in St. George, is founded, we are told, on the _facts_ of his
reappearance on earth at various periods, and particularly at the great
siege of Antioch, in the times of the crusades. The Christians had
been well nigh as thoroughly beaten as the Russians at Silistria. They
were at the utmost extremity, when a squadron was seen rushing down
from a mountain defile, with three knights at its head, in brilliant
panoply and snow-white scarfs. “Behold,” cried Bishop Adhemar, “the
heavenly succor which was promised to you! Heaven declares for the
Christians. The holy martyrs, George, Demetrius, and Theodore, come to
fight for you.” The effect was electrical. The Christian army rushed
to victory, with the shout, “It is the will of God!” and the effect of
the opportune appearance of the three chiefs and their squadron, who
laid right lustily on the Saracens, was decisive of one of the most
glorious, yet only temporarily productive of triumphs.
When Richard I. was on his expedition against enemies of the same race,
he too was relieved from great straits by a vision of St. George. The
army, indeed, did not see the glorious and inspiring sight, but the
king affirmed that _he_ did, which, in those credulous times was quite
as well. In these later days men are less credulous, or saints are
more cautious. Thus the Muscovites assaulted Kars under the idea that
St. Sergius was with them; at all events, Pacha Williams, a good cause,
and sinewy arms, were stronger than the Muscovite idea and St. Sergius
to boot.
Such, then, is the hagiography of our martial saint. Gibbon has
sketched his life in another point of view--business-like, if not
matter-of-fact. The terrible historian sets down our great patron as
having been born in a fuller’s shop in Cilicia, educated (perhaps) in
Cappadocia, and as having so won promotion, when a young man, from his
patrons, by the skilful exercise of his profession as a parasite, as to
procure, through their influence, “a lucrative commission or contract
to supply the army with bacon!” In this commissariat employment he is
said to have exercised fraud and corruption, by which may be meant
that he sent to the army bacon as rusty as an old cuirass, and charged
a high price for a worthless article. In these times, when the name
and character of St. George are established, it is to be hoped that
Christian purveyors for Christian armies do not, in reverencing George
the Saint, imitate the practices alleged against him as George the
Contractor. It would be hard, indeed, if a modern contractor who sent
foul hay to the cavalry, uneatable food to the army generally, or
poisonous potted-meat to the navy, could shield himself under the name
and example of St. George. Charges as heavy _are_ alleged against him
by Gibbon, who adds that the malversations of the pious rogue “were
so notorious, that George was compelled to escape from the pursuit of
justice.” If he saved his fortune, it is allowed that he made shipwreck
of his honor; and he certainly did not improve his reputation if,
as is alleged, he turned Arian. The career of our patron saint, as
described by Gibbon, is startling. That writer speaks of the splendid
library subsequently collected by George, but he hints that the volumes
on history, rhetoric, philosophy, and theology, were perhaps as much
proof of ostentation as of love for learning. That George was raised
by the intrigues of a faction to the pastoral throne of Athanasius, in
Alexandria, does not surprise us. Bishops were very irregularly elected
in those early days, when men were sometimes summarily made teachers
who needed instruction themselves; as is the case in some enlightened
districts at present. George displayed an imperial pomp in his
archiepiscopal character, “but he still betrayed those vices of his
base and servile extraction,” yet was so impartial that he oppressed
and plundered all parties alike. “The merchants of Alexandria,” says
the historian of the “Decline and Fall,” “were impoverished by the
unjust and almost universal monopoly which he acquired of nitre, salt,
paper, funerals, &c., and the spiritual father of a great people
condescended to practise the vile and pernicious arts of an informer.
He seems to have had as sharp an eye after the profit to be derived
from burials, as a certain archdeacon, who thinks intramural burial
of the dead a very sanitary measure for the living, and particularly
profitable to the clergy. Thus the example of St. George would seem
to influence very “venerable” as well as very “martial” gentlemen.
The Cappadocian most especially disgusted the Alexandrians by levying
a house tax, of his own motion, and as he pillaged the pagan temples
as well, all parties rose at length against the common oppressor and
“under the reign of Constantine he was expelled by the fury and justice
of the people.” He was restored only again to fall. The accession of
Julian brought destruction upon the archbishop and many of his friends,
who, after an imprisonment of three weeks, were dragged from their
dungeons by a wild and cruel populace, and murdered in the streets.
The bodies were paraded in triumph upon camels (as that of Condé was
by his Catholic opponents, after the battle of Jarnac, on an ass), and
they were ultimately cast into the sea. This last measure was adopted
in order that, if the sufferers were to be accounted as martyrs, there
should at least be no relics of them for men to worship. Gibbon thus
concludes: “The fears of the Pagans were just, and their precautions
ineffectual. The meritorious death of the archbishop obliterated the
memory of his life. The rival of Athanasius was dear and sacred to the
Arians, and the seeming conversion of those sectaries introduced his
worship into the bosom of the Catholic church. The odious stranger,
disguising every circumstance of time and place, assumed the rank of
a martyr, a saint, and a Christian hero; and the infamous George of
Cappadocia has been transformed into the famous St. George of England,
the patron of arms, of chivalry, and of the garter.”
The romancers have treated St. George and his knightly confraternity
after their own manner. As a sample of what reading our ancestors
were delighted with, especially those who loved chivalric themes, I
know nothing better than “The Famous History of the Seven Champions
of Christendom, St. George of England, St. Denis of France, St. James
of Spain, St. Anthony of Italy, St. Andrew of Scotland, St. Patrick
of Ireland, and St. David of Wales. Shewing their honourable battles
by sea and land. Their tilts, justs, tournaments for ladies; their
combats with gyants, monsters, and dragons; their adventures in foreign
nations; their enchantments in the Holy Land; their knighthoods,
prowess, and chivalry, in Europe, Africa, and Asia; with their
victories against the enemies of Christ; also the true manner and
places of their deaths, being seven tragedies, and how they came to
be called the Seven Saints of Christendom.” The courteous author or
publisher of the veracious details, prefaces them with a brief address
“to all courteous readers,” to whom “Richard Johnson wisheth increase
of virtuous knowledge.” “Be not,” he says, “like the chattering cranes,
nor Momus’s mates that carp at everything. What the simple say, I
care not. What the spiteful say, I pass not; only the censure of the
conceited,” by which good Richard means the learned, “I stand unto;
that is the mark I aim at,”--an address, it may be observed, which
smacks of the Malaprop school; but which seemed more natural to our
ancestors than it does to us.
For these readers Richard Johnson presents a very highly-spiced fare.
He brings our patron saint into the world by a Cæsarean operation
performed by a witch, who stole him from his unconscious mother,
and reared him up in a cave, whence the young knight ultimately
escaped with the other champions whom the witch, now slain, had kept
imprisoned. The champions, it may be observed, travel with a celerity
that mocks the “Express,” and rivals the despatch of the Electric
Telegraph. They are scarcely departed from the seven paths which led
from the brazen pillar, each in search of adventures, when they are
all “in the thick of it,” almost at the antipodes. A breath takes St.
George from Coventry, his recovered home, after leaving the witch,
to Egypt. At the latter place he slays that terrible dragon, which
some think to imply the Arian overcoming the Athanasian, and rescues
the Princess Sabra, in whose very liberal love we can hardly trace a
symbol of the Church, although her antipathies are sufficiently strong
to remind one of the _odium theologicum_. George goes on performing
stupendous feats, and getting no thanks, until he undertakes to slay a
couple of lions for the Soldan of Persia, and gets clapped into prison,
during seven years, for his pains. The biographer I suspect, shut the
knight up so long, in order to have an excuse to begin episodically
with the life of St. Denis.
The mystic number seven enters into all the principal divisions of
the story. Thus, St. Denis having wandered into Thessaly was reduced
to such straits as to live upon mulberries; and these so disagreed
with him that he became suddenly transformed into a hart; a very
illogical sequence indeed. But the mulberry tree was, in fact,
Eglantius the King’s daughter, metamorphosed for her pride. Seven
years he thus remained; at the end of which time, his horse, wise as
any regularly-ordained physician, administered to him a decoction of
roses which brought about the transformation of both his master and his
master’s mistress into their “humane shapes.” That they went to court
sworn lovers may be taken as a matter of course. There they are left,
in order to afford the author an opportunity of showing how St. James,
having most unorthodoxically fallen in love with a Jewish maiden, was
seven years dumb, in consequence. St. James, however, is a patient and
persevering lover. If I had an ill-will against any one I would counsel
him to read this very long-winded history, but being at peace with
all mankind, I advise my readers to be content with learning that the
apostolic champion and the young Jewess are ultimately united, and fly
to Seville, where they reside in furnished lodgings, and lead a happy
life;--while the author tells of what befell to the doughty St. Anthony.
This notable Italian is a great hand at subduing giants and ladies.
We have a surfeit of combats and destruction, and love-making and
speechifying, in this champion’s life; and when we are compelled to
leave him travelling about with a Thracian lady, who accompanies him,
in a theatrical male dress, and looks in it like the Duchess--at least,
like Miss Farebrother, in the dashing white sergeant of the Forty
Thieves--we shake our head at St. Anthony and think how very unlike
he is to his namesake in the etching by Callot, where the fairest of
sirens could not squeeze a sigh from the anchorite’s wrinkled heart.
While they are travelling about in the rather disreputable fashion
above alluded to, we come across St. Andrew of Scotland, who has
greater variety of adventure than any other of the champions. With
every hour there is a fresh incident. Now he is battling with spirits,
now struggling with human foes, and anon mixed up, unfavorably, with
beasts. At the end of all the frays, there is--we need hardly say it--a
lady. The bonny Scot was not likely to be behind his fellow-champions
in this respect. Nay, St. Andrew has six of them, who had been swans,
and are now natural singing lasses. What sort of a blade St. Andrew
was may be guessed by the “fact,” that when he departed from the royal
court, to which he had conducted the half dozen ladies, they all eloped
in a body, after him. There never was so dashing a hero dreamed of by
romance--though a rhymer _has_ dashed off his equal in wooing, and
Burns’s “Finlay” is the only one that may stand the parallel.
When the six Thracian ladies fall into the power of “thirty
bloody-minded satyrs,” who so likely, or so happy to rescue them as
jolly St. Patrick. How he flies to the rescue, slays one satyr, puts
the rest to flight, and true as steel, in love or friendship, takes
the half dozen damsels under his arm, and swings singingly along with
them in search of the roving Scot! As for St. David, all this while,
he had not been quite so triumphant, or so tried, as his fellows. He
had fallen into bad company, and “four beautiful damsels wrapped the
drousie champion in a sheet of fine Arabian silk, and conveyed him into
a cave, placed in the middle of a garden, where they laid him on a
bed, more softer than the down of Culvers.” In this agreeable company
the Welsh champion wiled away _his_ seven years. It was pleasant but
not proper. But if the author had not thus disposed of him, how do you
think he would ever have got back to St. George of England? The author
indeed exhibits considerable skill, for he brings St. George and St.
David together, and the first rescues the second from ignoble thraldom,
and what is worse, from the most prosy enchanter I ever met with in
history, and who is really not enchanting at all. This done, George is
off to Tripoli.
There, near there, or somewhere else, for the romances are dreadfully
careless in their topography, he falls in with his old love Sabra,
married to a Moorish King. If George is perplexed at this, seeing that
the lady had engaged to remain an unmarried maiden till he came to wed
her, he is still more so when she informs him that she has, in all
essentials, kept her word, “through the secret virtue of a golden chain
steeped in tiger’s blood, the which she wore seven times double about
her ivory neck.” St. George does not know what to make of it, but as on
subsequently encountering two lions, Sabra, while he was despatching
one, kept the other quietly with its head resting on her lap, the
knight declared himself perfectly satisfied, and they set out upon
their travels, lovingly together.
By the luckiest chance, all the wandering knights and their ladies met
at the court of a King of Greece, who is not, certainly, to be heard of
in Gillies’ or Goldsmith’s history. The scenery is now on a magnificent
scale, for there is a regal wedding on foot, and tournaments, and the
real war of Heathenism against all Christendom. As the Champions of
Christendom have as yet done little to warrant them in assuming the
appellation, one would suppose that the time had now arrived when they
were to give the world a taste of their quality in that respect. But
nothing of the sort occurs. The seven worthies separate, each to his
own country, in order to prepare for great deeds; but none are done for
the benefit of Christianity, unless indeed we are to conclude that when
George and Sabra travelled together, and he overcame all antagonists,
and she inspired with love all beholders;--he subdued nature itself and
she ran continually into danger, from which he rescued her:--and that
when, after being condemned to the stake, the young wife gave birth
to three babes in the wood, and was at last crowned Queen of Egypt,
something is meant by way of allegory, in reference to old church
questions, and in not very clear elucidation as to how these questions
were beneficially affected by the Champions of Christendom!
I may add that when Sabra was crowned Queen of Egypt, every one was
ordered to be merry, on pain of death! It is further to be observed
there is now much confusion, and that the confusion by no means grows
less as the story thunders on. The Champions and the three sons of St.
George are, by turns, East, West, North, and South, either pursuing
each other, or suddenly and unexpectedly encountering, like the
principal personages in a pantomime. Battles, love-making, and shutting
up cruel and reprobate magicians from the “humane eye,” are the chief
events, but to every event there are dozens of episodes, and each
episode is as confusing, dazzling, and bewildering as the trunk from
which it hangs.
St. George, however, is like a greater champion than himself; and when
he is idle and in Italy, he does precisely what Nelson did in the
same place--fall in love with a lady, and cause endless mischief in
consequence. By this time, however, Johnson begins to think, rightly,
that his readers have had enough of it, and that it is time to dispose
of his principal characters. These too, are so well disposed to help
him, that when the author kills St. Patrick, the saint burys himself!
In memory of his deeds, of which we have heard little or nothing,
some are accustomed to honor him, says Mr. Johnson--“wearing upon
their hats, each of them, a cross of red silk, in token of his many
adventures under the Christian Cross.” So that the shamrock appears to
have been a device only of later times.
St. David is as quickly despatched. This champion enters Wales to crush
the pagans there. He wears a leek in his helmet, and his followers
adopt the same fashion, in order that friend may be distinguished
from foe. The doughty saint, of course, comes conqueror out of the
battle, but he is in a heated state, gets a chill and dies after all
of a common cold. Bruce, returning safe from exploring the Nile, to
break his neck by falling down his own stairs, hardly presents a more
practical bathos than this. Why the leek became the badge of Welshmen
need not be further explained.
It is singular that in recounting the manner of the death of the
next champion, St. Denis, the romancer is less romantic than common
tradition. He tells us how the knight repaired to then pagan France;
how he was accused of being a Christian, by another knight of what we
should fancy a Christian order, St. Michael, and how the pagan king
orders St. Denis to be beheaded, in consequence. There are wonders in
the heavens, at this execution, which convert the heathen sovereign to
Christianity; but no mention is made of St. Denis having walked to a
monastery, after his head was off, and _with_ his head under his arm.
Of this prodigy Voltaire remarked, “Ce n’est que le premier pas qui
coute,” but of that the romancer makes no mention. St. James suffers by
being shut up in his chapel in Spain, and starved to death, by order
of the Atheist king. Anthony dies quietly in a good old age, in Italy;
St. Andrew is beheaded by the cruel pagan Scots whom, in his old age,
he had visited, in order to bring them to conversion: and St. George,
who goes on, riding down wild monsters and rescuing timid maidens,
to the last--and his inclination, was always in the direction of the
maidens--ultimately meets his death by the sting of a venomous dragon.
And now it would seem that two or three hundred years ago, authors were
very much like the actors in the _Critic_, who when they _did_ get hold
of a good thing, could never give the public enough of it. Accordingly,
the biography of the Seven Champions was followed by that of their
sons. I will spare my readers the turbulent details: they will probably
be satisfied with learning that the three sons of St. George became
kings, “according as the fairy queen had prophesied to them,” and that
Sir Turpin, son of David, Sir Pedro, son of James, Sir Orlando, son of
Anthony, Sir Ewen, son of Andrew, Sir Phelim, son of Patrick, and Sir
Owen, son of David, like their sires, combated with giants, monsters,
and dragons; tilted and tournamented in honor of the ladies, did battle
in defence of Christianity, relieved the distressed, annihilated
necromancers and table-turners, in short, accomplished all that could
be expected from knights of such prowess and chivalry.
When Richard Johnson had reached this part of his history, he gave it
to the world, awaiting the judgment of the critics, before he published
his second portion: that portion wherein he was to unfold what nobody
yet could guess at, namely, wherefore the Seven Champions were called
_par excellence_, the Champions of Christendom. I am afraid that
meanwhile those terrible, god-like, and inexorable critics, had not
dealt altogether gently with him. The _Punch_ they offered him was not
made exclusively of sweets. His St. George had been attacked, and very
small reverence been expressed for his ladies. But see how calmly and
courteously--all the more admirable that there must have been some
affectation in the matter--he turns from the censuring judges to that
benevolent personage, the gentle reader. “Thy courtesy,” he says,
“must be my buckler against the carping malice of mocking jesters,
that being worse able to do well, scoff commonly at that they can not
mend; censuring all things, doing nothing, but (monkey-like) make apish
jests at anything they do in print, and nothing pleaseth them, except
it savor of a scoffing and invective spirit. Well, what they say of me
I do not care; thy delight is my sole desire.” Well said, bold Richard
Johnson. He thought he had put down criticism as St. George had the
dragon.
I can not say, however, that good Richard Johnson treats his gentle
reader fairly. This second part of his Champions is to a reader worse
than what all the labors of Hercules were to the lusty son of Alcmena.
An historical drama at Astley’s is not half so bewildering, and is
almost as credible, and Mr. Ducrow himself when he was rehearsing his
celebrated “spectacle drama” of “St. George and the Dragon” at old
Drury--and who that ever saw him on those occasions can possibly forget
him?--achieved greater feats, or was more utterly unlike any sane
individual than St. George is, as put upon the literary stage by Master
Johnson.
One comfort in tracing the tortuosities of this chivalric romance
is that the action is rapid; but then there is so much of it, and
it is so astounding! We are first introduced to the three sons of
St. George, who are famous hunters in England, and whose mother, the
lady Sabra, “catches her death,” by going out attired like Diana, to
witness their achievements. The chivalric widower thereupon sets out
for Jerusalem, his fellow-champions accompany, and George’s three
sons, Guy, Alexander, and David, upon insinuation from their mother’s
spirit, start too in pursuit. The lads were knighted by the king of
England before they commenced their journey, which they perform with
the golden spur of chivalry attached to their heels. They meet with the
usual adventures by the way: destroying giants, and rescuing virgins,
who in these troublesome times seem to have been allowed to travel
about too much by themselves. Meanwhile, their sire is enacting greater
prodigies still, and is continually delivering his fellow-champions
from difficulties, from which they are unable to extricate themselves.
Indeed, in all circumstances, his figure is the most prominent; and
although the other half-dozen _must_ have rendered some service on
each occasion, St. George makes no more mention of the same than
Marshal St. Arnaud, in his letters on the victory at the Alma, does of
the presence and services of the English.