turned with wonderful astuteness to the advantage of Romanism; but
others, more honest, have not been so victorious. Witness the
painfully uncertain impression left by some parts of one or two of
those masterly articles on Romish heroes which appeared in the
"Quarterly Review;" an uncertainty which we have the fullest reason
to believe was most foreign to the reviewer's mind and conscience.
Even Mr. Macaulay's brilliant history here and there falls into the
same snare. No one but those who have tried it can be aware of the
extreme difficulty of preventing the dramatic historian from
degenerating into an apologist or heating into a sneerer; or
understand the ease with which an earnest author, in a case like the
present, becomes frantically reckless, under the certainty that, say
what he will, he will be called a Jesuit by the Protestants, an
Infidel by the Papists, a Pantheist by the Ultra-High-Church, and a
Rogue by all three.
Now, we certainly shall not say that Mrs. Jameson is greater than the
writers just mentioned; but we must say, that female tact and deep
devotional feeling cut the Gordian knot which has puzzled more
cunning heads. Not that Mrs. Jameson is faultless; we want something
yet, in the telling of a Christian fairy-tale, and know not what we
want: but never were legends narrated with more discernment and
simplicity than these.
As an instance, take the legend of St. Dorothea (vol. ii. p. 184),
which is especially one of those stories of "sainted personages who,"
as Mrs. Jameson says, "lived, or are supposed to have lived, in the
first ages of Christianity: and whose real history, founded on fact
or tradition, has been so disguised by poetical embroidery, that they
have in some sort the air of ideal beings;" and which may, therefore,
be taken as a complete test of the authoress's tact and honesty:
In the province of Cappadocia and in the city of Caesarea, dwelt a
noble virgin, whose name was Dorothea. In the whole city there was
none to be compared to her in beauty and grace of person. She was a
Christian, and served God day and night with prayers, with fasting,
and with alms.
The governor of the city, by name Sapritius (or Fabricius), was a
very terrible persecutor of the Christians, and hearing of the
maiden, and of her great beauty, he ordered her to be brought before
him. She came, with her mantle folded on her bosom, and her eyes
meekly cast down. The governor asked "Who art thou?" and she
replied: "I am Dorothea, a virgin, and a servant of Jesus Christ."
He said: "Thou must serve our gods, or die." She answered mildly:
"Be it so; the sooner shall I stand in the presence of Him whom I
most desire to behold." Then the governor asked her: "Whom meanest
thou?" She replied: "I mean the Son of God, Christ, mine espoused!
his dwelling is paradise; by his side are joys eternal; and in his
garden grow celestial fruits and roses that never fade." Then
Sapritius, overcome by her eloquence and beauty, ordered her to be
carried back to her dungeon. And he sent to her two sisters, whose
names were Calista and Christeta, who had once been Christians, but
who, from terror of the torments with which they were threatened, had
renounced their faith in Christ. To these women the governor
promised large rewards if they would induce Dorothea to follow their
evil example; and they, nothing doubting of success, boldly undertook
the task. The result, however, was far different; for Dorothea, full
of courage and constancy, reproved them, as one having authority, and
drew such a picture of the joys they had forfeited through their
falsehood and cowardice, that they fell at her feet, saying: "O
blessed Dorothea, pray for us, that, through thy intercession, our
sins may be forgiven and our penitence accepted!" And she did so.
And when they had left the dungeon they proclaimed aloud that they
were servants of Christ.
Then the governor, furious, commanded that they should be burned, and
that Dorothea should witness their torments. And she stood by,
bravely encouraging them, and saying: "O my sisters, fear not!
suffer to the end! for these transient pangs shall be followed by the
joys of eternal life!" Thus they died: and Dorothea herself was
condemned to be tortured cruelly, and then beheaded. The first part
of her sentence she endured with invincible fortitude. She was then
led forth to death; and, as she went, a young man, a lawyer of the
city named Theophilus, who had been present when she was first
brought before the governor, called to her mockingly: "Ha! fair
maiden, goest thou to join thy bridegroom? Send me, I pray thee, of
the fruits and flowers of that same garden of which thou hast spoken:
I would fain taste of them!" And Dorothea looking on him inclined
her head with a gentle smile, and said: "Thy request, O Theophilus,
is granted!" Whereat he laughed aloud with his companions; but she
went on cheerfully to death.
When she came to the place of execution, she knelt down and prayed;
and suddenly appeared at her side a beautiful boy, with hair bright
as sunbeams:
A smooth-faced glorious thing,
With thousand blessings dancing in his eyes.
In his hand he held a basket containing three apples, and three
fresh-gathered and fragrant roses. She said to him; "Carry these to
Theophilus; say that Dorothea hath sent them, and that I go before
him to the garden whence they came, and await him there." With these
words she bent her neck, and received the death-stroke.
Meantime the angel (for it was an angel) went to seek Theophilus, and
found him still laughing in merry mood over the idea of the promised
gift. The angel placed before him the basket of celestial fruit and
flowers, saying: "Dorothea sends thee this," and vanished. What
words can express the wonder of Theophilus? Struck by the prodigy
operated in his favour, his heart melted within him; he tasted of the
celestial fruit, and a new life was his; he proclaimed himself a
servant of Christ, and, following the example of Dorothea, suffered
with like constancy in the cause of truth, and obtained the crown of
martyrdom.
We have chosen this legend just because it is in itself as
superstitious and fantastic as any in the book. We happen to hold
the dream of "The Spiritual Marriage," as there set forth, in
especial abhorrence, and we have no doubt Mrs. Jameson does so also.
We are well aware of the pernicious effect which this doctrine has
exercised on matrimonial purity among the southern nations; that by
making chastity synonymous with celibacy, it degraded married
faithfulness into a restriction which there were penalties for
breaking, but no rewards for keeping. We see clearly enough the
cowardice, the shortsightedness, of fancying that man can insure the
safety of his soul by fleeing from the world--in plain English,
deserting the post to which God has called him, like the monks and
nuns of old. We believe that the numbers of the early martyrs have
been exaggerated. We believe that they were like ourselves,
imperfect and inconsistent human beings; that, on the showing of the
legends and fathers themselves, their testimony for the truth was too
often impaired by superstition, fanaticism, or passion. But granting
all this, we must still say, in the words of one who cannot be
suspected of Romanising--the great Dr. Arnold--
Divide the sum total of reported martyrs by twenty; by fifty, if you
will; after all, you have a number of persons of all ages and sexes
suffering cruel torments and deaths for conscience' sake, and for
Christ's; and by their sufferings, manifestly with God's blessing,
insuring the triumph of Christ's Gospel. Neither do I think that we
consider the excellence of this martyr spirit half enough.
Indeed we do not. Let all the abatements mentioned above, and more,
be granted; yet, even then, when we remember that the world from
which Jerome or Anthony fled was even worse than that denounced by
Juvenal and Persius--that the nuptials which, as legends say, were
often offered the virgin martyrs as alternatives for death, were such
as employed the foul pens of Petronius and Martial--that the tyrants
whom they spurned were such as live in the pages of Suetonius, and
the Augustae Historiae Scriptores--that the gods whom they were
commanded to worship, the rites in which they were to join, were
those over which Ovid and Apuleius had gloated, which Lucian had held
up to the contempt of heathendom itself--that the tortures which they
preferred to apostacy and to foul crimes were, by the confessions of
the heathens themselves, too horrible for pen to tell--it does raise
a flush of indignation to hear some sleek bigot-sceptic, bred up in
the safety and luxury of modern England, among Habeas Corpus Acts and
endowed churches, trying from his warm fireside to sneer away the
awful responsibilities and the heroic fortitude of valiant men and
tender girls, to whose piety and courage he owes the very
enlightenment, the very civilisation, of which he boasts.
It is an error, doubtless, and a fearful one, to worship even such as
them. But the error, when it arose, was at worst the caricature of a
blessed truth. Even for the sinful, surely it was better to admire
holiness than to worship their own sin. Shame on those who, calling
themselves Christians, repine that a Cecilia or a Magdalen replaced
an Isis and a Venus; or who can fancy that they are serving
Protestantism by tracing malevolent likenesses between even the
idolatry of a saint and the idolatry of a devil! True, there was
idolatry in both, as gross in one as the other. And what wonder?
What wonder if, amid a world of courtesans, the nun was worshipped?
At least God allowed it; and will man be wiser than God? "The times
of that ignorance He winked at." The lie that was in it He did not
interfere to punish. He did more; He let it work out, as all lies
will, their own punishment. We may see that in the miserable century
which preceded the glorious Reformation; we may see it in the present
state of Spain and Italy. The crust of lies, we say, punished
itself; to the germ of truth within it we partly owe that we are
Christian men this day.
But granting, or rather boldly asserting all this, and smiling as
much as we choose at the tale of St. Dorothea's celestial basket, is
it not absolutely, and in spite of all, an exquisite story? Is it
likely to make people better or worse? We might believe the whole of
it, and yet we need not, therefore, turn idolaters and worship sweet
Dorothea for a goddess. But if, as we trust in God is the case, we
are too wise to believe it all--if even we see no reason (and there
is not much) for believing one single word of it--yet still we ask,
Is it not an exquisite story? Is there not heroism in it greater
than of all the Ajaxes and Achilles who ever blustered on this earth?
Is there not power greater than of kings--God's strength made perfect
in woman's weakness? Tender forgiveness, the Saviour's own likeness;
glimpses, brilliant and true at the core, however distorted and
miscoloured, of that spiritual world where the wicked cease from
troubling, where the meek alone shall inherit the earth, where, as
Protestants too believe, all that is spotless and beautiful in nature
as well as in man shall bloom for ever perfect?
It is especially in her descriptions of paintings that Mrs. Jameson's
great talents are displayed. Nowhere do we recollect criticisms more
genial, brilliant, picturesque than those which are scattered through
these pages. Often they have deeper merits, and descend to those
fundamental laws of beauty and of religion by which all Christian art
must ultimately be tested. Mrs. Jameson has certainly a powerful
inductive faculty; she comprehends at once the idea {210} and central
law of a work of art, and sketches it in a few vivid and masterly
touches; and really, to use a hack quotation honestly for once, "in
thoughts which breathe, and words which burn." As an instance, we
must be allowed to quote at length this charming passage on angel
paintings, so valuable does it seem not only as information, but as a
specimen of what criticism should be:
On the revival of art, we find the Byzantine idea of angels
everywhere prevailing. The angels in Cimabue's famous "Virgin and
Child enthroned" are grand creatures, rather stern, but this arose, I
think, from his inability to express beauty. The colossal angels at
Assisi, solemn sceptred kingly forms, all alike in action and
attitude, appeared to me magnificent.
In the angels of Giotto we see the commencement of a softer grace and
a purer taste, further developed by some of his scholars. Benozzo
Gozzoli and Orcagna have left in the Campo Santo examples of the most
graceful and fanciful treatment. Of Benozzo's angels in the Ricardi
Palace I have spoken at length. His master, Angelico (worthy the
name!), never reached the same power of expressing the rapturous
rejoicing of celestial beings, but his conception of the angelic
nature remains unapproached, unapproachable: it is only his, for it
was the gentle, passionless, refined nature of the recluse which
stamped itself there. Angelico's angels are unearthly, not so much
in form as in sentiment; and superhuman, not in power but in purity.
In other hands, any imitation of his soft ethereal grace would become
feeble and insipid. With their long robes falling round their feet,
and drooping many-coloured wings, they seem not to fly or to walk,
but to float along, "smooth sliding without step." Blessed blessed
creatures! love us, only love us! for we dare not task your soft
serene beatitude, by asking you to help us!
There is more sympathy with humanity in Francia's angels: they look
as if they could weep as well as love and sing.
* * * * *
Correggio's angels are grand and lovely, but they are like children
enlarged and sublimated, not like spirits taking the form of
children; where they smile it is truly--as Annibal Caracci expresses
it--con una naturalezza et simplicita che innamora e sforza a ridere
con loro: but the smile in many of Correggio's angel heads has
something sublime and spiritual, as well as simple and natural.
And Titian's angels impress me in a similar manner--I mean those in
the glorious "Assumption" at Venice--with their childish forms and
features, but an expression caught from beholding the face of "our
Father that is in heaven:" it is glorified in fancy. I remember
standing before this picture, contemplating those lovely spirits, one
after another, until a thrill came over me like that which I felt
when Mendelssohn played the organ--I became music while I listened.
The face of one of those angels is to the face of a child just what
that of the Virgin in the same picture is compared with the fairest
of the daughters of earth: it is not here superiority of beauty, but
mind, and music, and love kneaded, as it were, into form and colour.
But Raphael, excelling in all things, is here excellent above all;
his angels combine in a higher degree than any other, the various
faculties and attributes in which the fancy loves to clothe these
pure, immortal, beatified creatures. The angels of Giotti, of
Benozzo, of Fiesole, are, if not female, feminine; those of Filippo
Lippi and of Andrea, masculine; but you cannot say of those of
Raphael, that they are masculine or feminine. The idea of sex is
wholly lost in the blending of power, intelligence, and grace. In
his early pictures, grace is the predominant characteristic, as in
the dancing and singing angels in his "Coronation of the Virgin." In
his later pictures the sentiment in his ministering angels is more
spiritual, more dignified. As a perfect example of grand and
poetical feeling, I may cite the angels as "Regents of the Planets,"
in the Capella Chigiana. The cupola represents in a circle the
creation of the solar system, according to the theological and
astronomical (or rather astrological) notions which then prevailed--a
hundred years before "the starry Galileo and his woes." In the
centre is the Creator; around, in eight compartments, we have, first,
the angel of the celestial sphere, who seems to be listening to the
divine mandate: "Let there be light in the firmament of heaven;"
then follow in their order, the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars,
Jupiter, and Saturn. The name of each planet is expressed by its
mythological representative; the Sun by Apollo, the Moon by Diana:
and over each presides a grand colossal-winged spirit, seated or
reclining on a portion of the zodiac as on a throne. I have selected
two angels to give an idea of this peculiar and poetical treatment.
The union of the theological and the mythological attributes is in
the classical taste of the time, and quite Miltonic. In Raphael's
child-angels, the expression of power and intelligence, as well as
innocence, is quite wonderful; for instance, look at the two angel-
boys, in the Dresden Madonna di San Sisto, and the angels, or
celestial genii, who bear along the Almighty when he appears to Noah.
No one has expressed like Raphael the action of flight, except
perhaps Rembrandt. The angel who descends to crown Santa Felicita
cleaves the air with the action of a swallow: and the angel in
Rembrandt's Tobit soars like a lark with upward motion, spurning the
earth.
Michael Angelo rarely gave wings to his angels; I scarcely recollect
an instance, except the angel in the "Annunciation:" and his
exaggerated human forms, his colossal creatures, in which the idea of
power is conveyed through attitude and muscular action, are, to my
taste, worse than unpleasing. My admiration for this wonderful man
is so profound that I can afford to say this. His angels are
superhuman, but hardly angelic: and while in Raphael's angels we do
not feel the want of wings, we feel while looking at those of Michael
Angelo that not even the "sail-broad vans" with which Satan laboured,
through the surging abyss of chaos could suffice to lift those
Titanic forms from earth, and sustain them in mid-air. The group of
angels over the "Last Judgment," flinging their mighty limbs about,
and those that surround the descending figure of Christ in the
"Conversion of St. Paul," may be referred to here as characteristic
examples. The angels, blowing their trumpets, puff and strain like
so many troopers. Surely this is not angelic: there may be power--
great, imaginative, and artistic power--exhibited in the conception
of form, but in the beings themselves there is more of effort than of
power: serenity, tranquillity, beatitude, ethereal purity, spiritual
grace, are out of the question.
In this passage we may remark an excellence in Mrs. Jameson's mode of
thought which has become lately somewhat rare. We mean a freedom
from that bigoted and fantastic habit of mind which leads nowadays
the worshippers of high art to exalt the early schools to the
disadvantage of all others, and to talk as if Christian painting had
expired with Perugino. We were much struck with our authoress's
power of finding spiritual truth and beauty in Titian's "Assumption,"
one of the very pictures in which the "high-art" party are wont to
see nothing but "coarseness" and "earthliness" of conception. She,
having, we suppose, a more acute as well as a more healthy eye for
the beautiful and the spiritual, and therefore able to perceive its
slightest traces wherever they exist, sees in those "earthly" faces
of the great masters, "an expression caught from beholding the face
of our Father that is in heaven." The face of one of those "angels,"
she continues, "is to the face of a child just what that of the
Virgin in the same picture is compared with the fairest of the
daughters of earth: it is not here superiority of beauty, but mind,
and music, and love, kneaded, as it were, into form and colour."
Mrs. Jameson acknowledges her great obligations to M. Rio; and all
students of art must be thankful to him for the taste, learning, and
earnest religious feeling which he has expended on the history of the
earlier schools of painting. An honest man, doubtless, he is; but it
does not follow, alas! in this piecemeal world, that he should write
an honest book. And his bigotry stands in painful contrast to the
genial and comprehensive spirit by which Mrs. Jameson seems able to
appreciate the specific beauties of all schools and masters. M.
Rio's theory (and he is the spokesman of a large party) is, unless we
much misjudge him, this--that the ante-Raphaelic is the only
Christian art; and that all the excellences of these early painters
came from their Romanism; all their faults from his two great
bugbears--Byzantinism and Paganism. In his eyes, the Byzantine idea
of art was Manichean; in which we fully coincide, but add, that the
idea of the early Italian painters was almost equally so: and that
almost all in them that was not Manichean they owe not to their
Romanism or their asceticism, but to their healthy layman's common
sense, and to the influence of that very classical art which they are
said to have been pious enough to despise. Bigoted and ascetic
Romanists have been, in all ages, in a hurry to call people
Manicheans, all the more fiercely because their own consciences must
have hinted to them that they were somewhat Manichean themselves.
When a man suspects his own honesty, he is, of course, inclined to
prove himself blameless by shouting the loudest against the
dishonesty of others. Now M. Rio sees clearly and philosophically
enough what is the root of Manicheanism--the denial that that which
is natural, beautiful, human, belongs to God. He imputes it justly
to those Byzantine artists who fancied it carnal to attribute beauty
to the Saviour or to the Virgin Mary, and tried to prove their own
spirituality by representing their sacred personages in the extreme
of ugliness and emaciation, though some of the specimens of their
painting which Mrs. Jameson gives proves that this abhorrence of
beauty was not so universal as M. Rio would have us believe. We
agree with him that this absurdity was learned from them by earlier
and semi-barbarous Italian artists, that these latter rapidly escaped
from it, and began rightly to embody their conceptions in beautiful
forms; and yet we must urge against them, too, the charge of
Manicheanism, and of a spiritual eclecticism also, far deeper and
more pernicious than the mere outward eclecticism of manner which has
drawn down hard names on the school of the Caracci.
For an eclectic, if it mean, anything, means this--one who, in any
branch of art or science, refuses to acknowledge Bacon's great law,
"that nature is only conquered by obeying her;" who will not take a
full and reverent view of the whole mass of facts with which he has
to deal, and from them deducing the fundamental laws of his subject,
obey them whithersoever they may lead; but who picks and chooses out
of them just so many as may be pleasant to his private taste, and
then constructs a partial system which differs from the essential
ideas of nature, in proportion to the number of facts which he has
determined to discard. And such a course was pursued in the art by
the ascetic painters between the time of Giotto and Raphael. Their
idea of beauty was a partial and a Manichean one; in their adoration
for a fictitious "angelic nature," made up from all which is negative
in humanity, they were prone to despise all by which man is brought
in contact with this earth--the beauties of sex, of strength, of
activity, of grandeur of form; all, that is, in which Greek art
excels: their ideal of beauty was altogether effeminate. They
prudishly despised the anatomic study of the human figure, of
landscape and chiaroscuro. Spiritual expression with them was
everything; but it was only the expression of the passive spiritual
faculties of innocence, devotion, meekness, resignation--all good,
but not the whole of humanity. Not that they could be quite
consistent in their theory. They were forced to paint their very
angels as human beings; and a standard of human beauty they had to
find somewhere; and they found one, strange to say, exactly like that
of the old Pagan statues (wings and all--for the wings of Christian
angels are copied exactly from those of Greek Genii), and only
differing in that ascetic and emasculate tone, which was peculiar to
themselves. Here is a dilemma which the worshippers of high art have
slurred over. Where did Angelico de Fiesole get the idea of beauty
which dictated his exquisite angels? We shall not, I suppose, agree
with those who attribute it to direct inspiration, and speak of it as
the reward of the prayer and fasting by which the good monk used to
prepare himself for painting. Must we then confess that he borrowed
his beauties from the faces of the prettiest nuns with whom he was
acquainted? That would be sad naturalism; and sad eclecticism too,
considering that he must have seen among his Italian sisters a great
many beauties of a very different type from that which he has chosen
to copy; though, we suppose, of God's making equally with that of his
favourites. Or did he, in spite of himself, steal a side-glance now
and then at some of the unrivalled antique statues of his country,
and copy on the sly any feature or proportion in them which was
emasculate enough to be worked into his pictures? That, too, is
likely enough; nay, it is certain. We are perfectly astonished how
any draughtsman, at least how such a critic as M. Rio, can look at
the early Italian painters without tracing everywhere in them the
classic touch, the peculiar tendency to mathematic curves in the
outlines, which is the distinctive peculiarity of Greek art. Is not
Giotto, the father of Italian art, full of it in every line? Is not
Perugino? Is not the angel of Lorenzo Credi in Mrs. Jameson's
woodcut? Is not Francia, except just where he is stiff, and soft,
and clumsy? Is not Fra Angelico himself? Is it not just the absence
of this Greek tendency to mathematical forms in the German painters
before Albert Durer, which makes the specific difference, evident to
every boy, between the drawing of the Teutonic and Italian schools?
But if so, what becomes of the theory which calls Pagan art by all
manner of hard names? which dates the downfall of Christian art from
the moment when painters first lent an eye to its pernicious
seductions? How can those escape the charge of eclecticism, who,
without going to the root-idea of Greek art, filched from its outside
just as much as suited their purpose? And how, lastly, can M. Rio's
school of critics escape the charge of Manichean contempt for God's
world and man, not as ascetics have fancied him, but as God has made
him, when they think it a sufficient condemnation of a picture to
call it naturalistic; when they talk and act about art as if the
domain of the beautiful were the devil's kingdom, from which some few
species of form and elements were to be stolen by Christian painters,
and twisted from their original evil destination into the service of
religion?
On the other hand, we owe much to those early ascetic painters; their
works are a possession for ever. No future school of religious art
will be able to rise to eminence without taking full cognisance of
them, and learning from them their secret. They taught artists, and
priests, and laymen too, that beauty is only worthy of admiration
when it is the outward sacrament of the beauty of the soul within;
they helped to deliver men from that idolatry to merely animal
strength and loveliness into which they were in danger of falling in
ferocious ages, and among the relics of Roman luxury; they asserted
the superiority of the spirit over the flesh; according to their
light, they were faithful preachers of the great Christian truth,
that devoted faith, and not fierce self-will, is man's glory. Well
did their pictures tell to brutal peasant, and to still more brutal
warrior, that God's might was best shown forth, not in the
elephantine pride of a Hercules, or the Titanic struggles of a
Laocoon, but in the weakness of martyred women, and of warriors who
were content meekly to endure shame and death, for the sake of Him
who conquered by sufferings, and bore all human weaknesses; who "was
led as a lamb to the slaughter, and, like a sheep dumb before the
shearer, opened not his mouth."
We must conclude with a few words on one point on which we differ
somewhat from Mrs. Jameson--the allegoric origin of certain legendary
stories. She calls the story of the fiend, under the form of a
dragon, devouring St. Margaret, and then bursting at the sign of the
cross while the saint escaped unhurt, "another form of the familiar
allegory--the power of Sin overcome by the power of the Cross."
And again, vol. ii. p. 4:
The legend of St. George came to us from the East; where, under
various forms, as Apollo and the Python, as Bellerophon and the
Chimaera, as Perseus and the Sea-monster, we see perpetually
recurring the mythic allegory by which was figured the conquest
achieved by beneficent Power over the tyranny of Wickedness, and
which reappears in Christian art in the legends of St. Michael and
half a hundred other saints.
To us these stories seem to have had by no means an allegorical, but
rather a strictly historic foundation; and our reasons for this
opinion may possibly interest some readers.
Allegory, strictly so called, is the offspring of an advanced, and
not of a semi-barbarous state of society. Its home is in the East--
not the East of barbarous Pontine countries peopled by men of our own
race, where the legend of St. George is allowed to have sprung up,
but of the civilised, metaphysical, dark-haired races of Egypt,
Syria, and Hindostan. The "objectivity" of the Gothic mind has never
had any sympathy with it. The Teutonic races, like the earlier
Greeks, before they were tinctured with Eastern thought, had always
wanted historic facts, dates, names, and places. They even found it
necessary to import their saints; to locate Mary Magdalene at
Marseilles, Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury, the three Magi at
Cologne, before they could thoroughly love or understand them.
Englishmen especially cannot write allegories. John Bunyan alone
succeeded tolerably, but only because his characters and language
were such as he had encountered daily at every fireside and in. every
meeting-house. But Spenser wandered perpetually away, or rather,
rose up from his plan into mere dramatic narrative. His work and
other English allegories, are hardly allegoric at all, but rather
symbolic; spiritual laws in them are not expressed by arbitrary
ciphers, but embodied in imaginary examples, sufficiently startling
or simple to form a plain key to other and deeper instances of the
same law. They are analogous to those symbolic devotional pictures
in which the Madonna and saints of all ages are grouped together with
the painter's own contemporaries--no allegories at all, but the plain
embodiment of a fact in which the artist believed; not only "the
communion of all saints," but also their habit of assisting, often in
visible form, the Christians of his own time.
These distinctions may seem over-subtle, but our meaning will surely
be plain to anyone who will compare "The Faerie Queen," or the legend
of St. George, with the Gnostic or Hindoo reveries, and the fantastic
and truly Eastern interpretation of Scripture, which the European
monks borrowed from Egypt. Our opinion is, that in the old legends
the moral did not create the story, but the story the moral; and that
the story had generally a nucleus of fact within all its distortions
and exaggerations. This holds good of the Odinic and Grecian myths;
all are now more or less inclined to believe that the deities of
Zeus's or Odin's dynasties were real conquerors or civilisers of
flesh and blood, like the Manco Capac of the Peruvians, and that it
was around records of their real victories over barbarous aborigines,
and over the brute powers of nature, that extravagant myths grew up,
till more civilised generations began to say: "These tales must have
some meaning--they must be either allegories or nonsense;" and then
fancied that in the remaining thread of fact they found a clue to the
mystic sense of the whole.
Such, we suspect, has been the history of St. George and the Dragon,
as well as of Apollo and the Python. It is very hard to have to give
up the dear old dragon who haunted our nursery dreams, especially
when there is no reason for it. We have no patience with antiquaries
who tell us that the dragons who guarded princesses were merely "the
winding walls or moats of their castles." What use then, pray, was
there in the famous nether garment with which Regnar Lodbrog (shaggy-
trousers) choked the dragon who guarded his lady-love? And Regnar
was a real piece of flesh and blood, as King AElla and our Saxon
forefathers found to their cost; his awful death-dirge, and the
effect which it produced, are well known to historians. We cannot
give up Regnar's trousers, for we suspect the key to the whole
dragon-question is in the pocket of them.
Seriously, Why should not those dragons have been simply what the
Greek word dragon means--what the earliest romances, the Norse myths,
and the superstitions of the peasantry in many parts of England to
this day assert them to have been--"mighty worms," huge snakes? All
will agree that the Python, the representative in the old world of
the Boa-constrictor of the new, lingered in the Homeric age, if not
later, both in Greece and in Italy. It existed on the opposite coast
of Africa (where it is now extinct) in the time of Regulus; we
believe, from the traditions of all nations, that it existed to a far
later date in more remote and barbarous parts of Europe. There is
every reason to suppose that it still lingered in England after the
invasion of the Cymri--say not earlier than B.C. 600--for it was
among them an object of worship; and we question whether they would
have been likely to have adored a foreign animal, and, as at Abury,
built enormous temples in imitation of its windings, and called them
by its name.
The only answer to these traditions has as yet been, that no reptile
of that bulk is known in cold climates. Yet the Python still lingers
in the Hungarian marshes. A few years ago a huge snake, as large as
the Pythons of Hindostan, spread havoc among the flocks and terror
among the peasantry. Had it been Ariosto's "Orc," an a priori
argument from science would have had weight. A marsupiate sea-
monster is horribly unorthodox; and the dragon, too, has doubtless
been made a monster of, but most unjustly: his legs have been
patched on by crocodile-slaying crusaders, while his wings--where did
they come from? From the traditions of "flying serpents," which have
so strangely haunted the deserts of Upper Egypt from the time of the
old Hebrew prophets, and which may not, after all, be such lies as
folk fancy. How scientific prigs shook with laughter at the notion
of a flying dragon! till one day geology revealed to them, in the
Pterodactylus, that a real flying dragon, on the model of Carlo
Crivelli's in Mrs. Jameson's book, with wings before and legs behind,
only more monstrous than that, and than all the dreams of Seba and
Aldrovandus (though some of theirs, to be sure, have seven heads),
got its living once on a time in this very island of England! But
such is the way of this wise world! When Le Vaillant, in the last
century, assured the Parisians that he had shot a giraffe at the
Cape, he was politely informed that the giraffe was fabulous,
extinct--in short, that he lied; and now, behold! the respectable old
unicorn (and good Tories ought to rejoice to hear it) has been
discovered at last by a German naturalist, Von Muller, in Abyssinia,
just where our fathers told us to look for it! And why should we not
find the flying serpent too? The interior of Africa is as yet an
unknown world of wonders; and we may yet discover there, for aught we
know, the descendants of the very satyr who chatted with St. Anthony.
No doubt the discovery of huge fossil animals, as Mrs. Jameson says,
on the high authority of Professor Owen, may have modified our
ancestors' notions of dragons: but in the old serpent worship we
believe the real explanation of these stories is to be found. There
is no doubt that human victims, and even young maidens, were offered
to these snake-gods; even the sunny mythology of Greece retains
horrible traces of such customs, which lingered in Arcadia, the
mountain fastness of the old and conquered race. Similar cruelties
existed among the Mexicans; and there are but too many traces of it
throughout the history of heathendom.
The same superstition may, as the legends assert, have lingered on,
or been at least revived during the later ages of the empire, in
remote provinces, left in their primeval barbarism, at the same time
that they were brutalised by the fiendish exhibitions of the Circus,
which the Roman governors found it their interest to introduce
everywhere. Thus the serpent became naturally regarded as the
manifestation of the evil spirit by Christians as well as by the old
Hebrews; thus, also, it became the presiding genius of the malaria
and fever which arose from the fens haunted by it--a superstition
which gave rise to the theory that the tales of Hercules and the
Hydra, Apollo and the mud-Python, St. George and the Dragon, were
sanitary-reform allegories, and the monsters whose poisonous breath
destroyed cattle and young maidens only typhus and consumption. We
see no reason why early Christian heroes should not have actually met
with such snake-gods, and felt themselves bound, like Southey's
Madoc, or Daniel in the old rabbinical story, whose truth has never
been disproved, to destroy the monsters at all risk. We see no
reason, either, why their righteous daring may not have been crowned
with victory; and suspect that on such events were gradually built up
the dragon-slaying legends which charmed all Europe, and grew in
extravagances and absurdities, till they began to degenerate into the
bombast of the "Seven Champions," and expired in the immortal ballad
of the "Dragon of Wantley," in which More of More Hall, on the
morning of his battle with the monster, invoked the saints no more,
but--
To make him strong and mighty--
He drank by the tale
Six pots of ale
And a quart of aqua-vitae.
So ended the sublime sport of dragon-slaying. Its only remnant may
now be seen in Borneo, whither that noble Christian man, Bishop
Macdougall, took out the other day a six-chambered rifle, on the
ground that "while the alligators ate his school-children at Sarawak,
it was his duty as a bishop to shoot the alligators."