Our Fathers Have Told Us Part 2

The deacon objecting that no apparel of that profane nature is under his hand, St. Martin, with his customary serenity, takes off his own episcopal stole, or whatsoever flowing stateliness it might be, throws it on the dest.i.tute shoulders, and pa.s.ses on to perform indecorous public service in his waistcoat, or such mediaeval nether attire as remained to him.

But, as he stood at the altar, a globe of light appeared above his head; and when he raised his bare arms with the Host--the angels were seen round him, hanging golden chains upon them, and jewels, not of the earth.

Incredible to you in the nature of things, wise reader, and too palpably a gloss of monkish folly on the older story?

Be it so: yet in this fable of monkish folly, understood with the heart, would have been the chastis.e.m.e.nt and check of every form of the church's pride and sensuality, which in our day have literally sunk the service of G.o.d and His poor into the service of the clergyman and his rich; and changed what was once the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, into the spangling of Pantaloons in an ecclesiastical Masquerade.

But one more legend,--and we have enough to show us the roots of this saint's strange and universal power over Christendom.

"What peculiarly distinguished St. Martin was his sweet, serious, unfailing serenity; no one had ever seen him angry, or sad, or, gay; there was nothing in his heart but piety to G.o.d and pity for men. The Devil, who was particularly envious of his virtues, detested above all his exceeding charity, because it was the most inimical to his own power, and one day reproached him mockingly that he so soon received into favour the fallen and the repentant. But St. Martin answered him sorrowfully, saying, 'Oh most miserable that thou art! if _thou_ also couldst cease to persecute and seduce wretched men, if thou also couldst repent, thou also shouldst find mercy and forgiveness through Jesus Christ.'"[7]

[Footnote 7: Mrs. Jameson, Vol. II., p. 722.]

In this gentleness was his strength; and the issue of it is best to be estimated by comparing its scope with that of the work of St. Firmin. The impatient missionary riots and rants about Amiens'

streets--insults, exhorts, persuades, baptizes,--turns everything, as aforesaid, upside down for forty days: then gets his head cut off, and is never more named, _out_ of Amiens. St. Martin teazes n.o.body, spends not a breath in unpleasant exhortation, understands, by Christ's first lesson to himself, that undipped people may be as good as dipped if their hearts are clean; helps, forgives, and cheers, (companionable even to the loving-cup,) as readily the clown as the king; he is the patron of honest drinking; the stuffing of your Martinmas goose is fragrant in his nostrils, and sacred to him the last kindly rays of departing summer. And somehow--the idols totter before him far and near--the Pagan G.o.ds fade, _his_ Christ becomes all men's Christ--his name is named over new shrines innumerable in all lands; high on the Roman hills, lowly in English fields;--St. Augustine baptized his first English converts in St. Martin's church at Canterbury; and the Charing Cross station itself has not yet effaced wholly from London minds his memory or his name.

That story of the Episcopal Robe is the last of St. Martin respecting which I venture to tell you that it is wiser to suppose it literally true, than a _mere_ myth; myth, however, of the deepest value and beauty it remains a.s.suredly: and this really last story I have to tell, which I admit you will be wiser in thinking a fable than exactly true, nevertheless had a.s.suredly at its root some grain of fact (sprouting a hundred-fold) cast on good ground by a visible and unforgettable piece of St. Martin's actual behaviour in high company; while, as a myth, it is every whit and for ever valuable and comprehensive.

St. Martin, then, as the tale will have it, was dining one day at the highest of tables in the terrestrial globe--namely, with the Emperor and Empress of Germany! You need not inquire what Emperor, or which of the Emperor's wives! The Emperor of Germany is, in all early myths, the expression for the highest sacred power of the State, as the Pope is the highest sacred power of the Church. St. Martin was dining then, as aforesaid, with the Emperor, of course sitting next him on his left--Empress opposite on his right: everything orthodox. St. Martin much enjoying his dinner, and making himself generally agreeable to the company: not in the least a John Baptist sort of a saint. You are aware also that in Royal feasts in those days persons of much inferior rank in society were allowed in the hall: got behind people's chairs, and saw and heard what was going on, while they un.o.btrusively picked up crumbs, and licked trenchers.

When the dinner was a little forward, and time for wine came, the Emperor fills his own cup--fills the Empress's--fills St.

Martin's,--affectionately hobn.o.bs with St. Martin. The equally loving, and yet more truly believing, Empress, looks across the table, humbly, but also royally, expecting St. Martin, of course, next to hobn.o.b with _her_. St. Martin looks round, first, deliberately; becomes aware of a tatterdemalion and thirsty-looking soul of a beggar at his chair side, who has managed to get _his_ cup filled somehow, also--by a charitable lacquey.

St. Martin turns his back on the Empress, and hobn.o.bs with _him_!

For which charity--mythic if you like, but evermore exemplary--he remains, as aforesaid, the patron of good-Christian topers to this hour.

As gathering years told upon him, he seems to have felt that he had carried weight of crozier long enough--that busy Tours must now find a busier Bishop--that, for himself, he might innocently henceforward take his pleasure and his rest where the vine grew and the lark sang. For his episcopal palace, he takes a little cave in the chalk cliffs of the up-country river: arranges all matters therein, for bed and board, at small cost. Night by night the stream murmurs to him, day by day the vine-leaves give their shade; and, daily by the horizon's breadth so much nearer Heaven, the fore-running sun goes down for him beyond the glowing water;--there, where now the peasant woman trots homewards between her panniers, and the saw rests in the half-cleft wood, and the village spire rises grey against the farthest light, in Turner's 'Loireside.'[8]

[Footnote 8: Modern Painters, Plate 73.]

All which things, though not themselves without profit, my special reason for telling you now, has been that you might understand the significance of what chanced first on Clovis' march south against the Visigoths.

"Having pa.s.sed the Loire at Tours, he traversed the lands of the abbey of St. Martin, which he declared inviolate, and refused permission to his soldiers to touch anything, save water and gra.s.s for their horses.

So rigid were his orders, and the obedience he exacted in this respect, that a Frankish soldier having taken, without the consent of the owner, some hay, which belonged to a poor man, saying in raillery "that it was but gra.s.s," he caused the aggressor to be put to death, exclaiming that "Victory could not be expected, if St. Martin should be offended."

Now, mark you well, this pa.s.sage of the Loire at Tours is virtually the fulfilment of the proper bounds of the French kingdom, and the sign of its approved and securely set power is "Honour to the poor!"

Even a little gra.s.s is not to be stolen from a poor man, on pain of Death. So wills the Christian knight of Roman armies; throned now high with G.o.d. So wills the first Christian king of far victorious Franks;--here baptized to G.o.d in Jordan of his goodly land, as he goes over to possess it.

How long?

Until that same Sign should be read backwards from a degenerate throne;--until, message being brought that the poor of the French people had no bread to eat, answer should be returned to them "They may eat gra.s.s." Whereupon--by St. Martin's faubourg, and St. Martin's gate--there go forth commands from the Poor Man's Knight against the King--which end _his_ Feasting.

And be this much remembered by you, of the power over French souls, past and to come, of St. Martin of Tours.

NOTES TO CHAPTER I.

The reader will please observe that notes immediately necessary to the understanding of the text will be given, with _numbered_ references, under the text itself; while questions of disputing authorities, or quotations of supporting doc.u.ments will have _lettered_ references, and be thrown together at the end of each chapter.[9] One good of this method will be that, after the numbered notes are all right, if I see need of farther explanation, as I revise the press, I can insert a letter referring to a _final_ note without confusion of the standing types. There will be some use also in the final notes, in summing the chapters, or saying what is to be more carefully remembered of them.

Thus just now it is of no consequence to remember that the first taking of Amiens was in 445, because that is not the founding of the Merovingian dynasty; neither that Merovaeus seized the throne in 447 and died ten years later. The real date to be remembered is 481, when Clovis himself comes to the throne, a boy of fifteen; and the three battles of Clovis' reign to be remembered are Soissons, Tolbiac, and Poitiers--remembering also that this was the first of the three great battles of Poitiers;--how the Poitiers district came to have such importance as a battle-position, we must afterwards discover if we can. Of Queen Clotilde and her flight from Burgundy to her Frank lover we must hear more in next chapter,--the story of the vase at Soissons is given in "The Pictorial History of France," but must be deferred also, with such comment as it needs, to next chapter; for I wish the reader's mind, in the close of this first number, to be left fixed on two descriptions of the modern 'Frank' (taking that word in its Saracen sense), as distinguished from the modern Saracen. The first description is by Colonel Butler, entirely true and admirable, except in the implied extension of the contrast to olden time: for the Saxon soul under Alfred, the Teutonic under Charlemagne, and the Frank under St. Louis, were quite as religious as any Asiatic's, though more practical; it is only the modern mob of kingless miscreants in the West, who have sunk themselves by gambling, swindling, machine-making, and gluttony, into the scurviest louts that have ever fouled the Earth with the carcases she lent them.

[Footnote 9: The plan for numbered and lettered references is not followed after the first chapter.]

"Of the features of English character brought to light by the spread of British dominion in Asia, there is nothing more observable than the contrast between the religious bias of Eastern thought and the innate absence of religion in the Anglo-Saxon mind. Turk and Greek, Buddhist and Armenian, Copt and Pa.r.s.ee, all manifest in a hundred ways of daily life the great fact of their belief in a G.o.d. In their vices as well as in their virtues the recognition of Deity is dominant.

"With the Western, on the contrary, the outward form of practising belief in a G.o.d is a thing to be half-ashamed of--something to hide. A procession of priests in the Strada Reale would probably cause an average Briton to regard it with less tolerant eye than he would cast upon a Juggernaut festival in Orissa: but to each alike would he display the same iconoclasm of creed, the same idea, not the less fixed because it is seldom expressed in words: "You pray; therefore I do not think much of you." But there is a deeper difference between East and West lying beneath this incompatibility of temper on the part of modern Englishmen to accept the religious habit of thought in the East. All Eastern peoples possess this habit of thought. It is the one tie which links together their widely differing races. Let us give an ill.u.s.tration of our meaning. On an Austrian Lloyd's steamboat in the Levant a traveller from Beyrout will frequently see strange groups of men crowded together on the quarter-deck. In the morning the missal books of the Greek Church will be laid along the bulwarks of the ship, and a couple of Russian priests, coming from Jerusalem, will be busy muttering ma.s.s. A yard to right or left a Turkish pilgrim, returning from Mecca, sits a respectful observer of the scene. It is prayer, and therefore it is holy in his sight. So, too, when the evening hour has come, and the Turk spreads out his bit of carpet for the sunset prayers and obeisance towards Mecca, the Greek looks on in silence, without trace of scorn in his face, for it is again the worship of the Creator by the created. They are both fulfilling the _first_ law of the East--prayer to G.o.d; and whether the shrine be Jerusalem, Mecca, or Lha.s.sa, the sanct.i.ty of worship surrounds the votary, and protects the pilgrim.

"Into this life comes the Englishman, frequently dest.i.tute of one touch of sympathy with the prayers of any people, or the faith of any creed; hence our rule in the East has ever rested, and will ever rest, upon the bayonet. We have never yet got beyond the stage of conquest; never a.s.similated a people to our ways, never even civilized a single tribe around the wide dominion of our empire. It is curious how frequently a well-meaning Briton will speak of a foreign church or temple as though it had presented itself to his mind in the same light in which the City of London appeared to Blucher--as something to loot.

The other idea, that a priest was a person to hang, is one which is also often observable in the British brain. On one occasion, when we were endeavouring to enlighten our minds on the Greek question, as it had presented itself to a naval officer whose vessel had been stationed in Greek and Adriatic waters during our occupation of Corfu and the other Ionian Isles, we could only elicit from our informant the fact that one morning before breakfast he had hanged seventeen priests."

The second pa.s.sage which I store in these notes for future use, is the supremely magnificent one, out of a book full of magnificence,--if truth be counted as having in it the strength of deed: Alphonse Karr's "Grains de Bon Sens." I cannot praise either this or his more recent "Bourdonnements" to my own heart's content, simply because they are by a man utterly after my own heart, who has been saying in France, this many a year, what I also, this many a year, have been saying in England, neither of us knowing of the other, and both of us vainly. (See pages 11 and 12 of "Bourdonnements.") The pa.s.sage here given is the sixty-third clause in "Grains de Bon Sens."

"Et tout cela, monsieur, vient de ce qu'il n'y a plus de croyances--de ce qu'on ne croit plus a rien.

"Ah! saperlipopette, monsieur, vous me la baillez belle! Vous dites qu'on ne croit plus a rien! Mais jamais, a aucune epoque, on n'a cru a tant de billevesees, de bourdes, de mensonges, de sottises, d'absurdites qu'aujourd'hui.

"D'abord, on _croit_ a l'incredulite--l'incredulite est une croyance, une religion tres exigeante, qui a ses dogmes, sa liturgie, ses pratiques, ses rites! ...son intolerance, ses superst.i.tions. Nous avons des incredules et des impies jesuites, et des incredules et des impies jansenistes; des impies molinistes, et des impies quietistes; des impies pratiquants, et non pratiquants; des impies indifferents et des impies fanatiques; des incredules cagots et des impies hypocrites et tartuffes.--La religion de l'incredulite ne se refuse meme pas le luxe des heresies.

"On ne croit plus a la bible, je le veux bien, mais on _croit_ aux 'ecritures' des journaux, on croit au 'sacerdoce' des gazettes et carres de papier, et a leurs 'oracles' quotidiens.

"On _croit_ au 'bapteme' de la police correctionnelle et de la Cour d'a.s.sises--on appelle 'martyrs' et 'confesseurs' les 'absents' a Noumea et les 'freres' de Suisse, d'Angleterre et de Belgique--et, quand on parle des 'martyrs de la Commune' ca ne s'entend pas des a.s.sa.s.sines, mais des a.s.sa.s.sins.

"On se fait enterrer 'civilement,' on ne veut plus sur son cercueil des prieres de l'Eglise, on ne veut ni cierges, ni chants religieux,--mais on veut un cortege portant derriere la biere des immortelles rouges;--on veut une 'oraison,' une 'predication' de Victor Hugo qui a ajoute cette specialite a ses autres specialites, si bien qu'un de ces jours derniers, comme il suivait un convoi en amateur, un croque-mort s'approcha de lui, le poussa du coude, et lui dit en souriant: 'Est-ce que nous n'aurons pas quelque chose de vous, aujourd'hui?'--Et cette predication il la lit ou la recite--ou, s'il ne juge pas a propos 'd'officier' lui-meme, s'il s'agit d'un mort de plus, il envoie pour la psalmodier M. Meurice ou tout autre 'pretre'

ou 'enfant de coeur' du 'Dieu,'--A defaut de M. Hugo, s'il s'agit d'un citoyen obscur, on se contente d'une homelie improvisee pour la dixieme fois par n'importe quel depute intransigeant--et le _Miserere_ est remplace par les cris de 'Vive la Republique!' pousses dans le cimetiere.

"On n'entre plus dans les eglises, mais on frequente les bra.s.series et les cabarets; on y officie, on y celebre les mysteres, on y chante les louanges d'une pretendue republique _sacro-sainte_, une, indivisible, democratique, sociale, athenienne, intransigeante, despotique, invisible quoique etant partout. On y communie sous differentes especes; le matin (_matines_) on 'tue le ver' avec le vin blanc,--il y a plus tard les vepres de l'absinthe, auxquelles on se ferait un crime de manquer d'a.s.siduite.

"On ne croit plus en Dieu, mais on _croit_ pieus.e.m.e.nt en M. Gambetta, en MM. Marcou, Naquet, Barodet, Tartempion, etc., et en toute une longue litanie de saints et de _dii minores_ tels que Goutte-Noire, Polosse, Boria.s.se et Silibat, le heros lyonnais.

"On _croit_ a 'l'immuabilite' de M. Thiers, qui a dit avec aplomb 'Je ne change jamais,' et qui aujourd'hui est a la fois le protecteur et le protege de ceux qu'il a pa.s.se une partie de sa vie a fusilier, et qu'il fusillait encore hier.

'On _croit_ au republicanisme 'immacule' de l'avocat de Cahors qui a jete par-dessus bord tous les principes republicains,--qui est a la fois de son cote le protecteur et le protege de M. Thiers, qui hier l'appelait 'fou furieux,' deportait et fusillait ses amis.

"Tous deux, il est vrai, en meme temps protecteurs hypocrites, et proteges dupes.

"On ne croit plus aux miracles anciens, mais on _croit_ a des miracles nouveaux.

"On _croit_ a une republique sans le respect religieux et presque fanatique des lois.

"On _croit_ qu'on peut s'enrichir en restant imprevoyants, insouciants et paresseux, et autrement que par le travail et l'economie.

"On se _croit_ libre en obeissant aveuglement et betement a deux ou trois coteries.

"On se _croit_ independant parce qu'on a tue ou cha.s.se un lion et qu'on l'a remplace par deux douzaines de caniches teints en jaune.

"On _croit_ avoir conquis le 'suffrage universel' en votant par des mots d'ordre qui en font le contraire du suffrage universel,--mene au vote comme on mene un troupeau au paturage, avec cette difference que ca ne nourrit pas.--D'ailleurs, par ce suffrage universel qu'on croit avoir et qu'on n'a pas,--il faudrait _croire_ que les soldats doivent commander au general, les chevaux mener le cocher;--_croire_ que deux radis valent mieux qu'une truffe, deux cailloux mieux qu'un diamant, deux crottins mieux qu'une rose.