Chapter II (7)

A natural halting-place, as one may say, at the end of the first march from Jellalabad is the castle of a great Ghilzai chief, whose name I forget. He had been an active enemy in the late war; but for reasons unknown the political department long refused to let us take possession of this building, which is called Rosarbad, though it was empty; nor would they even permit us to encamp in the fields and groves about it. Accordingly a very small post was established on a bleak hillside in the neighborhood, a spot so stony and barren that pegs would not hold in the soil. Two nights I passed there are scored in the blackest of chalk among my experiences of mere wretchedness; for a gale was always blowing and tents were always collapsing: if one’s own escaped, the yelling and roaring of other sufferers made life almost as miserable. As for the horses, they enjoyed a battle scarcely interrupted, and the squealing all night, with the shouting of furious troopers, banished sleep. A detachment which had three weeks’ duty at that outpost lost a quarter of its strength by invaliding, the result of sheer fatigue. When I add that a night attack was always probable, and often threatened, the least fanciful of readers may conceive that existence at Boulé camp was not happy.

It was an aggravation and a mockery for these unfortunates to see the great tower of Rosarbad above the cypresses and planes but a thousand yards away, to know that it was confiscated by the laws of war, and that no human being dwelt in those comfortable quarters. The state of things became unbearable at last, the Politicals were overruled, and when I came down country from Gandamuck I found the castle occupied. It was late in the month of April. Quitting the barren, rocky highway, we rode across a bridge, rough but neat, through a screen of trees, and found ourselves in a landscape thoroughly and charmingly English. The crops were strange, no doubt, but they looked familiar. The stalwart peasantry who toiled there had dark faces and outlandish dress; but, buried to the waist in green, stooping above their work, they passed, at a glance, for English husbandmen. And the trees that bordered these pleasant fields, full-leaved, deepshadowed, resembled our native elm. Even the atmosphere was English, the still golden haze of a midsummer evening. We pulled up, each struck with thoughts not lightly to be breathed. The foreign landscape, the parched hills and dusty road behind, were all shut out. One might fondly dream for an instant that war and exile had come to an end, that these ruddy turrets peeping above the trees marked the ancient, hospitable home where we were eagerly expected. Our orderly looked and stared, and gazed and muttered—the stupid exclamation does not signify; it was meant to suggest wonder and delight and feeling beyond an honest trooper’s power of expression.

Envious fancy had done its utmost among those poor fellows camped at Boulé, in picturing the spot they were forbidden to approach. But it surpassed anticipation. I am not going to describe the scene, for I made no sketch, and some who will read this did, whilst every one who halted there keeps a recollection of Rosarbad. Nothing like it did we see in any part of Afghanistan. Though built of mud, its lofty walls, brand new, had almost the sharpness of granite, and they were thick enough to stand some pounding of solid shot. Frosts have tried them now, doubtless, rains have channeled them, the battlements are ruinous, and not one right angle remains; but it was mighty handsome in our day, looking like a feudal fortress, with a gate-tower almost majestic overlooking a grove of cypresses on the other side the moat: so dense was the foliage of this copse that daylight could not pierce it. A miscellaneous throng of bunniahs had converted its twilight arcades into a bazaar, hanging bright cottons from trunk to trunk, and establishing booths full of cheap glitter. Sowars and sepoys, in flowing, picturesque undress, strolled hand in hand through the chiaroscuro. Giant Pathans prowled up and down, all beard and eyes and dirt, gazing with rapt, vulture-like expression at the luxury displayed. Sometimes a yell arose, a sound of scuffling, a rush of frightened traders and of sepoys to the rescue; then from the struggling mass a prisoner was dragged, and perhaps a groaning comrade was borne to the gate.

Within the portcullis and the vaulted approach lay a garden, actually a garden, bordered on one side by the durbar hall, on another by a row of small latticed chambers. In the hall, which was raised several feet above the level, stood an enormous tub, into which a column of water fell by a shoot. It was forced to the upper story, and thence descended. Of all surprises that befell a visitor to Rosarbad, none equalled this. A soothing cataract, a shower-bath, and a fish-pond all in one make a convenience for the drawing-room hardly known in Europe. After the first enthusiasm, however, certain disadvantages betrayed themselves. The middle of the hall was a quagmire, and if in the zeal of admiration one approached too near, the mud held one fast while the shower wet one through. But this made part of the day’s fun. The officers of the little garrison cherished their odd quarters, and they applied their leisure to gardening, with such success that visitors were sometimes presented with a rose. I need scarcely say that the name of the castle has no connection with botany. The Pathan seems to be acquainted with five flowers only—jasmine, rose, chrysanthemum, iris, and narcissus. Painful to an enthusiast is the most successful of Oriental gardens. Though they bear a mass of flowers so that Peshawur, for instance, has an air laden with scents, the individual bloom is mean and the tree pitiful.

In contrast to the glories of Rosarbad, I recall a billet on the other side of Afghanistan. We had been snowed up in the Kojak pass—a miserable time, and when a thaw released us I pushed on with a comrade towards Quetta—a ride to try one’s good humor; for with the thaw came rain, which made that bare desert as slippery as ice—a peculiar condition dreaded under the name of ‘put.’ We got off the track somehow beyond Abdallah Karez, and very glad were we to find an empty village, where a Baboo go-master was posted to collect stores of forage and grain. He had three sepoys to protect him—a guard much less formidable than a score of Pathan dogs, left by their masters, I suppose, which fed upon the carcasses of camels lying all around. This Baboo was an ingenious man. The mud huts had been dismantled perhaps; anyhow, they were roofless and badly gapped. In the long frost our go-master had a bad time; the thermometer below zero at night, or always close upon it, and no better protection than a tent for his southern limbs. Moreover, there was some chance that the enemy might swoop down, or he thought so. Superstition loses its awful power in the extremity of wretchedness. The Baboo, who was forbidden to touch a dead insect or even to look at it, employed sepoys and muleteers, and anyone he could catch, in building a fortification of dead camels all round his store-house; and he lived therein, shuddering with remorse, but warm and secure. While the frost lasted it was mighty comfortable, but the thaw had reduced that Baboo to sore distress. His wall was decaying visibly under conditions which I need not suggest, and to enter the enclosure needed more heroism and more cotton wool than the average mortal is provided with. A camel’s is a heavy and unwieldy carcass when frozen hard: a regiment of scavengers could not have cleared away those scores of bodies when loosed by the thaw. The Government stores were protected after a fashion hitherto thought peculiar to Chinese warfare, by “stink-pot” torpedos in effect, and neither friend nor foe dared approach. I do not know the end of that story. If it is the traveller’s privilege to see queer incidents, it is too often his ill-luck to miss the explanation and the catastrophe.

A scene I cherish with especial tenderness is that passed at Changhi, behind Singapore. A Malay fishing village lay beneath our bungalow, upon a broad and snowy beach. In barbarous regions of the North men live underground, but these dwellings were suspended in the sunny air amongst plumes of cocoanut and betel; behind them rose the shadowy jungle. There was no cultivated land in sight, for the Malay finds his harvest and his garden in the sea. The smooth sand below high-water mark was a parterre of sponges, green and red, and purple blue, intermixed with coral. Old-fashioned people in Europe cherish certain round masses of limestone, daintily fluted, and put them under a glass case for ornament. Imagine their beauty in the spot where nature places them, every lip and hollow on the cream-white surface traced out in vividest pencilling of green, with the seaflowers of sponge around them.

But after the first impulse of delight, one almost comes to overlook this charming foreground; for beneath the water lies a tangle and a maze of all things lovely for shape and color and growth and motion. Coral takes a hundred flowery forms, weeds branch like trees or wave like serpents, sponges are cups of amethyst and ruby. When waves lie still, one sees just as clearly into the depths below as into the air above, and almost as far, as it seems. The vegetation is gigantic in its loveliness. There are coral growths shaped like an Egyptian lily and as white, but three feet in diameter, wherein a mermaid might take her bath. Others break into a thicket, each twig covered with snowy rosettes which bear a morsel of green velvet in their bosoms. Others are great round hillocks diapered with emerald, with here and there a bush of scarlet thorn springing from their sides. Through and over the garden, long silvery weeds tremble and quiver in a net. Small fish as quick as humming-birds, and almost as gay, dart to and fro. Water snakes float past in coils like Indian enamel of every shade, in red and brown and yellow and purple. I am grateful that fate allowed me three weeks of life at Changhi.

But I have dwelt also, too long, with those northern people referred to who burrow in the earth, and with those southerners, not half long enough, who inhabit the trees. Not to be forgotten are our quarters before Plevna, in the compound of a Bulgar farm-house. The floor of its single room lay perhaps two feet beneath the soil, and one entered by a steep incline—that is to say, the inhabitants entered. The ends of the roof descended just so low as to give room for a foot-square window at the level of the earth; but on the incline mentioned, it rose. One of my comrades in this hostelry was poor MacGahan, who lay on his back and sang the whole day through when at home. He had laid some hay upon the “stoop” beside the entrance, and from amongst it his bright eyes watched and his voice resounded. I lived in a waggon. One day the gudewife interviewed my dragoman. She expressed her belief that it was MacGahan’s songs that brought the rain, which, indeed, was perennial. She clung to her point with vehemence. Her husband arrived, and so did some Cossacks. They listened with great interest for a while, understanding not a word, and then, with a happy impulse, hustled the Bulgar head first into his den. The motive of this proceeding lay beyond our comprehension, and theirs also, no doubt; but the Cossack is an irresponsible being. When we laughed they roared, crinkling their jolly, ugly faces until the eyes vanished altogether. I gave them a drink, but not a many-bladed knife, which was lost to human sight in that hour.

The dirtiest experience to which mankind may be subjected is a campaign; but when Russ meets Turk on Bulgarian fields you have a conjuncture of men and circumstances not to be realised elsewhere. The country was sodden at that time, the camps mid-leg deep in puddled clay. General Zortoff, who had the command, occupied a hut much like ours, a couple of hundred yards away; but we always mounted to pay a call, for the space round head-quarters was an actual bog. Officers waiting on the general sat perched upon fences round his yard, in a manner very drolly miserable. The staff had their office in a cowshed which had not been cleaned for years.

A month in a Dyak house is another pleasing recollection. For that space of time, barring nights camped out, my quarters lay besides the council fire. A hoop of human heads hung above it, within arm’s length of my own. Ugly were they as valued—precious ugly, one might say with literal truth—but the ghosts never visited my dreams. All the inhabitants of a Dyak village dwell under one roof, more than a thousand feet in length sometimes. The whole building stands twenty to sixty feet in air on massive posts. Every family has its single apartment side by side, the chief’s in the middle, and every door opens on a clear, sheltered space running from end to end, which we call the inner verandah, for there is a second beyond the eave. Opposite the chief’s door lie the big stones of the council hearth, the heads, belonging to the clan, strung on hoops, and details of common property. That month spent with savages, living their life, noting the thousand small events of every day, about which the most thoughtful of men would hardly think of asking speculative questions—the experience of that time taught me much that has been useful since: for the naked barbarian and the æsthetic philosopher are one. He who knows by practice the instincts of human nature understands a thousand mysteries inscrutable to one who has only its acquired customs to guide him.

Pleasant was the teaching. Fog alone was visible from the top of the ladder when the house began to stir—a sea of mist from which arose, with no trunks perceptible, the crowns of fruit trees and feathered crests of palms. First the married men turned out, and then the bachelors appeared from their separate quarter; shivering under his bark blanket, each cut a plug of betel and chewed it. Then graceful girls came out with long shovel baskets, some leisurely and composed, others bustling; these had not winnowed the paddy over night, and certain of the youths knew why. After a while the housewife opened her door, and in that defiant voice which belongs to hard-working mothers everywhere, summoned her family to breakfast. When they reappeared the fog was lifting, the sky dappled like an opal. Cheered by the growing warmth men moved briskly, arranging their tools and arms and gear. The young women and maidens followed, a pleasing bevy, with loads strapped to their backs, and all the villagers descended to the lower earth.

Only the chief and his old councillors remained—sitting over their eternal fire, chewing their eternal betel—the grandames, and the sick. Towards sunset the laboring folk returned, and the males sat to chew and gossip, but the girls had still their hardest work to do. Presently all the house resounded with the thud of pestles, and the air was filled with husks from the pounded rice. A silence of interest and hunger followed whilst the meal was cooking, and then the pleasure of the day began. For the elders it was only talk, always the same, as far as I could gather, of bad times and good times, and the prospect of the year; seldom personal, and never gossiping, at the chief’s fire, where all heads of families assembled. No one paid attention to the youth or to the maidens, so soon as their household duties were complete. By this time darkness had quite fallen, and there was no light excepting the low fires. Shoulders glossy as brown silk were faintly luminous in the twilight, as we looked down the house; from time to time a fire shot out, revealing the seated group around, lively enough, but subdued. Shadows stalked from hearth to hearth, tinkling and sparkling in brazen finery, and vanished with the gloom;—then the whispered chatter of girls, the smothered merriment, became more loud, with expostulations and mirthful appeals for help. A very pleasant scene; but I loved also to awake at midnight, and observe that different picture. The councillors, taking no exercise, never turned in; all the night through they maundered, and dozed, and coughed, and chewed betel. Above them the teeth of the weazened “heads” glimmered through the smoke. A labyrinth of posts and beams was faintly outlined in their rear. Now and again a young form passed stealthily, for in the hours of darkness courtship is seriously pursued. Beneath the cave I caught a glimpse of azure sky, and palm fronds gleaming in the moonlight. Of all the odd quarters I have known this is still the dearest to memory.

Once upon a time I lost myself in the veldt, somewhere by the Vaal river. Leaving Pniel in a “spider cart,” with a mulatto groom, I inspected the wet-diggings as far as Gong-Gong, and then got off the track. They told me that to go wrong would be impossible, with an Africander to steer my course, but I contrived to do it. Some philosophers would have you think that every savage has an instinctive mastery of woodcraft, but experience leads me to think that fools are almost as common in Barbarie as in Christendom. We lost ourselves, and wandered two days, heading direct for the Atlantic—and for nothing else in particular, besides the Namaqualand desert. Settlements are very few in that veldt, and the only one we came across was Jantje’s kraal on the second evening;—Jantje has since rebelled, and is now an outlaw, I believe. It had some forty huts on the top of a mound, encompassed by raging brooks;—for the sky had been little better than a sieve since we started. There was no sign of life, but a swelling roar of voices directed me to a wooden church, which I entered. All the population were there, and the vehemence of their devotions was deafening. A fat man hurried up, not ceasing to howl with the rest—his mouth opened from ear to ear and nose to chin. He took my arm, and led me out like a stray dog, whilst the congregation bellowed and stared without a pause. So many white lips—and teeth—fixed on me, in a gathering darkness that obscured the black faces, had an effect indescribably gruesome and absurd.

Outside the church this personage turned to resume his place, singing all the time as loud as he could bawl. My groom coming up arrested certain demands of explanation, which began to take a serious form, but no help could be got from Jantje’s people. We annexed an empty hut and camped there supperless, wet through. My first experience of tompans was made that night. This curious insect dwells in deserted Kaffir buildings and nowhere else, I believe. He is armed after the best and newest suggestions of science for naval equipment—his vital parts and locomotive machinery protected by the cuirass, his artillery, of great weight and superior rifling, on the Moncrieff system, swift to attack and agile to retreat. You cannot crush him with any weapon less ponderous than a hammer; to ignore a beast as large and as flat as a threepenny bit is impossible, and moral influence seems to be quite ineffective. To sing hymns and cultivate tompans was the only visible employment of Jantje’s kraal. I cannot affect to regret that its inhabitants have been scattered to the winds. Wherever they have fled they have found an opportunity to study better manners.

But I was going to recall the odd quarters at Jacobsdaal which brought this adventure to a fitting close. We had no treaty of extradition with the Free State at that time—I do not know that we have one now. All sorts of criminals took refuge at Jacobsdaal, a tiny but prosperous settlement lying just across the frontier. During my absence a gust of indignation had swept over the Diamond Fields, and all the guilty, the suspected, and the alarmed had fled. The landlady of the best “Accommodation House” declared to me, almost with tears, that her dwelling, hitherto inveterate in virtue, was become a rendezvous of malefactors. She advised me to try the other shop for once, since even thieves would not go there by choice—naturally. I did so, and found the guests sitting down. In the place of honor was a canteen man, badly wanted by the New Rush police. I also recognized an acquaintance accused of cheating at cards in the “Pig and Whistle;” another who had been lately described to the magistrate as “tremendous delirious;” an American gentleman whom the police had vainly besought to render an account to his partners. One of these latter, in attendance on his fugitive associate, identified for me a man charged with murder, and two common thieves. The conversation was most polite. The chairman’s suasive tones in proposing a “leetle mutton” were as good as testimony to character. He had a trick of cocking the old smoking-cap upon his head before every observation, as if to point it with knowingness. The extreme propriety with which he guided the conversation so overawed the thieves that they were too hoarse to talk. My poor “tremendous” friend yielded to the same wholesome influence, and addressed everyone in the third person as “the honorable gentleman on my right,” or left, or opposite. As for the manslaughterer, he showed warm philanthropy, arguing with vehemence that black people have as good rights as white, and better in their own country. Circumstances made this topic embarrassing to the chairman. He cocked his smoking-cap from side to side, imploring everyone to take some more of everything. After supper he made a little speech, ending with a toast—“Home, lads, mothers and dads.” The company drank it with deep emotion.—_Belgravia._

SIR TRISTRAM DE LYONESSE.

BY E. M. SMITH.

The ancient adage that “there is no new thing under the sun,” has been recently applied by a popular writer of fiction to the romantic stories of the day. But surely nowhere are the words of the Preacher more abundantly illustrated than in the realm of narrative poetry. With whom did “The Canterbury Tales,” “The Fairy Queen,”“The Idylls of the King,” originate? Certainly not with Chaucer, Spenser, or Tennyson. The hidden sources of those delightful rivers of song lie far away, so far that few care to trace them. The same, or nearly the same, story is handed down from one man to another, till at last some master-mind catches its true significance, tells it for once as it was never told before, and links his name with it through all the ages. Sometimes though more rarely, different capabilities of the same story will strike more than one master-mind, and then the comparisons are full of interest, and bring out into sharp relief the idiosyncrasies of each narrator. It has been so with portions of the “Iliad,” of the “Nibelungen Lied,” and of our own “Morte D’Arthur.” It is so still with the story of Sir Tristram de Lyonesse, who, of all King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, seems to have gone the farthest and fared the best. Rarely indeed has the homage of poets so far apart in time, and varying so widely in spirit and conception, been tendered so persistently to one object. Arthur may pass away in peace to the cool valley of Avilion, Launcelot to his grave in Joyous Guard, Galahad to the Blessed Vision which last he saw with mortal eyes in the city of Estorause; but Tristram is of the earth, earthy, and on the earth he abides. Twelve centuries have not quenched the ardor of his love for fair Iseult, nor traced one wrinkle on his brow.

Briefly, the legend of his life is this: Sir Tristram de Lyonesse as his first great exploit slew Sir Marhaus, the deadly foe of his uncle, King Mark, but was by him so desperately wounded that he sailed to Ireland under the name of Tamtris, to be cured of his wound by the surgical arts of the Queen of Ireland, sister to Sir Marhaus, and mother of the beautiful Princess Iseult. On his return to Cornwall he described the Princess in words so glowing that King Mark resolved to marry her, and sent his nephew back to escort her over the sea. Fearful lest all should not go well, the Queen gave to her daughter’s faithful maid, Bragwaine, a magic potion, which the bride was to drink on the night of her marriage with King Mark, to ensure their mutual love. Unwittingly, however, Tristram and Iseult drank of it together on board the vessel; and, all their lives, it wrought them woe and misery, until at length they died together, and were buried side by side. The facts are always much the same—but the hero alters so completely as to change the whole aspect of the story, and make the interpretation put upon it different in every age.

When we first meet with him among the Welsh bards of the sixth century, he is simply Drystan, or Trystan, the Tumultuous; his name has not already doomed him to that _triste_ existence, which grows consistently more and more tragic throughout the later records of his life. He is the son, not of King Meliodas, but of Talwz; his lady is Essylt; his uncle, Mark Meirzion; and the chief points in his character are curiously brought out by his association with Greidial and Gwgon, as one of the three heralds of Britain; with Gwair and Cai, the diademed princes; with Call and Pryderi, the mighty swineherds; with Gwair and Eiddillig, the stubborn chiefs; with Caswallan and Cynon, the faithful lovers. Heraldry, obstinacy, fidelity—no very promising material for a hero nowadays; but then the lines on which a poet worked were simpler.

For three years this tumultuous being withdrew from Arthur’s Court in disgust at the issue of one of his quarrels, and the King, with almost incredible folly, instead of rejoicing at the deliverance, sent after him twenty-eight warriors in succession, all of whom Trystan overthrew. At last, Gwalzmai with the Golden Tongue (the Gawaine of later days) tried his fortune, accosting the fierce chieftain in these words:

Tumultuous is the wave naturally
When the sea is its base:
Who art thou, warrior incomprehensible?

To which Trystan Ossianically replies:

Tumultuous be a wave and a thunderstorm:
While they be tumultuous in their course,
In the day of conflict I am Trystan.

Finally the Golden-tongued prevails, and they return together.

Our next glimpse of him is in the kingdom of the _trouvères_ and _troubadours_, with whom he is a great favorite. The famous Mademoiselle Marie, in her translation, the “Lai Dee Chevrefoil,” written about the middle of the twelfth century, sings of a pretty episode in his love, which none of her successors have improved upon, and which most of them have omitted. There are allusions to him in Chrestien de Troyes, who wrote before the year 1191, and in the works of a poetical king of Navarre, about 1226. The date of the Auchinleck MS., “Sir Tristram,” which Scott raised such a tempest by ascribing to Thomas the Rhymer of Ercildoune, is said to be 1330. It is written in a curious and very effective metre; the short abrupt line of two syllables falling regularly near the end of each stanza reins in the full swing of the rest with great force and directness. The poem is full of life and vigor, and there are touches of naïf insight here and there in strange contrast with the rough, matter-of-fact tone of the whole. Many and quaint are the adventures of the hero, especially when he kills a dragon in Ireland for the sake of Iseult, that “brid bright, as blood upon snoweing,” and her mother cures him of the pain caused by its poisonous tongue, with treacle; or when, having overcome a terrible “geaunt” in Brittany, he requires him to adorn the walls of his castle with “images” of Iseult and Bragwaine, the beauty of which so astounds his young brother-in-law, evidently a novice in works of art, that he straightway falls backward and breaks his head!

This poem, or another much like it, was celebrated both at home and abroad, where “Thomas of Britain” was henceforth quoted as the great authority on the subject. About the same time lived Raoul de Beauvais, who also made it his study; Rusticien de Puise, whose work is in prose; and the authors of two metrical fragments in French, from one of which Scott completed the Auchinleck MS., though its end had not been unearthed when he became its editor. The translation, which carried the name of Tristram northward as far as Iceland, is still kept in the library at Copenhagen; and G. de le Flamma tells us that when the tomb of a Lombard king was opened in 1339, there was found inscribed on his sword, “This was the sword of Sir Tristram, who killed Amoroyt of Ireland.” Seghart von Bamberg wrote of him in 1403, and also Eylhard von Habergen. Of the same period is the Romance by Gotfried of Strasburg, who died in the midst of his work, leaving it to be finished in a less poetical spirit by Ulrich von Turheim and Heinrich von Vribert.

Our own Geoffrey of Monmouth was the first to draw Sir Tristram into the magic circle of Arthur’s knights, in whose good company he has ever since remained. Lady Juliana Berners mentions him as the inventor of “venery” or terms of hunting; and his name occurs in “The Temple of Glass,” and in Gower, who states that he fell by King Mark’s own hand, a tradition followed only by Sir Thomas Malory and Tennyson. In the “Orlando Furioso” we hear of the “Rocca di Tristano,” and Ariosto and Boiardo drew from his legend, old even then, their fountains of love and hatred. Dante places him next to Paris among the lovers flitting by like cranes in his “Inferno.” In 1485 Sir Thomas Malory, himself a knight, published his noble “Morte D’Arthur,” in which Tristram is one of the most striking figures; and it is remarkable that although he never seems to have thought there was anything to condemn greatly in the nephew’s conduct, he palliates it by defaming the uncle as much as possible—a moral concession not to be found in either of the earlier romances, which he must have consulted for his work. But we will not multiply references, lest the reader should be fain to cry with the author of “Sir Hain and Dame Anieuse,”

Or pues tu chanter de Tristan,
Ou de plus longue, se tu sez.

The theme was getting wearisome. Le Seigneur Luce du château de Gast had exhausted it in his prose Romance (where, for the first time, Palamides, the Paynim lover of Iseult, and Dinadan, the foolish, knight, appear); and, besides this, there was a “Romance of Meliodas,” Tristram’s father, and afterwards a “Romance of Ysaie le Triste,” his son; so that all the details of his private life were nearly as well known as those of Mr. Carlyle’s to the present generation. “Ysaie le Triste” appeared in 1522; and in 1554, when no imagination, however vivid, could possibly add a single exploit to those which had been recounted already, Jean Maugin took a new departure, and turned the whole thing into an allegory, in which Sir Tristram became the type of Christian chivalry. His queer attempt is justly ridiculed by Scott; but it is not altogether without interest, as the first indication of the symbolic spirit in which modern poets have treated the legend—with the exception of Scott himself, whose beautiful Conclusion and Ballad are pure imitations of the mediæval spirit as well as of the mediæval form, and have nothing modern about them. Towards the end of the sixteenth century the taste for chivalrous romance died out in Europe—or rather fell asleep—and the name of Tristram was no more heard for more than two hundred years, except in a glowing stanza or two of Spenser’s “Fairy Queen.” Then came the revival of Scott and Southey to prepare the way, and lastly that signal triumph of the ancient story in our own day, when four of the greatest living poets singled it out for illustration, and it became a living power again in the hands of Wagner, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Matthew Arnold. But its power is of a different kind, for a change has come over the spirit of the dream, since it was first dreamed long ago among the Welsh mountains.

Accordingly Tristram, once the mere sport of existing circumstances, becomes a highly responsible person with correctly oppressive notions of duty. He has grown old along with the rest of the world; he rides no more light-hearted through the forest, sails no more gaily across the sea, forgetful of all but life and its deliciousness, woos no more whom he would. Nor, in the modern versions, does he die merrily, as he died in the “Morte D’Arthur” and in the “Book of Howth,” “harping afore his lady La Belle Isoud.”Wagner, to whom one might have fancied, _à priori_, that such an exit for his tenor would have been most welcome, sentences him to lingering death of a wound given him by the traitor Melot; Tennyson fells him with a blow of King Mark’s from behind; in Matthew Arnold he dies naturally; in Swinburne the false words of Iseult Les Blanches Mains finish the work of sickness. His love, his death, are all-important now; whereas of old the first was but an interesting episode in the life of a man who was second only to Sir Launcelot at a tourney, and the last so insignificant as to be disposed of in a single sentence. We hear nothing now of the Castle of Maidens, or of Lonazep; nothing of the wife of Sir Segwarides, or of other fair ladies; nothing at all of that great crisis in his life when he met Sir Launcelot at the peron, “and either wounded other wonderly sore, that the blood ran out upon the grass.”

Of course there may be a reason for this in the fact that we look upon Tristram as a hero by himself, and therefore have no need to illustrate his inferiority to Launcelot, and to Launcelot only, in love and in war. But where are ye now, Sir Palamides, Sir Bruno, and Sir Elias? Your very names have a forgotten sound.

The knights’ bones are dust,
And their good swords rust,
Their souls are with the saints, I trust.

But he who wishes to find any record of their doings with Sir Tristram must search through the length and breadth of Malory’s twenty-one books ere he find it. Nor is there any trace in the modern poems of the sweet old story, how after that “deep draughts of death” had taken the Lady Elizabeth, Tristram’s mother, and his father, King Maliodas, had “let call him Tristram, the sorrowful-born child,” and had actually, for love of her, “endured seven years without a wife,” he married a wicked lady, who tried to poison Tristram; and how she was condemned to death for the attempt, and he rescued her from his father’s wrath, and made them accorded, and how she “loved him ever after, and gave Tristram many great gifts.”

All these things, which relieved the sombre hues of the picture have faded into dimness. The martial glory of Tristram has passed away; nothing but tragedy remains—the sin, the sorrow, the inexplicable fate which linked two separated lives together. Long ago it was a bit of witchcraft pure and simple; now the magic drink has become the symbol of mystery and doom, and what not. Like Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, the guilty souls are hurried round and round without a moment’s respite by the whirlwind of their passion, in that wonderful opera which the most devoted followers of Wagner esteem his masterpiece of blended poetry and music. The fierce, dark, rapturous rejoicing of love on the very edge of death lights it up with a lurid glare, which makes everything else look pale and fanciful by comparison; it has no parallel in art, even among Wagner’s other works, nor can any one desire that it should have. The great difficulties which stand in the way of its representation may prevent it from ever becoming popular in the sense in which “Lohengrin” and “Tannhäuser” are popular; but those who have had the good fortune to hear it will not easily forget its unique and terrible power. It is strange that Wagner should have made King Mark an ideal uncle, tender and forgiving to the last degree, and so full of self-denial that had he but known of the fatal drink in time, he would have resigned his bride to his nephew with the best grace in the world. Dramatically the action loses by this change; the sympathies of the audience are baffled and divided; do what we will, the conduct of the hero seems mean and treacherous, and his death more arbitrary than it need have been, since Melot, the traitor who gives him his mortal wound, had far less reason to hate him than had the injured bridegroom. Indeed, it is difficult to see what Wagner himself thought that he gained by this amendment, unless that tragedy itself becomes more tragic by the needless suffering inflicted on a high and noble soul, ready to sacrifice its dearest hopes rather than undergo the agony of seeing another’s virtue tempted beyond endurance. There is also one dire offence against good taste, worthy of Wagner’s earliest models (and of Shakespeare in “King Lear”,) in the scene where Tristram tears the bandage from his wounds. But if the hero fares rather badly, until we forgive him for the sake of his death-cry, “Liebe!” the heroine has never in the course of her long life found such an interpreter. She has lost, indeed, her old, light-hearted innocence; but she has lost it to become one of the grandest and most original creations in the whole range of the drama. She surpasses even the bounds of passion; the very _fury_ of love is upon her, from the moment when, foreseeing that she can no longer live without him, she resolves to make Tristram drink with her of the death-drink, and the charm begins to work, to the moment when she falls dead besides his body. The magic only reveals what shame forbade her to confess. The key to her whole character lies in her answer to Bragwaine’s entreaty that she will not give the signal for Tristram’s approach by extinguishing the torch in the window of her tower in King Mark’s palace—

Und wär ’es meines Lebens Licht,
Lachend es zu löschen
Zag ’ich nicht.

Wagner showed his wisdom when he left her alone in her glory, and made no attempt to introduce that other Iseult of Brittany, who certainly interferes with any conception of Tristram as the most faithful of lovers. “And for because that Sir Tristram had such cheer and riches, and all other pleasures that he had, almost he had forsaken La Beale Isoud. And so upon a time Sir Tristram agreed to wed Isoud les Blanches Mains. And at the last they were wedded, and solemnly held their marriage,” But this is far too natural and unheroic for the nineteenth century; and poor Iseult the Second fares ill at the hands of our poets—excepting Matthew Arnold who, with unwonted chivalry, has taken up the cause of this distressed damsel (this “snowdrop by the sea,” whose own brother forsook her for her namesake), and made of her one of those meek, motherly, sweet little women, who are ready to forgive any one they love anything; and who, too weak either to make or mar the lives with which they come in contact, yet hold their own by the power of that clinging, lasting devotedness, which is all their innocent natures let them know of passion. Very sweet is his picture of her, standing in her gorgeous robes by the chimney-piece with the firelight flickering on her white face and her white hands, and her jewelled clasp, ready to vanish gracefully the moment her rival enters; and it is with a gentle feeling of regret that we lose sight of her at last, wandering on the seashore with her children, while she tells them the old story of Merlin and Vivien to beguile the weary hours of her widowhood. Here and here only the pure, white-handed maiden-wife bears away the palm from the old Iseult of Tristram’s dreams, with

Her proud, dark eyes,
And her petulant, quick replies;

and we rather resent her intrusion than welcome her, when she comes back to nurse him, very repentant indeed, like a sort of queenly Sister of Mercy. His dying request is also a great innovation:

Close mine eyes, then seek the princess Iseult;
Speak her fair, she is of royal blood!
Say, I charged her, that thou stay beside me—
She will grant it; she is kind and good.

The hero of “the last tournament” is a very different being. Of all those who have told the story, Tennyson alone seems to have looked upon Tristram as thoroughly base and unworthy. Such a knight as this, so rough, licentious, and wanting in courtesy, could never have been Launcelot’s second; and indeed Tennyson lays no stress whatever on the strong friendship which existed between them—so strong that neither would ever wittingly harm any relation or friend of the other. As Wagner has made the legend a symbol of that strife between man, his passions, and his circumstances, which is the complex motive of our latest tragedy,—as Matthew Arnold has drawn from it the lesson, that quiet and neglected lives often do more to make the world lovely than great and brilliant ones (a lesson which chivalry would never have found there),—so Tennyson has made it a symbol of that degradation of the whole nature, which follows the conscious surrender of the spirit to the flesh, and has drawn from it the lesson that the very happiness of partners in guilt is tainted with bitterness and turns to ashes in their mouths. Nowhere else is there such a sharp contrast implied between Launcelot, the sinner who repented and was given time for repentance, and Tristram, the sinner who repented not and was cut off in the midst of his sin. There is a great gulf between them, across which they do not even join their hands.

Iseult stands in much the same relation to Guinevere; she is coarser, more ironical, free from any feeling of remorse; but she surpasses Tristram as Launcelot surpasses Guinevere, in “faith unfaithful,” and one has a strong compassion for her in her lonely home, looking out over the wild sea, with that stealthy spy of a husband, dogging her every footstep. How full of compressed, dramatic force the last lines are!

He rose, he turn’d, then, flinging round her neck,
Claspt it; and cried “Thine Order, O my Queen!”
But while he bow’d to kiss the jewel’d throat,
Out of the dark, just as the lips had touch’d,
Behind him rose a shadow and a shriek—
“Mark’s way,” said Mark, and clove him through the brain.

Not so has Swinburne read the character. His Tristram of Lyonesse is once more the free, open-handed, light-hearted hero, or rather he would be if he had not inevitably contracted some of the _Zeit-Geist_, its weariness, its languor, its power of analysis. His gaiety is not spontaneous—his song is as labored as if he had had to send it up for an examination; his love is over-heavy with its own sweetness. The long-drawn, honied lines drag on and on through pages of description, till we almost long for a rough, dissonant note to break the eternal, soft, alliterative hissing and kissing. But Iseult bears the wealth of jewelled epithets lavished upon her, and it is easy enough to understand them when we are under the spell of her fascination, or when she is finely contrasted with the cruel, cold-blooded Iseult of Brittany, who in her jealous anger kills her husband, by telling him that the sails of the ship which is bringing his love to him are black instead of white, so that he thinks she has refused to come:

And fain he would have raised himself and seen
And spoken, but strong death struck sheer between,
And darkness closed as iron round his head,
And smitten through the heart lay Tristan dead.

So there he lies. But he may yet be born again, and fight, and love, and die, for who knows what shall be in the days to come, or to what ancient songs the houses of our children’s children may echo? It may be there is yet a further interpretation of the riddle, the outlines of which we cannot even guess; and that the two Iseults may come to like each other. Things even more strange than this have happened. It was said that out of Tristram’s grave there grew an eglantine, which turned itself around Iseult’s; and although it was cut three times by order of the king, the eglantine was ever fair and fresh. By this time it has grown into a mighty tree, and, for all we know, it has not done growing yet.—_Merry England._

OLD MYTHOLOGY IN NEW APPAREL.

BY J. THEODORE BENT.

We are generally accustomed to consider mythology as a bygone episode of _juventus mundi_; it may seem at first sight strange to realize that what we have read of in Homer exists to-day. But so it is, and the following facts collected during lengthened tours in remote corners of Greece will prove, I hope, that the mystic beings of classical Greece are present now, when the world is supposed to be growing old. All my instances are from the islands of the Ægean Sea, the Cyclades and the Sporades, where communication with the outer world has never been great, and over which the various waves of Goths, Italians, Turks, which in a measure destroyed the identity of continental Greece, had, comparatively speaking, slight influence, and that only in the towns near the coast, whereas up in the mountains of Naxos, Amorgos, &c., pure Greek blood still flows.

Here the mythology of their ancestors is deeply ingrained in the inhabitants, both in the ritual of their Church, and in their manners and customs; the ritual, indeed, of the Eastern Church is but an intellectual adaptation under Christian guidance of the problems propounded by the later philosophers to the popular doctrines of polytheism.

I was in the island of Keos, or Zia, one of the Cyclades, when the idea of forming this collection struck me, and it was on the occasion of being told that here St. Artemidos is considered as the patron saint of weakly children. The church dedicated to this saint is some little way from the town on the hill slopes; thither a mother will take a child afflicted by any mysterious wasting, “struck by the Nereids,” as they say; she then strips off its clothes, and puts on new ones blessed by the priest, leaving the old ones as a perquisite for the church; and then if perchance the child grows strong, she will thank St. Artemidos for the blessing vouchsafed, unconscious that she is perpetuating the archaic worship of Artemis. The Ionian idea of the fructifying and nourishing properties of the Ephesian Artemis has been transferred to her Christian namesake.

About these Nereids, too, we hear much in modern Greece, and they have the properties of many of our mythological friends, those of Keos, for example, are supposed to live on cliffs and in trees; if a man sleeps under the shadow of a cliff or tree, and is taken with a cold sweat, they say “the goddess of the tree has injured him,” and accordingly to appease her they spread on the place a clean white cloth, and put on it new-made bread, a plate with honey, another with sweetmeats, a bottle of good wine, a knife and fork and an empty glass, an unburnt candle, and an incense pot; an old woman utters some mystic words, and then all go away, “that the Nereids may eat and the sufferer regain his health.” We have here a ceremony very like that anciently performed at Athens to appease the Eumenides when a banquet was laid near the caves they were supposed to haunt, of which honey and milk were the necessary ingredients.

The Nereids in many cases correspond to the nymphs of antiquity; they preside over healing streams, and they wash in them at night when the waters sleep, and no one at that time dares to approach for fear of becoming frenzied (νυμφόληπτος).

The cloak of Phœbus Apollo has fallen on the prophet Elias. As of old temples on all the highest hills of the islands are dedicated to the sun-god; the reason is obvious. Ἡλιος, the sun deity (the _h_ not being aspirated), at once suggested Elias to the easily accommodating divines, and to all intents and purposes the prophet supplies the place of the sun-god of antiquity. Prophet Elias has power over rain; in times of drought people assemble in crowds in his church to pray for rain, and in this he has the attribute of ὄμβριος or ὑέτιος Ζεῦς. When it thunders they say the prophet is driving in his chariot in pursuit of demons.

To pass on to another analogy. There is a curious parallel between St. Anarguris, the patron saint in some parts of flocks and herds, and the god Pan of ancient days. On the island of Thermià (Κύθνος) I saw a church dedicated to St. Anarguris built over the mouth of a cavern, as the protecting saint of the place, instead of Pan, the ancient god of grottos. But a still more marked instance of the continuation of Pan worship occurs to-day on Keos at the little church of St. Anarguris, at a remote hamlet called 'στὸ μακρινὸ. Whenever an ox is ailing they take it to this church and pray for its recovery; if the cock crows when they start, or they hear the voice of a man or the grunt of a pig, there is every hope that the animal will be cured; but on the contrary, if they hear a cat, a dog, or a woman, it is looked upon as an evil omen. When at the church of St. Anarguris they solemnly register a vow that if the ox recovers they will present it to the saint when its days of work are over; accordingly, every year on the 1st of July, the day on which they celebrate the feast of St. Anarguris, numbers of aged oxen may be seen on the road to this church, where they are slaughtered on the threshold and the flesh distributed amongst the poor.

St. Nicholas, again, is the lineal descendant of Poseidon; he is the sailor’s god. Wherever in ancient times there existed a temple to the honor of Poseidon we now find an insignificant white-washed edifice dedicated to St. Nicholas. This is especially noticeable at Tenos, where was in antiquity the famous shrine and feast of Poseidon. On this island the chief town is now called St. Nicholas, and hither yearly assemble to worship thousands of Greeks from all parts of the world before a miracle-working shrine. Modern priestcraft, in short, has cleverly arranged that Tenos should be the modern Delos where the topic of independent panhellenism can be freely discussed.

Everything nautical has to do with St. Nicholas; in Mykenos a little church built on a rock out in the harbor is dedicated to him; another on the sea shore at Paros is dedicated to Ἅγιος Νικόλαος Θαλασσίτης; his picture, or εἰκὼν is painted on the inside of crabs’ backs, which are gilded outside and worshipped. In nautical songs St. Nicholas is always alluded to as the inventor of the rudder, and is represented as seated at the helm, whilst Christ sits at the prow and the Virgin in the middle. In a storm sailors call on him for assistance, as the ancients did on the Dioscouri, whom they thought to have power to allay storms direct from Poseidon himself.

We always find St. Dionysius as the successor of Dionysos in the Christian ritual. The island of Naxos was a chief centre of the worship of the wine-loving god in antiquity; and a fable about St. Dionysius, still told in the islands and on the mainland, clearly points to the continuity of the myth. It is as follows:—