peasant whom they trampled under their horses’
hoofs, if he were only renewed and sanctified by the
Spirit of God. They accepted the lowest and
commonest facts of that peasant’s wretched life;
they outdid him in helplessness, loneliness, hunger,
dirt, and slavery; and then said, “Among all
these I can yet be a man of God, wise, virtuous, pure,
free, and noble in the sight of God, though not in
the sight of Caesars, counts, and knights.”
They went on, it is true, to glorify the means above
the end; to consecrate childlessness, self-torture,
dirt, ignorance, as if they were things pleasing to
God and holy in themselves. But in spite of
those errors they wrought throughout Europe a work
which, as far as we can judge, could have been done
in no other way; done only by men who gave up all
that makes life worth having for the sake of being
good themselves and making others good.
Most readers will recollect what an important part
in the old ballads and romances is played by the hermit.
He stands in strongest contrast to the knight.
He fills up, as it were, by his gentleness and self-sacrifice,
what is wanting in the manhood of the knight, the
slave too often of his own fierceness and self-assertion.
The hermit rebukes him when he sins, heals him when
he is wounded, stays his hand in some mad murderous
duel, such as was too common in days when any two
armed horsemen meeting on road or lawn ran blindly
at each other in the mere lust of fighting, as boars
or stags might run. Sometimes he interferes to
protect the oppressed serf; sometimes to rescue the
hunted deer which has taken sanctuary at his feet.
Sometimes, again, his influence is that of intellectual
superiority; of worldly experience; of the travelled
man who has seen many lands and many nations.
Sometimes, again, that of sympathy; for he has been
a knight himself, and fought and sinned, and drank
of the cup of vanity and vexation of spirit, like
the fierce warrior who kneels at his feet.
All who have read (and all ought to have read) Spenser’s
Fairy Queen, must recollect his charming description
of the hermit with whom Prince Arthur leaves Serena
and the squire after they have been wounded by “the
blatant beast” of Slander; when—
“Toward night they came unto a plain
By which a little hermitage there lay
Far from all neighbourhood, the which annoy it may.
“And nigh thereto a little chapel stood,
Which being all with ivy overspread
Decked all the roof, and shadowing the rood,
Seemed like a grove fair branched overhead;
Therein the hermit which his here led
In straight observance of religious vow,
Was wont his hours and holy things to bed;
And therein he likewise was praying now,
When as these knights arrived, they wist not where
nor how.
“They stayed not there, but straightway in did
pass:
Who when the hermit present saw in place,
From his devotions straight he troubled was;
Which breaking off, he toward them did pace
With staid steps and grave beseeming grace:
For well it seemed that whilom he had been
Some goodly person, and of gentle race,
That could his good to all, and well did ween
How each to entertain with courtesy beseen.
