connected with fixed magical procedure. A root or food, or still oftener
an ointment, is resorted to: ointments played a great part in
superstition; it was by ointments that the unlucky persons accused of
being wizards were held to have spread the plague of Milan. But the
surest method of transformation was a girdle made of the skin of the
animal whose form it was desired to take. This is regarded as a
makeshift for not being able to put on the whole skin. An old French
record tells of a man who buried a black cat in a box where four roads
met, with enough bread soaked in holy water and holy oil to keep it
alive for three days. The man intended to dig the cat up and, after
killing it, to make a girdle of its skin by which means he expected to
obtain the gift of second sight; but the burial-place of the cat was
discovered by some dogs that were scratching the earth, before the three
days had elapsed. The man, put to the torture, confessed all. In this
case, it will be noticed that the spiritual powers of the cat were to be
obtained without assuming its outward form. The turnskin who wishes to
go back into his human shape, has also to follow fixed rules: a formula
must be pronounced by some one else, as in the jungle tiger story, or
the man-beast must eat some stated food as in Lucian’s skit (if Lucian
wrote it) of the man who, by using the wrong salve, turned himself into
a donkey instead of into a bird as he had wished, and who could only
resume his own form by eating roses, which he did not accomplish until
he had undergone all sorts of adventures.
The belief that beasts were inhabited by depraved men has a certain
affinity with the belief that depraved men were inhabited by demons.
Dante maintains that some persons have actually gone to their account
while their bodies are still above-ground, the lodgings of evil spirits.
The history of the turnskin leads up to several conclusions, of which
the most important is, that superstitions often grow uglier as they grow
older. They descend, they rarely ascend. This experience should make us
pause before we pronounce hideous beliefs to be, in a true sense,
primitive. The idea of transformation is one of the oldest of human
ideas, much older than transmigration, but at the outset, far from
lending itself to such repulsive applications as man-tigers and
demon-men, it gave birth to some of the fairest passages in the poetry
of mankind which he calls his religion. It is impossible to imagine a
more beautiful myth than the Vedic belief in the swan-maidens, the
Apsarases who, by putting on skirts of swan feathers, could become
swans. Their swan-skirts stretch from the hot East to the cold North,
for they are the same that are worn by the Valkyries. All these early
legends of swans bring into particularly clear light the moral identity
of the impressions received from things seen by man at the bottom and at
the top of the ladder of intellectual progress. Natural objects, lovely
or terrible, raise archetypal images of things lovely or terrible which
in our minds remain shapeless but to which the primitive man gives a
local habitation and a name. Swans, sailing on still waters or circling
above our heads, inspire us with indefinite longings which took form in
the myth of the Apsarases and appear again in the Vedic story of the
sage who, by deep knowledge and holiness, became a golden swan and flew
away to the sun. To this day, if the Hindu sees a flight of swans
wending its mysterious way across the sky, he repeats the saying almost
mechanically (as a Catholic crosses himself if he pass a shrine): “The
soul flies away, and none can go with it.”
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XIV
THE HORSE AS HERO
FIFTY years ago the knell of the horse was rung, with due solemnity, by
the American statesman, Charles Sumner. The age of chivalry, he said,
was gone—an age of humanity had come; “the horse, whose importance more
than human, gave the name to that period of gallantry and war, now
yields his foremost place to man.” As a matter of fact, the horse is
yielding his foremost place to the motor-car, to the machine; and this
is the topsy-turvy way in which most of the millennial hopes of the
mid-nineteenth century are being fulfilled by the twentieth; the big
dream of a diviner day ends in a reality out of which all that is ideal
is fading. But the reason why I quote the passage is the service which
it renders as a reminder of the often forgotten meaning of the word
“chivalry.” The horse was connected with the ideals no less than with
the realities of the phase in human history that was called after him;
the mental consequences of the partnership between man and that noble
beast were not less far reaching than the physical. There are a hundred
types of human character, some of them of the highest, in the making of
which the horse counts for nothing; but this type, this figure of the
very perfect gentle knight, cannot be imagined in a horseless world. We
hear of what man taught animals, but less of what animals taught man. In
the unity of emotion between horse and rider something is exchanged.
Even the epithets which it is natural to apply to the knightly hero, one
and all fit his steed: defiant and gentle, daring and devoted, trusty
and tireless, a scorner of obstacles, of a gay, brave spirit—the list
could be lengthened at will. And the qualities and even the defects they
had in common were not so much the result of accident as the true fruit
of their mutual interdependence.
In the aftermath of chivalry which produced the song-writers and the
splendid adventurers of the Elizabethan age, horsemanship came again to
the fore as a passion rather than as a mere necessary pursuit. We know
that, not satisfied with what England could provide, the fashionable
young men frequented the schools of skilled Italians, generally of noble
birth, such as Corte da Pavia, who was Queen Elizabeth’s riding-master.
The prevailing taste is reflected in Shakespeare, who, though he was for
all time, was yet, essentially of his own; his innumerable allusions to
horses show, in the first place, that he knew all about them, as he did
about most things, and in the second, that he knew that these allusions
would please his audience, which no born dramatist ever treated as a
negligible quantity, and the least of all Shakespeare. Even the
performing or “thinking” horse does not escape his notice; “the dancing
horse will tell you,” in “Love’s Labour Lost,” refers to the “Hans” or
“Trixie” of the period who also attracted the attention of Ben Jonson,
Downe, Sir Kenelm Digby, Sir Walter Raleigh, Hall, and John Taylor, the
water-poet. This animal’s name was “Morocco” but he was often called
“Bankes’ horse,” from his master who taught him to tell the number of
pence in silver coins and the number of points in throws of dice, and on
one occasion made him walk to the top of St. Paul’s. Alas, for the fate
of “Morocco” and his master, “Being beyond the sea burnt for one witch,”
as chronicled by Ben Jonson! Like Esmeralda and her goat, they were
accused of magic, and the charge, first started at Orleans, was followed
by condemnation and death in Rome. Greater tragedies of superstition
hardly come with such a shock as this stupid slaughter of a poor showman
and his clever beast.
In Elizabethan society interest in horses was directed chiefly to the
turnings and windings, the “shapes and tricks” of the riding-school, and
this lighter way of looking on them as affording man his most splendid
diversion is, in the main, Shakespeare’s way—though he does not forget
that, at times, a horse may be worth a kingdom. Not to him, however, or
to any modern poet, do we go for the unique, incomparable description of
the truly heroic horse, the uncowed charger of the East, created to awe
rather than to be awed by man, whom no image of servility would fit.
Here is this specimen of the world’s greatest poetry, in case any one be
so unfortunate as not to know it by heart:—
“He paweth in the valley and rejoiceth in his strength; he goeth on to
meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither
turneth he back from the sword. The quiver rattleth against him, the
glittering spear and the shield. He swalloweth the ground with
fierceness and rage: neither believeth he that it is the sound of the
trumpet. He saith among the trumpets, Ha! ha! He smelleth the battle
afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting.”
How the portrait leaps out of the page into life as Velasquez’s horse in
the Prado leaps out of his frame! We feel the pulse of a passion which
throbs through every vein from head to hoof. This Triumph of the
War-horse is one of the points of affinity in the Book of Job with Arab
rather than with Hebrew civilisation. The text itself is nearer Arabic
than any other Biblical book, and the life of the protagonist is very
like the life of an ancient Arabian chieftain. The Jews proper cared
little for horses; when they fell into their hands they knew no better
than to destroy them. They were a pastoral people, at no time fond of
sport, which was hardly recognised as lawful by their religious
ordinances. They do not seem to have ridden on horseback. Zechariah,
indeed, speaks of the war-horse, but only to represent him as the
beautiful image of peace, no more mixing in the fray, but bearing on his
bell (which was meant to affright the foe) the inscription: “Holiness
unto the Lord.”
[Illustration:
_Photo:_ _Mansell._
THE ASSYRIAN HORSE.
British Museum.]
On the other hand, the Arab, and, most of all, the Nomadic Arab, has a
dual existence with his horse. He could not live without it; it is a
part of himself—of all that makes him himself and not another. The same
is true of the Todas and their buffaloes, the Lapps and their reindeer.
In summer when the reindeer are in the hills, to save them from what is
there called the heat, a Lapp seems only half a Lapp; but his thoughts
are still of reindeer and his fingers are busy with scratching its
likeness on his spoons, his milk-bowls, his implements of all sorts, all
of which are made of reindeer-horn. His songs are still of reindeer:
“While the reindeer lasts, the Lapp will last; when the reindeer fails,
the Lapp will fail,” as ran the infinitely pathetic ditty I heard sung
by a Lapp woman who was shown to me as the best singer of the tribe.
With all these people the flesh of the beloved animal is esteemed the
greatest delicacy; a fact in which there seems to lie suggestions of
cannibalism in its real psychological aspect—the eating of the hero in
order to acquire his attributes. Sometimes, however, the reason may be
simply that they were for long periods in the impossibility of obtaining
other meat; since the natural man prefers food to which he has grown
familiar.
In what is probably the oldest version of Boccaccio’s Falcon story, the
Emperor of Constantinople sends to ask a very generous præ-Islamic Arab
Chief, by name Hatem Tai (celebrated as the type of chivalry over all
the Moslem world), to give him a horse which Hatem is known to value
beyond all his possessions. The object of the demand was to put his
reputation for generosity to the test. The officer, who is the bearer of
the Emperor’s request, is regaled sumptuously on the evening of his
arrival; and, according to the laws of Oriental courtesy, he puts off
speaking of the business in hand till next day. When he delivers his
message Hatem replies that he would have complied gladly, but that the
officer had eaten the horse last night for supper! The horse was the
most costly and coveted food which the chief could offer his guest, and
the story becomes thus more intelligible than when the victim is an
uneatable bird like a hawk.
In Oriental poetry the camel “who asks but a thorn from the bed of roses
of the world” takes a well-merited share of attention, but the animal
which is before all others the Eastern poets’ beast is, of course, the
horse: he might himself be called the poet as well as the prince among
beasts, for if any living thing incarnates the poetry “of form, of
motion, of glad devotion,” it is surely the high-bred Arab steed.
Innumerable tributes credit him with three parts human qualities:—
“The courser looks his love as plainly as if he could speak,
He waves his mane, his paws, he curls his nostrils and his lips;
He makes half-vocal sounds, uprears or droops his neck and hips,
His deep and pensive eyes light up with lambent flame, then seem
As if they swam in the desires of some mysterious dream.”[8]
Footnote 8:
Translated by W. R. Alger.
Of the true Arab horse it is said that his foot is so light that he
could dance on a woman’s breast without leaving a bruise. Some of the
Arabian ballads of horses are among the very few Oriental poems which
have acquired universal fame, as that which tells of how the peerless
Lahla picked up his captured and bound master and carried him with his
teeth back to the tribe, on reaching which he sinks dead, amidst the
tears and lamentations of all. Horses, the Koran expressly says, were
created for man’s use, but also “to be an ornament unto him”: all the
romance, the valour, the deep-seated aristocratic instinct of the Arab,
proudest of mankind, is bound up with his horse. The splendid Arab chief
who stands aside motionless to let go by an automobile carrying a party
of tourists across the Sahara reflects, as he draws his burnoose closer
over his mouth, “_This_ is the ‘_ornament_’ of Western man!” And,
looking at his horse, which stands motionless as he (for the Arab steed
fears nothing when his master is near), he adds to himself: “These
pass—we remain.” False it may be as a prophecy, but he believes it
_because convinced of his superiority_.
Still by the camp-fires in the desert they tell the old story of a great
chief who, in præ-Gallic times, was taken prisoner by the Emir’s
horsemen. He escaped, but hardly had he reached his tent when in the
desert air, in which sounds are heard afar off, a clattering of hoofs
could be distinguished—the Sultan’s men were coming! The chief sprang on
his mare and fled. When the men came up they knew that only one horse
could overtake the mare, her beautiful sister, not less swift than she.
A soldier leapt from his own horse intending to mount her, but the
chiefs son, yet a child, instantly shot her dead with a pistol. And so
the chief was saved.
The Ulemas of Algeria say that when God wished to create the mare He
spoke to the wind: “I will cause thee to bring forth a creature that
shall bear all My worshippers, that shall be loved by My slaves, and
that will cause the despair of all who will not follow My laws.” And
when He had created her He said: “I have made thee without an equal: the
goods of this world shall be placed between thy eyes; everywhere I will
make thee happy and preferred above all the beasts of the field, for
tenderness shall everywhere be in the heart of thy master; good alike
for the chase and retreat, thou shalt fly though wingless, and I will
only place on thy back the men who know me, who will offer ME prayers
and thanksgivings; men who shall be My worshippers from one generation
to another.”
For the Arab the horse was not only the means of performing great
enterprises but the very object of life, the thing in itself most
precious, the care, the preoccupation, and the prize. The Arab’s horse
is his kingdom.
[Illustration:
ARABIAN HORSE OF THE SAHARA.]
I suppose that there is no doubt that the knightly type was a flower
transported from the East, though, like many other Eastern flowers, it
grew to its best in European gardens. The Crusaders learnt more than
they taught. Coming down later, the national hero of Spain, for all his
pure Gothic blood, is an Eastern not a Western hero. He will be
understood far better when he is tried by this standard. If we weigh him
in Eastern rather than in Western scales, a more lenient and above all a
juster judgment will be the result, and we shall see how the fine
qualities with which legend credits him were not disproved by some acts
which the modern Western conscience condemns. On the whole it may be
taken for granted, in spite of all that has been said to the contrary,
that tradition which easily errs about facts, is rarely wrong about
character.
Ruy Diaz de Bivar was a hero after the Arab’s own heart:—
“Noble y leal, soldado y Caballero,
Señor te apellido la gente Mora,”
as the lines run on his coffin in the town-hall at Burgos. Nothing being
sacred to a critic, it has been contested that he was first called “Myo
Cid,” or “My Lord,” by the Moors, but tradition and etymology agree too
well for this to be reasonably doubted. It is certain that both Moors
and Christians called him by his other title of Campeador in Spanish and
Al-kambeyator in the form the Arabic writers gave it. It was derived
from his gallantry in single combats and did not mean, as some have
thought, “Champion of the Christians.”
It is entirely in keeping with the Cid’s Arab affinities that his horse
should have attained a fame almost as great as his own. From Bucephalus
to Copenhagen never was there a European horse equal in renown to
Bavieca. His glory, is it not writ in nearly every one of the hundred
ballads of the Cid? The choosing of Bavieca is one of the most striking
events in the Cid’s youth. The boy asked his godfather, a fat,
good-natured old priest, to give him a colt. The priest took him to a
field where the mares and their colts were being exercised and told him
to take the best. They were driven past him and he let all the
handsomest go by; then a mare came up with an ugly and miserable-looking
colt—“This,” he cried, “is the one for me!” His godfather was angry and
called him a simpleton, but the lad only answered that the horse would
turn out well and that “Simpleton” (“Bavieca”) should be his name.
Horses which begin as ugly ducklings and end as swans are an extensive
breed. Count de Gubernatis, in his valuable work on “Zoological
Mythology,” mentions Hatos, the magical horse of the Hungarians, as
belonging to this class. If as old as the oldest legend, they are, in a
sense, as new as the “outsider” which carries off one of the greatest
prizes of the Turf. The choosing of Bavieca was in the mind of Cervantes
when he described in his inimitable way the choosing of Rozinante
(“ex-jade”), who never became anything but a _rozin_ in the most present
tense, except in the imagination of his master, but who will live for
ever in his company, to bear witness to the indivisible oneness of the
knight and his horse.
Completely Oriental in sentiment is the splendid ballad which relates
how the Cid offered Bavieca to his king because it was not meet that a
subject should have a horse so far more precious than any possessed by
his lord. There is in this not only the act of homage but also the
absorbing pride which made the Arab who was overtaking a horse-stealer,
shout to him the secret sign at which his stolen mare would go her best,
preferring to lose her than to vanquish her.
“O king, the thing is shameful that any man beside
The liege lord of Castile himself should Bavieca ride.
For neither Spain nor Araby could another charger bring
So good as he, and certes, the best befits the king.”
The gorgeous simplicity of the original is missed by Lockhart in the
succeeding verses, in which the Cid, before giving up the horse, mounts
him to show his worth, his ermine mantle hanging from his shoulders. He
will do, he says, in the presence of the king what he has not done for
long except in battle with the Moor: he will touch Bavieca with his
spurs. Then comes the maddest, wildest, yet most accomplished display of
noble horsemanship that ever witched the world. One rein breaks and the
beholders tremble for his life, but with ease and grace he guides the
foaming and panting horse before the king and prepares to yield him up.
Then Alfonso cries, God forbid that he should take him: he shall be
accounted, indeed, as his, but shameful would it be
“That peerless Bavieca should ever be bestrid
By any mortal but Bivar—‘Mount, mount again, my Cid!’”
There is a spot in Spain where we still seem to breathe the very air of
chivalrous romance: the royal armoury at Madrid, in which the mail-clad
knights with their plumes, their housings, their lances, their trophies,
sit their fine horses as gallantly as if they were riding straight into
the lists. There, and there alone, we can invoke the proper _mise en
scène_ for the gestes and jousts described in the Spanish ballads.
Historically, it seems certain that the Cid died at Valencia in July,
1099, an access of grief that his captains—who, owing to his ill-health,
were obliged to replace him—had failed to hold the Moors in check. King
Alfonso came to the assistance of his noble widow, Jimena, but finally
Valencia had to be abandoned; all the Christians left the town and the
Cid’s body was borne to his distant Northern home. Such is the
historical outline, sufficiently pathetic in itself but adorned with
additions, not all of them, perhaps, invented in the sublime legend of
the Last Ride. It is said that the Cid, knowing that his last hour was
near, refrained from any food except certain draughts of rose-water in
which were dissolved the myrrh and balsam sent to him by the great
Sultan of Persia. He gave particular instructions as to how his body was
to be anointed with the myrrh and balsam which remained in the golden
caskets, and how it was to be set upright on Bavieca, fully saddled and
armed, to be still a terror to the Moors, who were to be kept in
complete ignorance of his death. All this was done and a great victory
was won over the Moors, who thought they saw their dreaded enemy once
more commanding in person. Then the victors started on the long journey
to San Pedro de Cardeña, near Burgos, the Cid riding his horse by day,
supported by an artful contrivance, and by night placed on a dummy horse
wrought by Gil Diaz, his devoted servitor. Jimena, with all the Cid’s
men, followed in his train. On the way the procession is joined by the
Cid’s two daughters and by a great mass of people who mourned in their
hearts for Spain’s greatest hero, but they wore rich and gay apparel,
for the Cid had forbidden the wearing of mourning. So Cardeña was
reached, and tenderly and lovingly Ruy Diaz lifted the Cid’s body for
the last time from Bavieca’s back—never more to bear a man. The glorious
war-horse lived for two years, led to water each day by Gil Diaz. On his
death, at more than forty years of age and leaving not unworthy
descendants behind him, he was buried, according to the Cid’s express
desire, in a deep and ample grave, “so that no dog might disturb his
bones,” near the gate of the Convent, and two elms were planted to mark
the spot. When Gil Diaz died, full of years and richly provided for by
the Cid’s daughters, he was laid to rest beside the horse he had loved
and tended so faithfully.
In this narrative, condensed from the Chronicles, the curious particular
will have been noticed of the gift by the “Great Sultan of Persia” to
the Christian warrior of those precious spices and aromatic gums which
seem to have been the secret treasure of old Persia, forming a priceless
offering reserved for the very greatest personages. The strangeness of
bringing in the Sultan of Persia almost suggests that there was truth in
the assertion that he had sent presents to the Cid. Over the sea and
over the fruitful fields the radiance of noble deeds travels, as Pinder
said of old. A little after the march of the Thousand, the Arabs of the
desert were heard discussing round their camp-fires the exploits of
Garibaldi. If the fame of the Cid reached Persia, as it is very likely
that it did, he would have found fervent admirers among a people which
was still electrified by the epic poem of Firdusi, who died within a
year or two of the Cid’s birth. In that epic is told the story of the
Persian Campeador—the Champion Rustem, who not only in his title but in
all we know of his general bearings has so great a resemblance to the
Cid that it is a wonder if no historical “discoverer” has derived one
from the other, the more so since there have not been wanting writers
who denied the Cid’s existence. And if Ruy Diaz de Bivar has his
analogue in Rustem, has not Bavieca a perfect counterpart in Rakush?