INTERMINGLED, fantastically and inconsistently, with the story of St.
Brendan, is that of St. Maclovius or Machutus, who has given his name to
the seaport of St. Malo, in Brittany. His life, written by Sigebert, a
monk of Gembloux, about the year 1100, tells us how he was a Breton, who
sailed with St. Brendan in search of the fairest of all islands, in which
the citizens of heaven were said to dwell. With St. Brendan St. Malo
celebrated Easter on the whale’s back, and with St. Brendan he returned.
But another old hagiographer, Johannes à Bosco, tells a different story,
making St. Malo an Irishman brought up by St. Brendan, and preserved by
his prayers from a wave of the sea. He gives, moreover, to the Isle of
Paradise the name of Inga, and says that St. Brendan and his companions
never reached it after all, but came home after sailing round the Orkneys
and other Northern isles. The fact is, that the same saints reappear so
often on both sides of the British and the Irish Channels, that we must
take the existence of many of them as mere legend, which has been carried
from land to land by monks in their migrations, and taken root upon each
fresh soil which it has reached. One incident in St. Malo’s voyage is so
fantastic, and so grand likewise, that it must not be omitted. The monks
come to an island whereon they find the barrow of some giant of old time.
St. Malo, seized with pity for the lost soul of the heathen, opens the
mound and raises the dead to life. Then follows a strange conversation
between the giant and the saint. He was slain, he says, by his kinsmen,
and ever since has been tormented in the other world. In that nether pit
they know (he says) of the Holy Trinity: but that knowledge is rather
harm than gain to them, because they did not choose to know it when alive
on earth. Therefore he begs to be baptized, and so delivered from his
pain. He is therefore instructed, catechised, and in due time baptized,
and admitted to the Holy Communion. For fifteen days more he remains
alive: and then, dying once more, is again placed in his sepulchre, and
left in peace.
From fragmentary recollections of such tales as these (it may be observed
in passing) may have sprung the strange fancy of the modern Cornishmen,
which identifies these very Celtic saints of their own race with the
giants who, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, inhabited the land before
Brutus and his Trojans founded the Arthuric dynasty. St. Just, for
instance, who is one of the guardian saints of the Land’s End, and St.
Kevern, one of the guardian saints of the Lizard, are both giants; and
Cornishmen a few years since would tell how St. Just came from his
hermitage by Cape Cornwall to visit St. Kevern in his cave on the east
side of Goonhilly Downs; and how they took the Holy Communion together;
and how St. Just, tempted by the beauty of St. Kevern’s paten and
chalice, arose in the night and fled away with the holy vessels, wading
first the Looe Pool, and then Mount’s Bay itself; and how St. Kevern
pursued him, and hurled after him three great boulders of porphyry, two
of which lie on the slates and granites to this day; till St. Just,
terrified at the might of his saintly brother, tossed the stolen vessels
ashore opposite St. Michael’s Mount, and, fleeing back to his own
hermitage, never appeared again in the neighbourhood of St. Kevern.
But to return. St. Malo, coming home with St. Brendan, craves for peace,
and solitude, and the hermit’s cell, and goes down to the sea-shore, to
find a vessel which may carry him out once more into the infinite
unknown. Then there comes by a boat with no one in it but a little boy,
who takes him on board, and carries him to the isle of the hermit Aaron,
near the town of Aletha, which men call St. Malo now; and then the little
boy vanishes away, and St. Malo knows that he was Christ himself. There
he lives with Aaron, till the Bretons of the neighbourhood make him their
bishop. He converts the idolaters around, and performs the usual
miracles of hermit saints. He changes water into wine, and restores to
life not only a dead man, but a dead sow likewise, over whose motherless
litter a wretched slave, who has by accident killed the sow with a stone,
is weeping and wringing his hands in dread of his master’s fury. While
St. Malo is pruning vines, he lays his cape upon the ground, and a
redbreast comes and lays an egg on it. He leaves it there, for the
bird’s sake, till the young are hatched, knowing, says his biographer,
that without God the Father not a sparrow falls to the ground. Hailoch,
the prince of Brittany, destroys his church, and is struck blind.
Restored to sight by the saint, he bestows large lands on the Church.
“The impious generation,” who, with their children after them, have lost
their property by Hailoch’s gift, rise against St. Malo. They steal his
horses, and in mockery leave him only a mare. They beat his baker, tie
his feet under the horse’s body, and leave him on the sand to be drowned
by the rising tide. The sea by a miracle stops a mile off, and the baker
is saved.
St. Malo, weary of the wicked Bretons, flees to Saintonge in Aquitaine,
where he performs yet more miracles. Meanwhile, a dire famine falls on
the Bretons, and a thousand horrible diseases. Penitent, they send for
St. Malo, who delivers them and their flocks. But, at the command of an
angel, he returns to Saintonge and dies there, and Saintonge has his
relics, and the innumerable miracles which they work, even to the days of
Sigebert, of Gembloux.