Part 19

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.”

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.”

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.

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?