Chapter 1. By The Rivers Of Waters

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_ CHAPTER I. BY THE RIVERS OF WATERS

The intelligent English traveller, in this fortunate age for him, is aware that, half-way between Boulogne and Paris, there is a complex railway-station, into which his train, in its relaxing speed, rolls him with many more than the average number of bangs and bumps prepared, in the access of every important French _gare_, to startle the drowsy or distrait passenger into a sense of his situation.

He probably also remembers that at this halting-place in mid-journey there is a well-served buffet, at which he has the privilege of "Dix minutes d'arret."

He is not, however, always so distinctly conscious that these ten minutes of arrest are granted to him within not so many minutes' walk of the central square of a city which was once the Venice of France.

Putting the lagoon islands out of question, the French River-Queen was nearly as large in compass as Venice herself; and divided, not by slow currents of ebbing and returning tide, but by eleven beautiful trout streams, of which some four or five are as large, each separately, as our Surrey Wandle, or as Isaac Walton's Dove; and which, branching out of one strong current above the city, and uniting again after they have eddied through its streets, are bordered, as they flow down, (fordless except where the two Edwards rode them, the day before Crecy,) to the sands of St. Valery, by groves of aspen, and glades of poplar, whose grace and gladness seem to spring in every stately avenue instinct with the image of the just man's life,--"Erit tanquam lignum quod plantatum est secus decursus aquarum."

But the Venice of Picardy owed her name, not to the beauty of her streams merely, but to their burden. She was a worker, like the Adriatic princes, in gold and glass, in stone, wood, and ivory; she was skilled like an Egyptian in the weaving of fine linen; dainty as the maids of Judah in divers colours of needlework. And of these, the fruits of her hands, praising her in her own gates, she sent also portions to stranger nations, and her fame went out into all lands.

"Un reglement de l'echevinage, du 12^me avril 1566, fait voir qu'on fabriquait a cette epoque, des velours de toutes couleurs pour meubles, des colombettes a grands et petits carreaux, des burailles croises, qu'on expediait en Allemagne--en Espagne, en Turquie, et en Barbarie!"[1]

All-coloured velvets, pearl-iridescent colombettes! (I wonder what they may be?) and sent to vie with the variegated carpet of the Turk, and glow upon the arabesque towers of Barbary![2] Was not this a phase of provincial Picard life which an intelligent English traveller might do well to inquire into? Why should this fountain of rainbows leap up suddenly here by Somme; and a little Frankish maid write herself the sister of Venice, and the servant of Carthage and of Tyre?

[Footnote 1: M. H. Dusevel, Histoire de la Ville d'Amiens. Amiens, Caron et Lambert, 1848; p. 305.]

[Footnote 2: Carpaccio trusts for the chief splendour of any festa in cities to the patterns of the draperies hung out of windows.]

And if she, why not others also of our northern villages? Has the intelligent traveller discerned anything, in the country, or in its shores, on his way from the gate of Calais to the _gare_ of Amiens, of special advantage for artistic design, or for commercial enterprise? He has seen league after league of sandy dunes. We also, we, have our sands by Severn, by Lune, by Solway. He has seen extensive plains of useful and not unfragrant peat,--an article sufficiently accessible also to our Scotch and Irish industries. He has seen many a broad down and jutting cliff of purest chalk; but, opposite, the perfide Albion gleams no whit less blanche beyond the blue. Pure waters he has seen, issuing out of the snowy rock; but are ours less bright at Croydon, at Guildford, or at Winchester? And yet one never heard of treasures sent from Solway sands to African; nor that the builders at Romsey could give lessons in colour to the builders at Granada? What can it be, in the air or the earth--in her stars or in her sunlight--that fires the heart and quickens the eyes of the little white-capped Amienoise soubrette, till she can match herself against Penelope?

The intelligent English traveller has of course no time to waste on any of these questions. But if he has bought his ham-sandwich, and is ready for the "En voiture, messieurs," he may perhaps condescend for an instant to hear what a lounger about the place, neither wasteful of his time, nor sparing of it, can suggest as worth looking at, when his train glides out of the station.

He will see first, and doubtless with the respectful admiration which an Englishman is bound to bestow upon such objects, the coal-sheds and carriage-sheds of the station itself, extending in their ashy and oily splendours for about a quarter of a mile out of the town; and then, just as the train gets into speed, under a large chimney tower, which he cannot see to nearly the top of, but will feel overcast by the shadow of its smoke, he _may_ see, if he will trust his intelligent head out of the window, and look back, fifty or fifty-one (I am not sure of my count to a unit) similar chimneys, all similarly smoking, all with similar works attached, oblongs of brown brick wall, with portholes numberless of black square window. But in the midst of these fifty tall things that smoke, he will see one, a little taller than any, and more delicate, that does not smoke; and in the midst of these fifty masses of blank wall enclosing 'works'--and doubtless producing works profitable and honourable to France and the world--he will see _one_ mass of wall--not blank, but strangely wrought by the hands of foolish men of long ago, for the purpose of enclosing or producing no manner of profitable work whatsoever, but one--

"This is the work of God; that ye should believe on Him whom He hath sent"!

Leaving the intelligent traveller now to fulfil his vow of pilgrimage to Paris,--or wherever else God may be sending him,--I will suppose that an intelligent Eton boy or two, or thoughtful English girl, may care quietly to walk with me as far as this same spot of commanding view, and to consider what the workless--shall we say also worthless?--building, and its unshadowed minaret, may perhaps farther mean.

Minaret I have called it, for want of better English word. Fleche--arrow--is its proper name; vanishing into the air you know not where, by the mere fineness of it. Flameless--motionless--hurtless--the fine arrow; unplumed, unpoisoned, and unbarbed; aimless--shall we say also, readers young and old, travelling or abiding? It, and the walls it rises from--what have they once meant? What meaning have they left in them yet, for you, or for the people that live round them, and never look up as they pass by?

Suppose we set ourselves first to learn how they came there.

At the birth of Christ, all this hillside, and the brightly-watered plain below, with the corn-yellow champaign above, were inhabited by a Druid-taught race, wild enough in thoughts and ways, but under Roman government, and gradually becoming accustomed to hear the names, and partly to confess the power, of Roman gods. For three hundred years after the birth of Christ they heard the name of no other God.

Three hundred years! and neither apostles nor inheritors of apostleship had yet gone into all the world and preached the gospel to every creature. Here, on their peaty ground, the wild people, still trusting in Pomona for apples, in Silvanus for acorns, in Ceres for bread, and in Proserpina for rest, hoped but the season's blessing from the Gods of Harvest, and feared no eternal anger from the Queen of Death.

But at last, three hundred years being past and gone, in the year of Christ 301, there came to this hillside of Amiens, on the sixth day of the Ides of October, the Messenger of a new Life.

His name, Firminius (I suppose) in Latin, Firmin in French,--so to be remembered here in Picardy. Firmin, not Firminius; as Denis, not Dionysius; coming out of space--no one tells what part of space. But received by the pagan Amienois with surprised welcome, and seen of them--forty days--many days, we may read--preaching acceptably, and binding with baptismal vows even persons in good society: and that in such numbers, that at last he is accused to the Roman governor, by the priests of Jupiter and Mercury, as one turning the world upside-down. And in the last day of the Forty--or of the indefinite many meant by Forty--he is beheaded, as martyrs ought to be, and his ministrations in a mortal body ended.

The old, old story, you say? Be it so; you will the more easily remember it. The Amienois remembered it so carefully, that, twelve hundred years afterwards, in the sixteenth century, they thought good to carve and paint the four stone pictures Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4 of our first choice photographs. (N. B.--This series is not yet arranged, but is distinct from that referred to in Chapter IV. See Appendix II.). Scene 1st, St. Firmin arriving; scene 2nd, St. Firmin preaching; scene 3rd, St. Firmin baptizing; and scene 4th, St. Firmin beheaded, by an executioner with very red legs, and an attendant dog of the character of the dog in 'Faust,' of whom we may have more to say presently.

Following in the meantime the tale of St. Firmin, as of old time known, his body was received, and buried, by a Roman senator, his disciple, (a kind of Joseph of Arimathea to St. Firmin,) in the Roman senator's own garden. Who also built a little oratory over his grave. The Roman senator's son built a church to replace the oratory, dedicated it to Our Lady of Martyrs, and established it as an episcopal seat--the first of the French nation's. A very notable spot for the French nation, surely? One deserving, perhaps, some little memory or monument,--cross, tablet, or the like? Where, therefore, do you suppose this first cathedral of French Christianity stood, and with what monument has it been honoured?

It stood where we now stand, companion mine, whoever you may be; and the monument wherewith it has been honoured is this--chimney, whose gonfalon of smoke overshadows us--the latest effort of modern art in Amiens, the chimney of St. Acheul.

The first cathedral, you observe, of the _French_ nation; more accurately, the first germ of cathedral _for_ the French nation--who are not yet here; only this grave of a martyr is here, and this church of Our Lady of Martyrs, abiding on the hillside, till the Roman power pass away.

Falling together with it, and trampled down by savage tribes, alike the city and the shrine; the grave forgotten,--when at last the Franks themselves pour from the north, and the utmost wave of them, lapping along these downs of Somme, is _here_ stayed, and the Frankish standard planted, and the French kingdom throned.

Here their first capital, here the first footsteps[3] of the Frank in his France! Think of it. All over the south are Gauls, Burgundians, Bretons, heavier-hearted nations of sullen mind: at their outmost brim and border, here at last are the Franks, the source of all Franchise, for this our Europe. You have heard the word in England, before now, but English word for it is none! _Honesty_ we have of our own; but _Frankness_ we must learn of these: nay, all the western nations of us are in a few centuries more to be known by this name of Frank. Franks, of Paris that is to be, in time to come; but French of Paris is in year of grace 500 an unknown tongue in Paris, as much as in Stratford-att-ye-Bowe. French of Amiens is the kingly and courtly form of Christian speech, Paris lying yet in Lutetian clay, to develope into tile-field, perhaps, in due time. Here, by soft-glittering Somme, reign Clovis and his Clotilde.

[Footnote 3: The first fixed and set-down footsteps; wandering tribes called Franks, had overswept the country, and recoiled, again and again. But _this_ invasion of the so-called Salian Franks, never retreats again.]

And by St. Firmin's grave speaks now another gentle evangelist, and the first Frank king's prayer to the King of kings is made to Him, known only as "the God of Clotilde."

I must ask the reader's patience now with a date or two, and stern facts--two--three--or more.

Clodion, the leader of the first Franks who reach irrevocably beyond the Rhine, fights his way through desultory Roman cohorts as far as Amiens, and takes it, in 445.[4]

[Footnote 4: See note at end of chapter, as also for the allusions in p. 8, to the battle of Soissons.]

Two years afterwards, at his death, the scarcely asserted throne is seized--perhaps inevitably--by the tutor of his children, Merovee, whose dynasty is founded on the defeat of Attila at Chalons.

He died in 457. His son Childeric, giving himself up to the love of women, and scorned by the Frank soldiery, is driven into exile, the Franks choosing rather to live under the law of Rome than under a base chief of their own. He receives asylum at the court of the king of Thuringia, and abides there. His chief officer in Amiens, at his departure, breaks a ring in two, and, giving him the half of it, tells him, when the other half is sent, to return.

And, after many days, the half of the broken ring is sent, and he returns, and is accepted king by his Franks.

The Thuringian queen follows him, (I cannot find if her husband is first dead--still less, if dead, how dying,) and offers herself to him for his wife.

"I have known thy usefulness, and that thou art very strong; and I have come to live with thee. Had I known, in parts beyond sea, any one more useful than thou, I should have sought to live with _him_."

He took her for his wife, and their son is Clovis.

A wonderful story; how far in literalness true is of no manner of moment to us; the myth, and power of it, _do_ manifest the nature of the French kingdom, and prophesy its future destiny. Personal valour, personal beauty, loyalty to kings, love of women, disdain of unloving marriage, note all these things for true, and that in the corruption of these will be the last death of the Frank, as in their force was his first glory.

Personal valour, worth. _Utilitas_, the keystone of all. Birth nothing, except as gifting with valour;--Law of primogeniture unknown;--Propriety of conduct, it appears, for the present, also nowhere! (but we are all pagans yet, remember).

Let us get our dates and our geography, at any rate, gathered out of the great 'nowhere' of confused memory, and set well together, thus far.

457. Merovee dies. The useful Childeric, counting his exile, and reign in Amiens, together, is King altogether twenty-four years, 457 to 481, and during his reign Odoacer ends the Roman empire in Italy, 476.

481. Clovis is only fifteen when he succeeds his father, as King of the Franks in Amiens. At this time a fragment of Roman power remains isolated in central France, while four strong and partly savage nations form a cross round this dying centre: the Frank on the north, the Breton on the west, the Burgundian on the east, the Visigoth strongest of all and gentlest, in the south, from Loire to the sea.

Sketch for yourself, first, a map of France, as large as you like, as in Plate I., fig. 1, marking only the courses of the five rivers, Somme, Seine, Loire, Saone, Rhone; then, rudely, you find it was divided at the time thus, fig. 2: Fleur-de-lysee part, Frank; \, Breton; ///, Burgundian; =, Visigoth. I am not sure how far these last reached across Rhone into Provence, but I think best to indicate Provence as semee with roses.

Now, under Clovis, the Franks fight three great battles. The first, with the Romans, near Soissons, which they win, and become masters of France as far as the Loire. Copy the rough map fig. 2, and put the fleur-de-lys all over the middle of it, extinguishing the Romans (fig. 3). This battle was won by Clovis, I believe, before he married Clotilde. He wins his princess by it: cannot get his pretty vase, however, to present to her. Keep that story well in your mind, and the battle of Soissons, as winning mid-France for the French, and ending the Romans there, for ever. Secondly, after he marries Clotilde, the wild Germans attack _him_ from the north, and he has to fight for life and throne at Tolbiac. This is the battle in which he prays to the God of Clotilde, and quits himself of the Germans by His help. Whereupon he is crowned in Rheims by St. Remy.

[Illustration: Plate I. THE DYNASTIES OF FRANCE.]

And now, in the new strength of his Christianity, and his twin victory over Rome and Germany, and his love for his queen, and his ambition for his people, he looks south on that vast Visigothic power, between Loire and the snowy mountains. Shall Christ, and the Franks, not be stronger than villainous Visigoths 'who are Arians also'? All his Franks are with him, in that opinion. So he marches against the Visigoths, meets them and their Alaric at Poitiers, ends their Alaric and their Arianism, and carries his faithful Franks to the Pic du Midi.

And so now you must draw the map of France once more, and put the fleur-de-lys all over its central mass from Calais to the Pyrenees: only Brittany still on the west, Burgundy in the east, and the white Provence rose beyond Rhone. And now poor little Amiens has become a mere border town like our Durham, and Somme a border streamlet like our Tyne. Loire and Seine have become the great French rivers, and men will be minded to build cities by these; where the well-watered plains, not of peat, but richest pasture, may repose under the guard of saucy castles on the crags, and moated towers on the islands. But now let us think a little more closely what our changed symbols in the map may mean--five fleur-de-lys for level bar.

They don't mean, certainly, that all the Goths are gone, and nobody but Franks in France? The Franks have not massacred Visigothic man, woman, and child, from Loire to Garonne. Nay, where their own throne is still set by the Somme, the peat-bred people whom they found there, live there still, though subdued. Frank, or Goth, or Roman may fluctuate hither and thither, in chasing or flying troops: but, unchanged through all the gusts of war, the rural people whose huts they pillage, whose farms they ravage, and over whose arts they reign, must still be diligently, silently, and with no time for lamentation, ploughing, sowing, cattle-breeding!

Else how could Frank or Hun, Visigoth or Roman, live for a month, or fight for a day?

Whatever the name, or the manners, of their masters, the ground delvers must be the same; and the goatherd of the Pyrenees, and the vine-dresser of Garonne, and the milkmaid of Picardy, give them what lords you may, abide in their land always, blossoming as the trees of the field, and enduring as the crags of the desert. And these, the warp and first substance of the nation, are divided, not by dynasties, but by climates; and are strong here, and helpless there, by privileges which no invading tyrants can abolish, and through faults which no preaching hermit can repress. Now, therefore, please let us leave our history a minute or two, and read the lessons of constant earth and sky.

In old times, when one posted from Calais to Paris, there was about half an hour's trot on the level, from the gate of Calais to the long chalk hill, which had to be climbed before arriving at the first post-house in the village of Marquise.

That chalk rise, virtually, is the front of France; that last bit of level north of it, virtually the last of Flanders; south of it, stretches now a district of chalk and fine building limestone,--(if you keep your eyes open, you may see a great quarry of it on the west of the railway, half-way between Calais and Boulogne, where once was a blessed little craggy dingle opening into velvet lawns;)--this high, but never mountainous, calcareous tract, sweeping round the chalk basin of Paris away to Caen on one side, and Nancy on the other, and south as far as Bourges, and the Limousin. This limestone tract, with its keen fresh air, everywhere arable surface, and quarriable banks above well-watered meadow, is the real country of the French. Here only are their arts clearly developed. Farther south they are Gascons, or Limousins, or Auvergnats, or the like. Westward, grim-granitic Bretons; eastward, Alpine-bearish Burgundians: here only, on the chalk and finely-knit marble, between, say, Amiens and Chartres one way, and between Caen and Rheims on the other, have you real _France_.

Of which, before we carry on the farther vital history, I must ask the reader to consider with me, a little, how history, so called, has been for the most part written, and of what particulars it usually consists.

Suppose that the tale of King Lear were a true one; and that a modern historian were giving the abstract of it in a school manual, purporting to contain all essential facts in British history valuable to British youth in competitive examination. The story would be related somewhat after this manner:--

"The reign of the last king of the seventy-ninth dynasty closed in a series of events with the record of which it is painful to pollute the pages of history. The weak old man wished to divide his kingdom into dowries for his three daughters; but on proposing this arrangement to them, finding it received by the youngest with coldness and reserve, he drove her from his court, and divided the kingdom between his two elder children.

"The youngest found refuge at the court of France, where ultimately the prince royal married her. But the two elder daughters, having obtained absolute power, treated their father at first with disrespect, and soon with contumely. Refused at last even the comforts necessary to his declining years, the old king, in a transport of rage, left the palace, with, it is said, only the court fool for an attendant, and wandered, frantic and half naked, during the storms of winter, in the woods of Britain.

"Hearing of these events, his youngest daughter hastily collected an army, and invaded the territory of her ungrateful sisters, with the object of restoring her father to his throne; but, being met by a well disciplined force, under the command of her eldest sister's paramour, Edmund, bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester, was herself defeated, thrown into prison, and soon afterwards strangled by the adulterer's order. The old king expired on receiving the news of her death; and the participators in these crimes soon after received their reward; for the two wicked queens being rivals for the affections of the bastard, the one of them who was regarded by him with less favour poisoned the other, and afterwards killed herself. Edmund afterwards met his death at the hand of his brother, the legitimate son of Gloucester, under whose rule, with that of the Earl of Kent, the kingdom remained for several succeeding years."

Imagine this succinctly graceful recital of what the historian conceived to be the facts, adorned with violently black and white woodcuts, representing the blinding of Gloucester, the phrenzy of Lear, the strangling of Cordelia, and the suicide of Goneril, and you have a type of popular history in the nineteenth century; which is, you may perceive after a little reflection, about as profitable reading for young persons (so far as regards the general colour and purity of their thoughts) as the Newgate Calendar would be; with this farther condition of incalculably greater evil, that, while the calendar of prison-crime would teach a thoughtful youth the dangers of low life and evil company, the calendar of kingly crime overthrows his respect for any manner of government, and his faith in the ordinances of Providence itself.

Books of loftier pretence, written by bankers, members of Parliament, or orthodox clergymen, are of course not wanting; and show that the progress of civilization consists in the victory of usury over ecclesiastical prejudice, or in the establishment of the Parliamentary privileges of the borough of Puddlecombe, or in the extinction of the benighted superstitions of the Papacy by the glorious light of Reformation. Finally, you have the broadly philosophical history, which proves to you that there is no evidence whatever of any overruling Providence in human affairs; that all virtuous actions have selfish motives; and that a scientific selfishness, with proper telegraphic communications, and perfect knowledge of all the species of Bacteria, will entirely secure the future well-being of the upper classes of society, and the dutiful resignation of those beneath them.

Meantime, the two ignored powers--the Providence of Heaven, and the virtue of men--have ruled, and rule, the world, not invisibly; and they are the only powers of which history has ever to tell any profitable truth. Under all sorrow, there is the force of virtue; over all ruin, the restoring charity of God. To these alone we have to look; in these alone we may understand the past, and predict the future, destiny of the ages.

I return to the story of Clovis, king now of all central France. Fix the year 500 in your minds as the approximate date of his baptism at Rheims, and of St. Remy's sermon to him, telling him of the sufferings and passion of Christ, till Clovis sprang from his throne, grasping his spear, and crying, "Had I been there with my brave Franks, I would have avenged His wrongs."

"There is little doubt," proceeds the cockney historian, "that the conversion of Clovis was as much a matter of policy as of faith." But the cockney historian had better limit his remarks on the characters and faiths of men to those of the curates who have recently taken orders in his fashionable neighbourhood, or the bishops who have lately preached to the population of its manufacturing suburbs. Frankish kings were made of other clay.

The Christianity of Clovis does not indeed produce any fruits of the kind usually looked for in a modern convert. We do not hear of his repenting ever so little of any of his sins, nor resolving to lead a new life in any the smallest particular. He had not been impressed with convictions of sin at the battle of Tolbiac; nor, in asking for the help of the God of Clotilde, had he felt or professed the remotest intention of changing his character, or abandoning his projects. What he was, before he believed in his queen's God, he only more intensely afterwards became, in the confidence of that before unknown God's supernatural help. His natural gratitude to the Delivering Power, and pride in its protection, added only fierceness to his soldiership, and deepened his political enmities with the rancour of religions indignation. No more dangerous snare is set by the fiends for human frailty than the belief that our own enemies are also the enemies of God; and it is perfectly conceivable to me that the conduct of Clovis might have been the more unscrupulous, precisely in the measure that his faith was more sincere.

Had either Clovis or Clotilde fully understood the precepts of their Master, the following history of France, and of Europe, would have been other than it is. What they could understand, or in any wise were taught, you will find that they obeyed, and were blessed in obeying. But their history is complicated with that of several other persons, respecting whom we must note now a few too much forgotten particulars.

If from beneath the apse of Amiens Cathedral we take the street leading due south, leaving the railroad station on the left, it brings us to the foot of a gradually ascending hill, some half a mile long--a pleasant and quiet walk enough, terminating on the level of the highest land near Amiens; whence, looking back, the Cathedral is seen beneath us, all but the fleche, our gained hill-top being on a level with its roof-ridge: and, to the south, the plain of France.

Somewhere about this spot, or in the line between it and St. Acheul, stood the ancient Roman gate of the Twins, whereon were carved Romulus and Remus being suckled by the wolf; and out of which, one bitter winter's day, a hundred and seventy years ago when Clovis was baptized--had ridden a Roman soldier, wrapped in his horseman's cloak,[5] on the causeway which was part of the great Roman road from Lyons to Boulogne.

[Footnote 5: More properly, his knight's cloak; in all likelihood the trabea, with purple and white stripes, dedicate to the kings of Rome, and chiefly to Romulus.]

And it is well worth your while also, some frosty autumn or winter day when the east wind is high, to feel the sweep of it at this spot, remembering what chanced here, memorable to all men, and serviceable, in that winter of the year 332, when men were dying for cold in Amiens streets:--namely, that the Roman horseman, scarce gone out of the city gate, was met by a naked beggar, shivering with cold; and that, seeing no other way of shelter for him, he drew his sword, divided his own cloak in two, and gave him half of it.

No ruinous gift, nor even enthusiastically generous: Sydney's cup of cold water needed more self-denial; and I am well assured that many a Christian child of our day, himself well warmed and clad, meeting one naked and cold, would be ready enough to give the _whole_ cloak off his own shoulders to the necessitous one, if his better-advised nurse, or mamma, would let him. But this Roman soldier was no Christian, and did his serene charity in simplicity, yet with prudence.

Nevertheless, that same night, he beheld in a dream the Lord Jesus, who stood before him in the midst of angels, having on his shoulders the half of the cloak he had bestowed on the beggar.

And Jesus said to the angels that were around him, "Know ye who hath thus arrayed me? My servant Martin, though yet unbaptized, has done this." And Martin after this vision hastened to receive baptism, being then in his twenty-third year.[6]

[Footnote 6: Mrs. Jameson, Legendary Art, Vol. II., p. 721.]

Whether these things ever were so, or how far so, credulous or incredulous reader, is no business whatever of yours or mine. What is, and shall be, everlastingly, _so_,--namely, the infallible truth of the lesson herein taught, and the actual effect of the life of St. Martin on the mind of Christendom,--is, very absolutely, the business of every rational being in any Christian realm.

You are to understand, then, first of all, that the especial character of St. Martin is a serene and meek charity to all creatures. He is not a preaching saint--still less a persecuting one: not even an anxious one. Of his prayers we hear little--of his wishes, nothing. What he does always, is merely the right thing at the right moment;--rightness and kindness being in his mind one: an extremely exemplary saint, to my notion.

Converted and baptized--and conscious of having seen Christ--he nevertheless gives his officers no trouble whatever--does not try to make proselytes in his cohort. "It is Christ's business, surely!--if He wants them, He may appear to them as He has to me," seems the feeling of his first baptized days. He remains seventeen years in the army, on those tranquil terms.

At the end of that time, thinking it might be well to take other service, he asks for his dismissal from the Emperor Julian,--on whose accusation of faintheartedness, Martin offers, unarmed, to lead his cohort into battle, bearing only the sign of the cross. Julian takes him at his word,--keeps him in ward till time of battle comes; but, the day before he counts on putting him to that war ordeal, the barbarian enemy sends embassy with irrefusable offers of submission and peace.

The story is not often dwelt upon: how far literally true, again observe, does not in the least matter;--here _is_ the lesson for ever given of the way in which a Christian soldier should meet his enemies. Which, had John Bunyan's Mr. Great-heart understood, the Celestial gates had opened by this time to many a pilgrim who has failed to hew his path up to them with the sword of sharpness.

But true in some practical and effectual way the story _is_; for after a while, without any oratorizing, anathematizing, or any manner of disturbance, we find the Roman Knight made Bishop of Tours, and becoming an influence of unmixed good to all mankind, then, and afterwards. And virtually the same story is repeated of his bishop's robe as of his knight's cloak--not to be rejected because so probable an invention; for it is just as probable an act.

Going, in his full robes, to say prayers in church, with one of his deacons, he came across some unhappily robeless person by the wayside; for whom he forthwith orders his deacon to provide some manner of coat, or gown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this gentleness was his strength; and the issue of it is best to be estimated by comparing its scope with that of the work of St. Firmin. The impatient missionary riots and rants about Amiens' streets--insults, exhorts, persuades, baptizes,--turns everything, as aforesaid, upside down for forty days: then gets his head cut off, and is never more named, _out_ of Amiens. St. Martin teazes nobody, spends not a breath in unpleasant exhortation, understands, by Christ's first lesson to himself, that undipped people may be as good as dipped if their hearts are clean; helps, forgives, and cheers, (companionable even to the loving-cup,) as readily the clown as the king; he is the patron of honest drinking; the stuffing of your Martinmas goose is fragrant in his nostrils, and sacred to him the last kindly rays of departing summer. And somehow--the idols totter before him far and near--the Pagan gods fade, _his_ Christ becomes all men's Christ--his name is named over new shrines innumerable in all lands; high on the Roman hills, lowly in English fields;--St. Augustine baptized his first English converts in St. Martin's church at Canterbury; and the Charing Cross station itself has not yet effaced wholly from London minds his memory or his name.

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

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

When the dinner was a little forward, and time for wine came, the Emperor fills his own cup--fills the Empress's--fills St. Martin's,--affectionately hobnobs with St. Martin. The equally loving, and yet more truly believing, Empress, looks across the table, humbly, but also royally, expecting St. Martin, of course, next to hobnob with _her_. St. Martin looks round, first, deliberately; becomes aware of a tatterdemalion and thirsty-looking soul of a beggar at his chair side, who has managed to get _his_ cup filled somehow, also--by a charitable lacquey.

St. Martin turns his back on the Empress, and hobnobs with _him_!

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

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

[Footnote 8: Modern Painters, Plate 73.]

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

"Having passed the Loire at Tours, he traversed the lands of the abbey of St. Martin, which he declared inviolate, and refused permission to his soldiers to touch anything, save water and grass for their horses. So rigid were his orders, and the obedience he exacted in this respect, that a Frankish soldier having taken, without the consent of the owner, some hay, which belonged to a poor man, saying in raillery "that it was but grass," he caused the aggressor to be put to death, exclaiming that "Victory could not be expected, if St. Martin should be offended."

Now, mark you well, this passage of the Loire at Tours is virtually the fulfilment of the proper bounds of the French kingdom, and the sign of its approved and securely set power is "Honour to the poor!" Even a little grass is not to be stolen from a poor man, on pain of Death. So wills the Christian knight of Roman armies; throned now high with God. So wills the first Christian king of far victorious Franks;--here baptized to God in Jordan of his goodly land, as he goes over to possess it.

How long?

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

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

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