Chapter M: S. Reinach’s opinion that in Totemism is to be found the secret of (6)

Little need be said of the natural history of the man-eating tiger; yet a few words may not be out of place. To his abnormality every one who has studied wild beasts bears witness. All agree that the loss of life from tigers is almost exclusively traceable to individuals of tiger-kind which prey chiefly or only on man. The seven or eight hundred persons killed annually by tigers in British India are victims of comparatively few animals. Not many years ago a single man-eating tigress was certified to have killed forty-eight persons. While the ordinary tiger has to be sought out with difficulty for the sport of those who wish to hunt him, the man-eater night after night waylays the rural postman or comes boldly into the villages in search of his unnatural food. During great scarcity caused by the destruction or disappearance of small game in the forests, the carnivora are forced out of their habits as the wolves in the Vosges are induced to come down to the plains in periods of intense cold. Such special causes do not affect the question of the man-eater, which eats man’s flesh from choice, not from necessity. Why he does so Europeans have tried to explain in various ways. One is, that the unfamiliar taste of human flesh creates an irresistible craving. In South America they say that a jaguar after tasting man’s flesh once becomes an incorrigible man-eater for ever after. Others think man-eating is a form of madness, a disease, and they point to the fact that the man-eater is always in bad condition; his skin is useless. But it is not sure if this be cause or effect, since man’s flesh is said to be unwholesome. A third and plausible theory would attribute man-eating to the easy capture of the prey: a tiger that has caught one man will hunt no other fleeter game. Especially in old age, a creature that has neither horns nor tusks nor yet swift feet must appear an attractive prey. This coincides with an observation made by Apollonius of Tyana: he says that lions caught and ate monkeys for medicine when they were sick, but that when they were old and unable to hunt the stag and the wild boar, they caught them for food. Aristotle said that lions were more disposed to enter towns and attack man when they grew old, as old age made their teeth defective, which was a hindrance to them in hunting.

Another possible clue may be deduced from a belief which exists in Abyssinia about the man-eating lion. In that country the people dislike to have Europeans hunt the lion, not only because they revere him as the king of beasts (though this is one reason, and it shows how natural to man is the friendly feeling towards beasts, and how it flourishes along with any sort of religion, provided the religion has been left Oriental and not Westernised), but also because they are convinced that a lion whose mate has been killed becomes ferocious and thirsts for human blood. This belief is founded on accurate observation of the capacity of wild beasts for affection. The love of the lion for his mate is no popular error. That noble hunter, Major Leveson, told a pathetic story of how he witnessed in South Africa a fight between two lions, while the lioness, palm and prize, stood looking on. A bullet laid her low, but the combatants were so hotly engaged that neither of them perceived what had happened. Then another bullet killed one of them: the survivor, after the first moment of surprise as to why his foe surrendered, turned round and for the first time saw the hunters who were quite near. He seemed about to spring on them, when he caught sight of the dead lioness: “With a peculiar whine of recognition, utterly regardless of our presence, he strode towards her, licked her face and neck with his great rough tongue and patted her gently with his huge paw, as if to awaken her. Finding that she did not respond to his caresses, he sat upon his haunches like a dog and howled most piteously....” Finally the mourning lion fled at the cries of the Kaffirs and the yelping of the dogs close at hand. He had understood the great, intolerable fact of death. Would any one blame him if he became an avenger of blood?

Supposing that this line of defence could be transferred to the tiger, instead of being branded as lazy, decrepit, mad, or bad, he might hope to appear before the public with a largely rehabilitated character.

The natives of the jungle resort to none of these hypotheses to account for the man-eater: a different bank of ideas can be drawn on by them to help them out of puzzling problems. The free force of imagination is far preferable, if admitted, as a solver of difficulties, to all our patient and plodding researches. The jungle natives tell many stories of the man-eater, of which the following is a typical example. It was told to a British officer, from whom I had it.

Once upon a time there was a man who had the power of changing himself into a tiger whenever he liked. But for him to change back into the shape of a man it was necessary that some human being should pronounce a certain formula. He had a friend who knew the formula, and to him he went when he wished to resume human shape. But the friend died.

The man was obliged, therefore, to find some one else to pronounce the formula. At last he decided to confide the secret to his wife; so, one day, he said to her that he should be absent for a short time and that when he came back it would be in the form of a tiger; he charged her to pronounce the proper formula when she should see him appear in tiger-shape, and he assured her that he would then, forthwith, become a man again.

In a few days, after he had amused himself by catching a few antelopes, he trotted up to his wife, hoping all would be well. But the woman, in spite of all that he had told her, was so dreadfully frightened when she saw a large tiger running towards her, that she began to scream. The tiger jumped about and tried to make her understand by dumb-show what she was to do, but the more he jumped the more she screamed, and at last he thought in his mind, “This is the most stupid woman I ever knew,” and he was so angry that he killed her. Directly afterwards he recollected that no other human being knew the right formula—hence he must remain for ever a tiger. This so affected his spirits that he acquired a hatred for the whole human race, and killed men whenever he saw them.

This diverting folk-tale shows a root-belief in the stage of becoming a branch-belief. In the present case the root is the ease with which men are thought to be able to transform themselves (or be transformed by others) into animals. The branch is the presumption that a very wicked animal must be human. The corresponding inference that a very virtuous animal must be human, throws its reflection upon innumerable fairy-tales. I think it was the more primitive of the two. Even the tiger is not everywhere supposed to be the worse for human influence. In the Sangor and Nerbrudda territories people say that if a tiger has killed one man he will never kill another, because the dead man’s spirit rides on his head and guides him to more lawful prey. Entirely primitive people do not take an evil view of human nature—which is proved by their confidence in strangers: the first white man who arrives among them is well received. Misanthropy is soon learnt, but it is not the earliest sentiment. The bad view of the man-tiger prevails in the Niger delta, where the negroes think that “some souls which turn into wild beasts give people a great deal of trouble.” Other African tribes hold that tailless tigers are men—tigers which have lost their tails in fighting or by disease or accident. I do not know if these are credited with good or bad qualities.

By the rigid Totemist all this is ascribed to Totemism. Men called other tribesmen by the names of their totems; then the totem was forgotten and they mistook the tiger-totem-man for a man-tiger _et sic de ceteris_. My Syrian guide on Mount Carmel told me that the ravens which fed Elijah were a tribe of Bedouins called “the Ravens,” which still existed. If this essay in the Higher Criticism was original it said much for his intelligence. But because such confusions may happen, and no doubt do happen, are they to be taken as the final explanation of the whole vast range of man and animal mutations? What have they to do with such a belief as that vouched for by St. Augustine—to wit, that certain witch innkeepers gave their guests drugs in cheese which turned them into animals? These witches had a sharp eye to business, for they utilised the oxen, asses, and horses thus procured, for draught or burden, or let them out to their customers, nor were they quite without a conscience, as when they had done using them they turned them back into men. Magic, the old rival of religion, lies at the bottom of all this order of ideas. Magic may be defined as the natural supernatural, since by it man _unaided_ commands the occult forces of nature. The theory of demoniacal assistance is of later growth.

A story rather different from the rest is told by Pausanias, who records that, at the sacrifice of Zeus on Mount Lycæus, a man was always turned into a wolf, but if for nine years in wolf-shape he abstained from eating human flesh, he would regain his human form. This suggests a Buddhist source. The infiltration of Buddhist folk-lore into Europe is a subject on which we should like to know more. Buddhism was the only missionary religion before Christianity, and there is every probability that it sent missionaries West as well as East.

The early Irish took so favourable a view of wolves that they were accustomed to pray for their salvation, and chose them as godfathers for their children. In Druidical times the wolf and other animals were divine manifestations, and the Celts were so attached to their beast-gods that they did not maledict what they had worshipped, but found it a refuge somewhere. In the earliest Gallic sculpture the dispossessed animals are introduced as companions of the new Saints.

It will be noticed that in the Indian folk-tale, though the identification of the man with the man-eater is clear, a very lenient view is taken of him: he was not always so; even his excursions in tiger-skin were, at first, purely innocent; he was a good husband and a respectable citizen till his wife’s nerves made him lose his temper.

In early Christian times, the man-wolf might be not only innocent but a victim. He might be a particularly good man turned by a sorcerer into a wolf, and in such cases he preserves his good tendencies. In the seventh century such a man-wolf defended the head of St. Edward the Martyr from other wild beasts.

On the other hand, there are stories of Christian saints who turned evil-disposed persons into beasts by means of the magical powers which, at first, _all_ baptized persons were thought to possess potentially if not actively. St. Thomas Aquinas believed in the possibility of doing this. In a Russian folk-tale the apostles Peter and Paul turned a bad husband and wife into bears.

In Europe by degrees the harmless were-wolf entirely disappeared but the evil one survived. The superstition of lycanthropy concentrated round one point (as superstitions often do): the self-transformation of a perverse man or sorcerer into an animal for nefarious purposes. The object of the transformation might be the opportunity for giving free range to sanguinary appetites; but there was another object lurking in the background, and this was the acquirement of second sight, which some animals (if not all) are supposed to be endowed with. Just as Varro and Virgil believed in lycanthropy, so the most highly educated Europeans in the time of Louis XIV. and after, believed in were-wolves. The choice of the animal was immaterial, but it fell naturally on the most prominent and feared wild animal which was locally extant. A fancy or exotic animal would not do, which illustrates the link there is between popular beliefs and _facts_; distorted facts, it may be, but real and not imaginary things. If a bear of bad morals appears in Norway, people declare that it can be “no Christian bear”—it must be a Lapp or a Finn, both these peoples, who are much addicted to magic, being supposed to have the power of changing into bears when they choose. Instead of seeking the wild beast in man, people sought the man in the wild beast.

As in Asia so in Europe, it was noticed and pondered that the normal wild beast is dangerous, perhaps, but not from a human point of view perverse. The normal wolf like the normal tiger does not attack or destroy for the love of destruction. Wolves attack in packs, but the instinct of the single individual is to keep out of man’s way. He does not kill even animals indiscriminately. In the last times when there were wolves in the Italian valleys of the Alps, the news spread that a wolf had killed a number of sheep. What had really happened was this, which an old hunter told at Edolo to a relative of mine. The wolf jumped down into a sheepfold sunk in the ground. He killed a sheep and ate some of it and then found, to his dismay, that he could not get up the wall of the sheepfold. Nothing daunted, however, he killed a sufficient number of sheep to form a mound, up which he climbed and so effected his escape. No one thought such a clever wolf as this a _lupo manaro_. But some wolves, like some dogs, are subject to fits of mental alienation, in which they slay without rhyme or reason. Sheep are found killed all over the countryside, and men or children may be among the victims. The question arises of who did it—a wolf, a man, or both in one? The material fact is there, and it is a fact calculated to excite terror, surprise, curiosity. That the fact may remain always a mystery recent experience shows. When the were-wolf mania was rampant in France, honestly conducted judicial inquiry succeeded in a few cases, in tracing the outrages to a real wolf or to a real man. At last, in 1603, a French court of law pronounced the belief in were-wolves to be an insane delusion, and from that date it slowly declined. Heretics were suspected of being were-wolves. As late as fifty years ago, a reminiscence of the _loup garou_ existed in most parts of France, in the shape of the _meneux des loups_, who were supposed to charm or tame whole packs of wolves which they led across the waste lands on nights when the moon shone fitfully through rifts in hurrying clouds. The village recluse, the poacher, the man who simply “knew more than he should,” fell under the suspicion of being a “wolf-leader,” and, of course, the usual “eye-witness” was forthcoming to declare that he had _seen_ the suspected individual out upon his midnight rambles with his wolves trotting after him. In some provinces all the fiddlers or bag-pipers were thought to be “wolf-leaders.”

_Maurice Sand._
“LE MENEUR DES LOUPS.”]

If the wolf turnskin died out sooner in England than in France, it was because there were no wolves to fasten it upon. Throughout the horrible witch-mania British sorcerers were supposed to turn into cats, weasels, or innocent hares! Italian witches still turn into cats. I remember how graphically C. G. Leland described to me a visit he had paid to a Tuscan witch; her cottage contained three stools, on one of which sat the witch, on the second her familiar jet-black cat, and on the third my old friend, who, I feel sure, had come to believe a good deal in the “old religion,” and who, in his last years, might have sat for a perfect portrait of a magician! The connexion of the witch and the cat is a form of turnskin-belief in which the feature of the acquirement of second sight is prominent. No witch without a cat! The essential _fact_ in the superstition is the fondness of poor, old friendless women for cats—their last friends. A contributing fact lay in the mysterious disappearances and reappearances of cats and in their half-wild nature. The cat in Indian folk-lore is the tiger’s aunt.

The mode of effecting transformation into animals is various, but always connected with fixed magical procedure. A root or food, or still oftener an ointment, is resorted to: ointments played a great part in superstition; it was by ointments that the unlucky persons accused of being wizards were held to have spread the plague of Milan. But the surest method of transformation was a girdle made of the skin of the animal whose form it was desired to take. This is regarded as a makeshift for not being able to put on the whole skin. An old French record tells of a man who buried a black cat in a box where four roads met, with enough bread soaked in holy water and holy oil to keep it alive for three days. The man intended to dig the cat up and, after killing it, to make a girdle of its skin by which means he expected to obtain the gift of second sight; but the burial-place of the cat was discovered by some dogs that were scratching the earth, before the three days had elapsed. The man, put to the torture, confessed all. In this case, it will be noticed that the spiritual powers of the cat were to be obtained without assuming its outward form. The turnskin who wishes to go back into his human shape, has also to follow fixed rules: a formula must be pronounced by some one else, as in the jungle tiger story, or the man-beast must eat some stated food as in Lucian’s skit (if Lucian wrote it) of the man who, by using the wrong salve, turned himself into a donkey instead of into a bird as he had wished, and who could only resume his own form by eating roses, which he did not accomplish until he had undergone all sorts of adventures.

The belief that beasts were inhabited by depraved men has a certain affinity with the belief that depraved men were inhabited by demons. Dante maintains that some persons have actually gone to their account while their bodies are still above-ground, the lodgings of evil spirits.

The history of the turnskin leads up to several conclusions, of which the most important is, that superstitions often grow uglier as they grow older. They descend, they rarely ascend. This experience should make us pause before we pronounce hideous beliefs to be, in a true sense, primitive. The idea of transformation is one of the oldest of human ideas, much older than transmigration, but at the outset, far from lending itself to such repulsive applications as man-tigers and demon-men, it gave birth to some of the fairest passages in the poetry of mankind which he calls his religion. It is impossible to imagine a more beautiful myth than the Vedic belief in the swan-maidens, the Apsarases who, by putting on skirts of swan feathers, could become swans. Their swan-skirts stretch from the hot East to the cold North, for they are the same that are worn by the Valkyries. All these early legends of swans bring into particularly clear light the moral identity of the impressions received from things seen by man at the bottom and at the top of the ladder of intellectual progress. Natural objects, lovely or terrible, raise archetypal images of things lovely or terrible which in our minds remain shapeless but to which the primitive man gives a local habitation and a name. Swans, sailing on still waters or circling above our heads, inspire us with indefinite longings which took form in the myth of the Apsarases and appear again in the Vedic story of the sage who, by deep knowledge and holiness, became a golden swan and flew away to the sun. To this day, if the Hindu sees a flight of swans wending its mysterious way across the sky, he repeats the saying almost mechanically (as a Catholic crosses himself if he pass a shrine): “The soul flies away, and none can go with it.”

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XIV

THE HORSE AS HERO

FIFTY years ago the knell of the horse was rung, with due solemnity, by the American statesman, Charles Sumner. The age of chivalry, he said, was gone—an age of humanity had come; “the horse, whose importance more than human, gave the name to that period of gallantry and war, now yields his foremost place to man.” As a matter of fact, the horse is yielding his foremost place to the motor-car, to the machine; and this is the topsy-turvy way in which most of the millennial hopes of the mid-nineteenth century are being fulfilled by the twentieth; the big dream of a diviner day ends in a reality out of which all that is ideal is fading. But the reason why I quote the passage is the service which it renders as a reminder of the often forgotten meaning of the word “chivalry.” The horse was connected with the ideals no less than with the realities of the phase in human history that was called after him; the mental consequences of the partnership between man and that noble beast were not less far reaching than the physical. There are a hundred types of human character, some of them of the highest, in the making of which the horse counts for nothing; but this type, this figure of the very perfect gentle knight, cannot be imagined in a horseless world. We hear of what man taught animals, but less of what animals taught man. In the unity of emotion between horse and rider something is exchanged. Even the epithets which it is natural to apply to the knightly hero, one and all fit his steed: defiant and gentle, daring and devoted, trusty and tireless, a scorner of obstacles, of a gay, brave spirit—the list could be lengthened at will. And the qualities and even the defects they had in common were not so much the result of accident as the true fruit of their mutual interdependence.

In the aftermath of chivalry which produced the song-writers and the splendid adventurers of the Elizabethan age, horsemanship came again to the fore as a passion rather than as a mere necessary pursuit. We know that, not satisfied with what England could provide, the fashionable young men frequented the schools of skilled Italians, generally of noble birth, such as Corte da Pavia, who was Queen Elizabeth’s riding-master. The prevailing taste is reflected in Shakespeare, who, though he was for all time, was yet, essentially of his own; his innumerable allusions to horses show, in the first place, that he knew all about them, as he did about most things, and in the second, that he knew that these allusions would please his audience, which no born dramatist ever treated as a negligible quantity, and the least of all Shakespeare. Even the performing or “thinking” horse does not escape his notice; “the dancing horse will tell you,” in “Love’s Labour Lost,” refers to the “Hans” or “Trixie” of the period who also attracted the attention of Ben Jonson, Downe, Sir Kenelm Digby, Sir Walter Raleigh, Hall, and John Taylor, the water-poet. This animal’s name was “Morocco” but he was often called “Bankes’ horse,” from his master who taught him to tell the number of pence in silver coins and the number of points in throws of dice, and on one occasion made him walk to the top of St. Paul’s. Alas, for the fate of “Morocco” and his master, “Being beyond the sea burnt for one witch,” as chronicled by Ben Jonson! Like Esmeralda and her goat, they were accused of magic, and the charge, first started at Orleans, was followed by condemnation and death in Rome. Greater tragedies of superstition hardly come with such a shock as this stupid slaughter of a poor showman and his clever beast.

In Elizabethan society interest in horses was directed chiefly to the turnings and windings, the “shapes and tricks” of the riding-school, and this lighter way of looking on them as affording man his most splendid diversion is, in the main, Shakespeare’s way—though he does not forget that, at times, a horse may be worth a kingdom. Not to him, however, or to any modern poet, do we go for the unique, incomparable description of the truly heroic horse, the uncowed charger of the East, created to awe rather than to be awed by man, whom no image of servility would fit. Here is this specimen of the world’s greatest poetry, in case any one be so unfortunate as not to know it by heart:—

“He paweth in the valley and rejoiceth in his strength; he goeth on to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword. The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield. He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage: neither believeth he that it is the sound of the trumpet. He saith among the trumpets, Ha! ha! He smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting.”

How the portrait leaps out of the page into life as Velasquez’s horse in the Prado leaps out of his frame! We feel the pulse of a passion which throbs through every vein from head to hoof. This Triumph of the War-horse is one of the points of affinity in the Book of Job with Arab rather than with Hebrew civilisation. The text itself is nearer Arabic than any other Biblical book, and the life of the protagonist is very like the life of an ancient Arabian chieftain. The Jews proper cared little for horses; when they fell into their hands they knew no better than to destroy them. They were a pastoral people, at no time fond of sport, which was hardly recognised as lawful by their religious ordinances. They do not seem to have ridden on horseback. Zechariah, indeed, speaks of the war-horse, but only to represent him as the beautiful image of peace, no more mixing in the fray, but bearing on his bell (which was meant to affright the foe) the inscription: “Holiness unto the Lord.”

_Photo:_ _Mansell._
THE ASSYRIAN HORSE.
British Museum.]

On the other hand, the Arab, and, most of all, the Nomadic Arab, has a dual existence with his horse. He could not live without it; it is a part of himself—of all that makes him himself and not another. The same is true of the Todas and their buffaloes, the Lapps and their reindeer. In summer when the reindeer are in the hills, to save them from what is there called the heat, a Lapp seems only half a Lapp; but his thoughts are still of reindeer and his fingers are busy with scratching its likeness on his spoons, his milk-bowls, his implements of all sorts, all of which are made of reindeer-horn. His songs are still of reindeer: “While the reindeer lasts, the Lapp will last; when the reindeer fails, the Lapp will fail,” as ran the infinitely pathetic ditty I heard sung by a Lapp woman who was shown to me as the best singer of the tribe.

With all these people the flesh of the beloved animal is esteemed the greatest delicacy; a fact in which there seems to lie suggestions of cannibalism in its real psychological aspect—the eating of the hero in order to acquire his attributes. Sometimes, however, the reason may be simply that they were for long periods in the impossibility of obtaining other meat; since the natural man prefers food to which he has grown familiar.

In what is probably the oldest version of Boccaccio’s Falcon story, the Emperor of Constantinople sends to ask a very generous præ-Islamic Arab Chief, by name Hatem Tai (celebrated as the type of chivalry over all the Moslem world), to give him a horse which Hatem is known to value beyond all his possessions. The object of the demand was to put his reputation for generosity to the test. The officer, who is the bearer of the Emperor’s request, is regaled sumptuously on the evening of his arrival; and, according to the laws of Oriental courtesy, he puts off speaking of the business in hand till next day. When he delivers his message Hatem replies that he would have complied gladly, but that the officer had eaten the horse last night for supper! The horse was the most costly and coveted food which the chief could offer his guest, and the story becomes thus more intelligible than when the victim is an uneatable bird like a hawk.

In Oriental poetry the camel “who asks but a thorn from the bed of roses of the world” takes a well-merited share of attention, but the animal which is before all others the Eastern poets’ beast is, of course, the horse: he might himself be called the poet as well as the prince among beasts, for if any living thing incarnates the poetry “of form, of motion, of glad devotion,” it is surely the high-bred Arab steed. Innumerable tributes credit him with three parts human qualities:—

“The courser looks his love as plainly as if he could speak,
He waves his mane, his paws, he curls his nostrils and his lips;
He makes half-vocal sounds, uprears or droops his neck and hips,
His deep and pensive eyes light up with lambent flame, then seem
As if they swam in the desires of some mysterious dream.”[8]

Footnote 8:

Translated by W. R. Alger.

Of the true Arab horse it is said that his foot is so light that he could dance on a woman’s breast without leaving a bruise. Some of the Arabian ballads of horses are among the very few Oriental poems which have acquired universal fame, as that which tells of how the peerless Lahla picked up his captured and bound master and carried him with his teeth back to the tribe, on reaching which he sinks dead, amidst the tears and lamentations of all. Horses, the Koran expressly says, were created for man’s use, but also “to be an ornament unto him”: all the romance, the valour, the deep-seated aristocratic instinct of the Arab, proudest of mankind, is bound up with his horse. The splendid Arab chief who stands aside motionless to let go by an automobile carrying a party of tourists across the Sahara reflects, as he draws his burnoose closer over his mouth, “_This_ is the ‘_ornament_’ of Western man!” And, looking at his horse, which stands motionless as he (for the Arab steed fears nothing when his master is near), he adds to himself: “These pass—we remain.” False it may be as a prophecy, but he believes it _because convinced of his superiority_.

Still by the camp-fires in the desert they tell the old story of a great chief who, in præ-Gallic times, was taken prisoner by the Emir’s horsemen. He escaped, but hardly had he reached his tent when in the desert air, in which sounds are heard afar off, a clattering of hoofs could be distinguished—the Sultan’s men were coming! The chief sprang on his mare and fled. When the men came up they knew that only one horse could overtake the mare, her beautiful sister, not less swift than she. A soldier leapt from his own horse intending to mount her, but the chiefs son, yet a child, instantly shot her dead with a pistol. And so the chief was saved.

The Ulemas of Algeria say that when God wished to create the mare He spoke to the wind: “I will cause thee to bring forth a creature that shall bear all My worshippers, that shall be loved by My slaves, and that will cause the despair of all who will not follow My laws.” And when He had created her He said: “I have made thee without an equal: the goods of this world shall be placed between thy eyes; everywhere I will make thee happy and preferred above all the beasts of the field, for tenderness shall everywhere be in the heart of thy master; good alike for the chase and retreat, thou shalt fly though wingless, and I will only place on thy back the men who know me, who will offer ME prayers and thanksgivings; men who shall be My worshippers from one generation to another.”

For the Arab the horse was not only the means of performing great enterprises but the very object of life, the thing in itself most precious, the care, the preoccupation, and the prize. The Arab’s horse is his kingdom.

ARABIAN HORSE OF THE SAHARA.]

I suppose that there is no doubt that the knightly type was a flower transported from the East, though, like many other Eastern flowers, it grew to its best in European gardens. The Crusaders learnt more than they taught. Coming down later, the national hero of Spain, for all his pure Gothic blood, is an Eastern not a Western hero. He will be understood far better when he is tried by this standard. If we weigh him in Eastern rather than in Western scales, a more lenient and above all a juster judgment will be the result, and we shall see how the fine qualities with which legend credits him were not disproved by some acts which the modern Western conscience condemns. On the whole it may be taken for granted, in spite of all that has been said to the contrary, that tradition which easily errs about facts, is rarely wrong about character.

Ruy Diaz de Bivar was a hero after the Arab’s own heart:—

“Noble y leal, soldado y Caballero,
Señor te apellido la gente Mora,”

as the lines run on his coffin in the town-hall at Burgos. Nothing being sacred to a critic, it has been contested that he was first called “Myo Cid,” or “My Lord,” by the Moors, but tradition and etymology agree too well for this to be reasonably doubted. It is certain that both Moors and Christians called him by his other title of Campeador in Spanish and Al-kambeyator in the form the Arabic writers gave it. It was derived from his gallantry in single combats and did not mean, as some have thought, “Champion of the Christians.”

It is entirely in keeping with the Cid’s Arab affinities that his horse should have attained a fame almost as great as his own. From Bucephalus to Copenhagen never was there a European horse equal in renown to Bavieca. His glory, is it not writ in nearly every one of the hundred ballads of the Cid? The choosing of Bavieca is one of the most striking events in the Cid’s youth. The boy asked his godfather, a fat, good-natured old priest, to give him a colt. The priest took him to a field where the mares and their colts were being exercised and told him to take the best. They were driven past him and he let all the handsomest go by; then a mare came up with an ugly and miserable-looking colt—“This,” he cried, “is the one for me!” His godfather was angry and called him a simpleton, but the lad only answered that the horse would turn out well and that “Simpleton” (“Bavieca”) should be his name.

Horses which begin as ugly ducklings and end as swans are an extensive breed. Count de Gubernatis, in his valuable work on “Zoological Mythology,” mentions Hatos, the magical horse of the Hungarians, as belonging to this class. If as old as the oldest legend, they are, in a sense, as new as the “outsider” which carries off one of the greatest prizes of the Turf. The choosing of Bavieca was in the mind of Cervantes when he described in his inimitable way the choosing of Rozinante (“ex-jade”), who never became anything but a _rozin_ in the most present tense, except in the imagination of his master, but who will live for ever in his company, to bear witness to the indivisible oneness of the knight and his horse.

Completely Oriental in sentiment is the splendid ballad which relates how the Cid offered Bavieca to his king because it was not meet that a subject should have a horse so far more precious than any possessed by his lord. There is in this not only the act of homage but also the absorbing pride which made the Arab who was overtaking a horse-stealer, shout to him the secret sign at which his stolen mare would go her best, preferring to lose her than to vanquish her.

“O king, the thing is shameful that any man beside
The liege lord of Castile himself should Bavieca ride.
For neither Spain nor Araby could another charger bring
So good as he, and certes, the best befits the king.”

The gorgeous simplicity of the original is missed by Lockhart in the succeeding verses, in which the Cid, before giving up the horse, mounts him to show his worth, his ermine mantle hanging from his shoulders. He will do, he says, in the presence of the king what he has not done for long except in battle with the Moor: he will touch Bavieca with his spurs. Then comes the maddest, wildest, yet most accomplished display of noble horsemanship that ever witched the world. One rein breaks and the beholders tremble for his life, but with ease and grace he guides the foaming and panting horse before the king and prepares to yield him up. Then Alfonso cries, God forbid that he should take him: he shall be accounted, indeed, as his, but shameful would it be

“That peerless Bavieca should ever be bestrid
By any mortal but Bivar—‘Mount, mount again, my Cid!’”

There is a spot in Spain where we still seem to breathe the very air of chivalrous romance: the royal armoury at Madrid, in which the mail-clad knights with their plumes, their housings, their lances, their trophies, sit their fine horses as gallantly as if they were riding straight into the lists. There, and there alone, we can invoke the proper _mise en scène_ for the gestes and jousts described in the Spanish ballads.

Historically, it seems certain that the Cid died at Valencia in July, 1099, an access of grief that his captains—who, owing to his ill-health, were obliged to replace him—had failed to hold the Moors in check. King Alfonso came to the assistance of his noble widow, Jimena, but finally Valencia had to be abandoned; all the Christians left the town and the Cid’s body was borne to his distant Northern home. Such is the historical outline, sufficiently pathetic in itself but adorned with additions, not all of them, perhaps, invented in the sublime legend of the Last Ride. It is said that the Cid, knowing that his last hour was near, refrained from any food except certain draughts of rose-water in which were dissolved the myrrh and balsam sent to him by the great Sultan of Persia. He gave particular instructions as to how his body was to be anointed with the myrrh and balsam which remained in the golden caskets, and how it was to be set upright on Bavieca, fully saddled and armed, to be still a terror to the Moors, who were to be kept in complete ignorance of his death. All this was done and a great victory was won over the Moors, who thought they saw their dreaded enemy once more commanding in person. Then the victors started on the long journey to San Pedro de Cardeña, near Burgos, the Cid riding his horse by day, supported by an artful contrivance, and by night placed on a dummy horse wrought by Gil Diaz, his devoted servitor. Jimena, with all the Cid’s men, followed in his train. On the way the procession is joined by the Cid’s two daughters and by a great mass of people who mourned in their hearts for Spain’s greatest hero, but they wore rich and gay apparel, for the Cid had forbidden the wearing of mourning. So Cardeña was reached, and tenderly and lovingly Ruy Diaz lifted the Cid’s body for the last time from Bavieca’s back—never more to bear a man. The glorious war-horse lived for two years, led to water each day by Gil Diaz. On his death, at more than forty years of age and leaving not unworthy descendants behind him, he was buried, according to the Cid’s express desire, in a deep and ample grave, “so that no dog might disturb his bones,” near the gate of the Convent, and two elms were planted to mark the spot. When Gil Diaz died, full of years and richly provided for by the Cid’s daughters, he was laid to rest beside the horse he had loved and tended so faithfully.

In this narrative, condensed from the Chronicles, the curious particular will have been noticed of the gift by the “Great Sultan of Persia” to the Christian warrior of those precious spices and aromatic gums which seem to have been the secret treasure of old Persia, forming a priceless offering reserved for the very greatest personages. The strangeness of bringing in the Sultan of Persia almost suggests that there was truth in the assertion that he had sent presents to the Cid. Over the sea and over the fruitful fields the radiance of noble deeds travels, as Pinder said of old. A little after the march of the Thousand, the Arabs of the desert were heard discussing round their camp-fires the exploits of Garibaldi. If the fame of the Cid reached Persia, as it is very likely that it did, he would have found fervent admirers among a people which was still electrified by the epic poem of Firdusi, who died within a year or two of the Cid’s birth. In that epic is told the story of the Persian Campeador—the Champion Rustem, who not only in his title but in all we know of his general bearings has so great a resemblance to the Cid that it is a wonder if no historical “discoverer” has derived one from the other, the more so since there have not been wanting writers who denied the Cid’s existence. And if Ruy Diaz de Bivar has his analogue in Rustem, has not Bavieca a perfect counterpart in Rakush?

It is the horse not his master that leads me into the mazes of the _Shah Nameh_, but something of Rustem must be told to make Rakush’s story intelligible. Like Siegfried, Rustem was of extraordinary size and strength: he looked a year old on the day of his birth. When he was still a child a white elephant broke loose and began trampling the people to death: Rustem ran to the rescue and slew it. A little time after this his father, whose name was Zal, called the boy and showed him all his horses, desiring him to choose that which pleased him best, but not one was powerful enough or spirited enough to satisfy him. Unlike the Cid, Rustem wanted a horse that looked as perfect as he really was. After examining them all and trying many, he noticed at a little distance a mare followed by a marvellously beautiful foal. Rustem got ready his noose to throw about the foal’s neck, and while he did so, a stable-man whispered to him that this foal was, indeed, worth anything to secure; the dam, named Abresh, was famous, while the sire had been no mortal creature but a djinn. The foal’s name was Rakush (“Lightning”), a name given to a dappled or piebald horse, and his coat, that was as soft as silk, looked like rose-leaves strewn on a saffron ground. Several persons who had tried already to capture the foal had been killed by the mare, who allowed no one to go near it.

In fact, no sooner has Rustem lassoed the foal than its mother rushes towards him ready to seize him with her white teeth, which glisten in the sun. Rustem utters a loud cry which so startles the mare that she pauses for an instant: then, with clenched fist, he rains blow on blow on her head and neck till she drops down to die. It was done in self-defence: still, it is a barbaric prelude.

Rustem continued to hold Rakush with his free hand while he conquered the mare, but now the colt drags him hither and thither like an inanimate object: the dauntless youth has to strive long for the mastery, but he does not rest till the end is achieved. The horse is broken in at one breath, after the fashion of American cow-boys. It should be noticed that legendary heroes always break in their own horses—no other influence has been ever brought to bear on the horse but their own. Rakush has found a master indeed, but a master worthy of him. He has recognised that there is one—only one—fit to rule him. Like all true heroes’ horses, he will suffer no other mortal to mount him: if Barbary really allowed Bolingbroke to ride him it was a sure sign that his poor royal master was no hero. This same characteristic belonged also to Julius Cæsar’s horse, which was a remarkable animal in more ways than one, as he was reported to have feet like a human being. I have no doubt that Soloman’s white mare, Koureen, followed the same rule as well as the angel Gabriel’s reputed steed, Haziûm, though I have not found record of the fact.

When the colt is broken in, he stands before his master perfect and without flaw. “Now I and my horse are ready to join the fighting-men in the field,” says Rustem as he places the saddle on his back, to the boundless joy of Zal, whose old, withered heart becomes as green as springtide with the thrill of fatherly pride.

So Rakush is richly caparisoned and Rustem rides away on him, beardless youth though he is, to command great armies, slay fearsome dragons, defeat the wiles of sorcerers, and do all the other feats with which the fresh fancy of a young nation embroidered the story of its favourite hero—for, it must be remembered, Firdusi did not invent Rustem any more than Tennyson invented Lancelot. I think there is every reason to believe that there was a real Rustem just as there was a real Cid; and that the first, like the second, was a combination of the _guerrillero_, the _condottiere_, the magnificent free-booter, with the knight-errant or paladin—a stamp which was impressed upon the other _rôle_ by the personal quality of noble-mindedness possessed by the individual in each case. For years unnumbered the exploits of Rustem have entertained the Persian listener from prince to peasant, but the story will ever remain young because it is of those which reflect that which holds mankind spell-bound: the magnetic power of human personality.

One hears the clear, crisp clatter of the horse’s hoofs as they gallop through the epic. Docile as Rakush has become, his spirit is unbent; he is eager to fight his own battles and his master’s too. Like Baiardo, the horse in Ariosto, he uses his hoofs with deadly effect, and on one occasion there is a regular duel between him and another horse while Rustem is fighting its rider. His rashness inspires Rustem with much anxiety in their earlier journeys together. Quite at the beginning, when Rustem is on his way to liberate his captive king—his first “labour”—he lies down to sleep in a forest, leaving Rakush free to graze, and what is not his surprise when he wakes to find a large lion extended dead on the grass close by. Rakush killed the savage beast with teeth and heels while his master slept tranquilly. Rustem remonstrates with his too venturesome steed: Why did he fight the lion all alone? Why did he not neigh loudly and call for assistance? Had he reflected how terribly unfortunate it would be for Rustem if anything were to happen to him? Who would carry his heavy battle-axe and all his other accoutrements? He conjures Rakush to fight no more lions single-handed. Then and at other times Rustem talks to Rakush, but Rakush does not answer like the horse of Achilles. The Persians of the eleventh century had reached the stage of people who take their marvels with discrimination; they accepted Simurghs, white demons, phantom elks, giants, dragons, but they might have hesitated about a talking horse. Another of Rustem’s addresses to his horse was spoken after one of his first victories when the enemy was in full retreat: “My valued friend,” he said, “put forth thine utmost speed and bear me after the foe.” The noble animal certainly understood, for he bounded over the plain snorting as he flew along and tossing up his mane, and great was the booty which fell into his master’s hands. Rustem once said that with his arms and his trusty steed he would not mind fighting thirty thousand men. As a matter of fact, he never lacked followers, for he was of those captains who have only to stamp on the ground for there to spring up soldiers.

In the nineteenth century a “legendary hero” wandered with his horse over the plains of Uruguay much as Rustem wandered with Rakush. “In my nomad life in America,” writes Garibaldi, “after a long march or a day’s fighting, I unsaddled my poor tired horse and smoothed and dried his coat ... rarely could I offer him a handful of oats since those illimitable fields provide so little grain that oats are not often given to horses. Then, after leading him to water, I settled him for the night near my own resting-place. Well, when all this was done, which was no more than a duty to my faithful companion of toil and peril, I felt content, and if by chance he neighed, refreshed, or rolled on the green turf—oh, then I tasted _la gentil voluttà d’esser pio_!” Marvels are out of date, but feeling remains unchanged, and the “sweets of kindness” were known, surely, even to the earliest hero who made a friend of his horse and found him, in the solitude of the wild, no bad substitute for human friends.

In the story of Sohrab, one of the finest episodes in epic poetry, Rakush is introduced as the primary cause of it all. Tired with hunting in the forest, and perhaps inclined to sleep by a meal of roasted wild ass, which seems to have been his favourite game, Rustem lay down to rest under a tree, turning Rakush free to graze as was his wont. When he awoke the horse was nowhere to be seen! Rustem looked for his prints, a way of recovering stolen animals still practised with astonishing success in India. He found the prints and guessed that his favourite had been carried off by robbers, which was what had actually happened: a band of Tartar marauders lassoed the horse with their kamunds and dragged him home. Rustem followed the track over the border of the little state of Samengan, the king of which, warned of the approach of the hero of the age, went out to meet him on foot with great deference. The hero, however, was in no mood for compliments; full of wrath, he told the king that his horse had been stolen and that he had traced his footprints to Samengan. The king kept his presence of mind better than might have been expected; he made profuse excuses and declared that no effort should be spared to recover the horse—meanwhile he prayed Rustem to become his honoured guest.