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Pragmatic Perspective 1st ed. 2021

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Ethics Matters
Ethical Issues in
Pragmatic Perspective

Nicholas Rescher
Ethics Matters
 Nicholas Rescher

Ethics Matters
Ethical Issues in Pragmatic Perspective
Nicholas Rescher
Department of Philosophy
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-52035-9    ISBN 978-3-030-52036-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52036-6

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 For Susanne Meinl
Extraordinary Historian
 Preface

Problems of ethics and moral philosophy have preoccupied me for many

years, and I have on various occasions published studies dealing with these
issues in the professional literature of philosophy. A number of these stud-
ies are included here, along with a good deal of unpublished material.
(Details of prior publication are given in the relevant chapter’s notes.)
The book covers a varied spectrum of ethical topics, ranging from the
fundamental considerations regarding ethical values, to the rationale of
obligation, and the ethical management of societal and personal affairs. Its
coordinative aim throughout is to show how fundamental general princi-
ples underpin the stance we can appropriately take on questions of specific
ethical detail.
I am grateful to Estelle Burris for her painstaking efforts in preparing
this material for publication.

Pittsburgh, PA Nicholas Rescher

vii
 Contents

1 Personhood  1

2 The Ethical Import of Value Attribution 41

3 The Rational Validation of Ethical Values 57

4 Rationality and Moral Obligation 73

5 On Compromise and Obligation 85

6 Moral Luck 97

7 Fairness Problems123

8 On the Ethics of Inaction127

9 Ancestor Worship?137

10 Distant Posterity (A Philosophical Glance Along Time’s

Corridor)143

ix
x Contents

11 Is There a Statute of Limitations in Ethics?169

12 An Ethical Paradox173

13 Collective Responsibility177

14 Allocating Scientific Credit193

15 Morality in Government and Politics207

16 Problems of Betterment215

17 Sovereign Immunity in Theological Ethics233

18 Perfectibility Problems237

Coda245

References247

Index251
 CHAPTER 1

Personhood

1   Part I: Humans as Persons

1.1  Human Beings and Being Human

Man is an animal and Homo sapiens a mammalian species. But man is not
just that, but is a person as well. And this means that we must be able to
do—at least sometimes—those sorts of things that mark a person as such
and differentiate them from the rest of creation.
There are various questions of transition which the Theory of Evolution
has made unavoidable. One is that of the point of development at which
the pre-human humanoids morphed into Homo sapiens: what does it
require for a humanoid mammal to be accounted human? And another is
that of the point at which humans qualify as rational agents: what does it
require for a member of Homo sapiens to qualify as a rational and morally
responsible person? Being human is a relatively straightforward matter.
The question just doesn’t arise save in the context of the beings we
encounter on the surface of our planet. But being a person is something a
great deal more difficult and problematic. Here we are dealing not with
biological taxonomy but with a complex manifold and convoluted theo-
retical matters. For here we are dealing not just with facets of what obser-
vationally is the case, but with a manifold of more problematic issues
regarding what can and might be.
In evolutionary biology, Homo sapiens is a developmental subgroup of
beings within the wider category of humanoids. Homo sapiens is a

© The Author(s) 2021 1

N. Rescher, Ethics Matters,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52036-6_1
2 N. RESCHER

classification subgroup of beings included within the potentially wider

groupings of persons.
Persons emerge late in the evolutionary time-table—and for under-
standable reason. For three stages of evaluative sophistication are involved:

1. The plus/minus, pleasure/pain, nice/nasty affective reactivity we

find throughout the organic realm.
2. The desirable/undesirable judgmental responses that provide evalu-
ation as we move it along the transit from higher primates to
proto-humans.
3. The right/wrong of ethical evaluation rooted in the developed sense
of community that comes on the scene with interactive among
Homo sapiens.

Stage 1 requires sensibility, stage 2 requires conscious reactivity, stage 31

requires rational evaluation by comparison with what would be and should
be different and calls for an awareness of contrast.
Persons alone have an inner thought-life. Reflectivity is present through-
out the range of significantly developed organisms: animals can feed them-
selves, wash themselves, protect themselves, move themselves, but only
persons have the cognitive reflexivity needed for forming a self-conception
that enables them to interest themselves, concern themselves, and appre-
hend and appreciate their own consideration. They alone have the self-­
awareness needed for a self-image in comparative content with
feature-attribution to others. Only persons can be proud or ashamed of
themselves. Only they can appreciate that there are things they ought or
ought not to think or do. Only they can gain entry into the realm of nor-
mativity. Animals can form habits of action; persons alone can adopt prac-
tical norms and rules.
Personhood is a well-established category of human understanding.
The Greeks personalized the forces of nature in the Olympian gods. And
throughout human history—from before Aesop until after Brer Rabbit
and Winnie the Pooh—we humans make persons of the animals that sur-
vive us. The “pathetic fallacy”—the ascription of human characteristic to
the innovative creations of nature and artifice (the “cruel sea,” the “unsuit-
able” machine, the “unrelenting” rain, and the like)—is something so
natural and commonplace as to deserve a kinder name.
 1 PERSONHOOD 3

To all appearances, then, we ourselves hold dual citizenship, both in the

human community and in the society of persons. However kinship with
our fellows has a somewhat different aspect in the two cases.
We are bound to our fellow humans by bonds of biological kinship.
And these ground claims to fraternal solidarity that enjoin mankind and in
the pursuit of basic needs—the security of life, liberty, opportunity in the
pursuit of happiness.
Personhood, by contrast, is a more difficult matter. Its impetus is rather
paternal than fraternal. To persons we can not only support in basic needs
but support in ethical innovation, to enhance the realization of potential,
to support their cultural growth, to aid not only their well-being and secu-
rity and to promote their ultimate ethical and “spiritual” constitution. For,
like good parents we actually should—and often do—want to see our fel-
low persons to be not just better off but to become better people.

1.2  Capacities of Persons
Personhood is a decisive classification and being a person is a binary mat-
ter—one either is or is not a person. But while we cannot be more or less
of a person, one can be a better or worse person. One can certainly honor
the obligations and harness the opportunities that being a person puts at
one’s disposal to a greater of lesser extent. In this regard personhood is
like kingship: a matter of better or worse even if not of more or less.
It is important to distinguish between degrees of personhood (which
there cannot be) and degrees of evidence for ascribing personhood (which
there certainly are). Granted, the grounds for ascribing personhood to X
can be partial and incomplete, but X’s personhood (if indeed there) can-
not prove to be partial and incomplete. Incomplete evidence for some-
thing is not evidence for something incomplete. Again, someone can
display and manifest the features requisite for personhood to varying
degrees, but that does not make this individual more or less of a person.
To reemphasize, personhood as such is a matter of the possession of capa-
bilities and not of the extent and requiring of their actualization. The
extent to which a creature quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck may
constitutes a stranger case for saying that it is a duck, but it does not make
it more of a duck. Like being a person, being a duck, is not a matter
of degree.
As a creature that makes its way in the world by the guidance of infor-
mation, we intelligent agents have a need for knowledge. And this enjoins
4 N. RESCHER

a cognitive dynamism on us whose natural consequence is a disaffection

from intellectual standing and an aversion to boredom. Our minds require
cognitive nourishment every bit as much as our bodies require physical
nourishment, and keeping the mind occupied becomes as important as
keeping the body fed. Characteristic of persons at large is an impetus to
being what is going on in the world and how things function there.
Persons must be mind-endowed. They must be capable of having belief,
forming opinions about things—in sum to process information, be it cor-
rectly or incorrectly. But they must also be capable of having evaluative
attitudes about things, pro or con, favorable or unfavorable.
Persons are bound to have beliefs about how matters stand in the world,
creating for themselves some sort of mental thought-model about its
arrangements. And they have various needs and wants that give them an
interest in what goes on. On this basis—their beliefs and their interests—
they make choices. It is this capacity to deploy beliefs, evaluations, and
choices into conjoint operation in an endeavor to produce results is what
defines them as persons. Agency guided by cognition, evaluation, and
choice constitute the heart of the matter. And to be fully a person, a being
should not only preside over the aforementioned capabilities of cognitive
and practical intelligence (belief, desire, choice) but be conscious and
indeed self-conscious thereof.
A reasonable accommodation has to be achieved between two conflict-
ing ideas:

• That the limits of a person’s cognitive world are set by the limits of
the individual’s experience. Experience accordingly sets limits to the
individual’s cognitive reach beyond which it cannot venture very far.
• That a person’s reflexivity of understanding enables them to realize
that reality extends above and beyond them on cognitive range.

The idea of a self, predicated on the contrast between the individual con-
cerned and the rest—both the impersonal remainder but also the personal
others. And persons as intelligent beings have a conception of their place
in impersonal nature and also as members of a wider grouping of other
persons.
This twofold, contrastive differentiation is at the cognitive disposal of
persons as intelligent agents, and endows them with an unavoidable aware-
ness of a realm of being that extends beyond the self.
 1 PERSONHOOD 5

The evaluative dimension spills over into the cognitive. Persons are first
and foremost cognitive agents, beings who act on the basis of information
and thought. For such beings, radical skepticism is not an option: a sys-
temic refusal to accept contentions creates a 100 percent certainty of lack-
ing the information needed to guide action. A person can reasonably be a
mild sceptic, denying the prospect of settling factual issues with 100 per-
cent certainty. But a person cannot reasonably be radical sceptic holding
that all factual claims are equimeritorious and that none is deserving of
greater credence than any other. For without evaluation rational decision
and thereby rational action becomes impossible and persons will no longer
function as rational beings.

1.3  Requisites for Personhood

And so, it has to be acknowledged that the physical embodiment of per-
sons (if any) involves issues very different from that of personhood itself.
The person at issue might be a multi-nodal plurality of jellyfish-like crea-
ture swimming connectively in a soupy sea. Or it might be a climate of
disembodied potencies leaping from one organic level to another tempo-
rarily enhancing it to a different mode of realization. The possibilities are
endless, and await the inauguration of science-fiction unified. But this has
important consequences, namely, that personhood as such is detached
from its physical manifestations, independent of its species and kinds.
(Personhood as such knows no race or sex.) The duties, rights, and claims
of personhood stand independent of all of these further taxonomic consid-
erations. They are something more fundamental and deep-rooted, with
ethical and metaphysical ramifications that stand independently on their
own feet.
So just what are these person-characterizing capabilities—those person-
abilities as we shall call them. To all appearances they stand as follows:

1. Intelligence: the ability deploy thought for acquiring and processing

information, encompassing consciousness, perception, reasoning
2. Agency: the ability to perform actions—alike mental (e.g., direct
attention) and physical (i.e., shift stones) and form habits and
rules of action
3. Will: the ability to make decisions, act purposively, using intelligence
to direct action for the realization of chosen objectives, thus fusing
the two preceding abilities.
6 N. RESCHER

4. Affectivity and judgment: the capacity for positive and negative

reductivity, to feel pleasure and pain and to evaluate conditions pro
and con, so as to effect evaluation and appraisal, prioritization,
assessment of worth
5. Reflectivity or self-awareness: the realization of oneself as a being
having the preceding abilities that characterize personhood
6. Communication: the ability to exchange thought with others
7. Socialization: community enlistment and social interaction subject
to shared norms and rules

The possession of these personabilities does not require the agent to exer-
cise them constantly and consistently. It is simply a matter of being able to
do so often and to some nontrivial extent. Capacity rather than perfor-
mance is of the essence here.
These personabilities are majoritatively necessary and sufficient condi-
tions for qualifying as a person.2 Here the connection is one of logico-­
conceptual implication. With evidentiation, however, far less is required.
The connection need not be one of logico-conceptual necessitation, but
can be a matter of eventual indications, with evidentiation, with consider-
ations of inductive harmonization now in the foreground.
Above all, persons must be able to obtain and manage information.
And to this end communication is virtually inevitable. For one thing there
is the matter of communication with oneself of other times and places by
means of memory, recollection, memoranda, and records. For another
there is the matter of communication with others. The recording and
transmission of information is thus an essential resource of personhood.
And the use of language is indemonstrable for the realization of these
requisites. All of the essentials of language use—pattern recognition, sym-
bolist realization, pattern detection, habitat acquisition, rule following,
etc.—are needed for the operation of the process that implements person-­
definitive capabilities.
Persons occupy a special place on Nature’s stage because they are “free
agents.” They are agents because they can act through thought-guided
intervention in the course of events. And they are free because their
thought can be developed autonomously rather than as an automaticity
responding to experimental conditioning. No doubt higher primates—
and even “lower” animals—can also engage in thought-guided action, but
only as the product of stimulus-response experience. Human persons can
move beyond this to shape their thinking by experience-transcending
 1 PERSONHOOD 7

speculation and conjecture in the light of speculation, conjecture, hypoth-

esis, and counterfactual. Ironically one of the hallmarks of this cognitive
skill is the prominence of error due to conclusive-presupposing and wish-
ful thinking. The autonomous self-management of belief characteristic of
freely formed beliefs and decisions makes persons cognitive amphibians
capable of functioning alike in the spheres of reality and speculative con-
jecture and mere—and even fact-controversy—positivity.
Affectivity and judgment, of course, have both a positive and a negative
dimension. But equally important is the negative domain where the ques-
tion is: Can they suffer—physically or mentally? Can they undergo pain,
dismay, frustration? The capacity to function in this domain of the plea-
sure/pain spectrum is yet another key definitive facet of personhood.
Persons are marked as such not only by positive but by negative features
as well. As finite beings they are subject to physical pain, mental suffering,
and existential termination (i.e., death). Be they natural or artificial, per-
sons are subject to the principle that “nothing lasts forever.” Even if a sort
of immobility would be achieved through ongoing processual reportative
we would come up against the Ship of Theseus paradox that a reconsti-
tuted vessel is only by custom and jurisprudence the same. The Tragic
Sense of Life of which the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote
so movingly is as inseparable from persons as their own shadow.
Whenever there is a plurality of interactive persons it is only to be
expected that persons should cluster together into groups. Many factors
conspire to result in this: the efficacy of collaboration, the commonality of
interest or experience (“Birds of a feather flock together”). The clustering
is all too common, “Don’t take it personally” means “Don’t be surprised
or offended at being treated in that way; everyone in your group is going
to be treated likewise.”
The connectivity among persons that is established via groupings
reflects a social proximity that is clearly a matter of more or less within
many divisions: kinship, friendship, comradeship, colleagueship, etc.—and
above all shared experiences: old soldiers find companionship even with
the enemies they fought earlier on. (When you meet in totally strange fel-
low timespans of distant corners of the world you are immediately friends.)

1.4  Being a Person
To count as a person calls for functioning on two fronts: the physical to
provide for interaction with nature that can provide information, and the
8 N. RESCHER

mental to access, process, and use this information. Both physically inter-
active and cognitively functional operations must figure in a person’s
repertoire.
A person must be able to realize things. But are there any specific, par-
ticular, identifiable things that a person must be able to realize?
Presumably yes—at least at the level of capacities and capabilities.
Presumably Cartesian reformalization of an ability to think of oneself as a
being, “a thing that can think,” is something of which any actual person
must be capable. The ability to see oneself as a distinctive unit in the
world’s larger scheme if things—to think the distinction between self and
other—is an integral essential feature of personhood.
The personabilities are not necessarily conjoined: it is theoretically pos-
sible for beings to have some while lacking others. Thus in specific

• A being could have intelligence but lack agency. It could be a mere

spectator to events it cannot affect, a witness to but not participant
in the passing scene.
• A being could act without itself possessing cognition and intelli-
gence. It can be a mere machine like those that nowadays produce
automobiles.
• A being could act with willing purposiveness but lack the cognitive
integration of selfhood. It can function as would a band of musicians
who just happen to perform the same piece.

Such beings, though possible, would not qualify as persons.

The personabilities fall into two groups: the indispensable and the likely
(or quasi-mandatory). The first division includes intelligence, agency, will,
affability, reflexivity. The latter category covers the collective aspect of
communication and socialization. In effect this means that the social
aspect could theoretically be absent or—as rather multi-nodal beings—
integrated into one single “organic” unit.
Being a person is a matter of performatory potential—of the capacity
for doing the things that typify the things that persons typically do. It is
not a matter of more or less—or even of better or worse. What is taxo-
nomically determinative is simply whether or not, and not more or less or
better or worse. Even doing something poorly manifests the potential of
doing it. (One need not be a competent performer to manifest a capacity.)
Personhood is a tertiary property. Magnets have the dispositional
capacity to collect iron filings. Sugar has the dispositional capacity to
 1 PERSONHOOD 9

dissolve in water and diffuse its sweetness there. Acts of violence or of

vandalism have the dispositional capacity to evoke shock and aversion in
humans. Dispositions of this sort—to evoke a certain sort of cognitive or
affective reaction in humans—are tertiary properties. (Secondary proper-
ties, by contrast, inhere in those despondent features that evoke a sensory
regime in sentient beings.) The tertiary properties correlate with the metal
responses for mind-endowed beings, the responses being judgmental
rather that sensitive (as with secondary properties). Personhood is a
descriptive characterization of just this sort.

2   Part II: Non-human Persons

2.1  Other Persons
Interestingly, it does not lie in the concept of a person that one must nec-
essarily have a body. To be sure, one must be able to act, but this agency
could in theory be purely mental—involving solely, say, the direct com-
munication between minds through a sympathetic resonance of some sort.
Only contingently—only among agents for whom the transmission of
information requires sending physical signals and where its recording
requires a physical depository—will persons have to be embodied.
Being a person thus contrasts with being human. We humans are Homo
sapiens, a biological species that has evolved here on planet earth. To be
sure, we are—or like to think we are—persons. But there is no good rea-
son to think that we have a monopoly here—that we are the only persons
in the universe. After all, Homo sapiens is a biological category. And what is
at issue with personhood is a functional category, a being with the capacity
to do certain sorts of things. And there is no basis for envisioning exclusiv-
ity here.
There is no decisive reason for thinking that humans are the sole and
exclusive instances of access to personhood. For one cannot but acknowl-
edge the very real prospect that those non-human persons could per-
form—and possibly perform better than ourselves—far better at the
various person-characterizing abilities than we humans.
Christiaan Huygens’ (d. 1695) book Cosmotheros (published posthu-
mously in 1698) was a landmark in the history of speculation about alien
life in the cosmos. On the one hand, it was a monumental exercise in
imaginative speculation on a scale not reduplicated to the time of Jules
Verne and H. G. Wells. But on the other, it was disappointingly
10 N. RESCHER

conservative. For Huygens, “planetarians” were pretty much like ourselves

in makeup, in social organization, and in culture. The difference for him
was not all that great. Their variation for his contemporary Netherlanders
was not greater—and sometimes less—than that of his contemporary
South Sea islanders.
And such a failure of imagination also threatens our present delibera-
tions. The threat is that just because the concept at issue with person-here
and person-there is one and the same, the realization of that concept must
also be very similar. But this similarity should in fact extend no further
than that for conceptual features that are at issue with personhood as such.
And that list of indistinguishable essentials can surely not extend far
beyond the handful of aforementioned personabilities.
Examining the scale of nature enable us to see what separates us from
the “lower” form of animal life, thus manifesting the basis for our claims
to rise above those “inferior” species. The issue is what precedes Homo
sapiens in the evolutionary order is critical here. However, the present
deliberations call for a very different perspective. Now the question is not
what separates us from the “below,” but rather what joins us to what does
or might lie “alongside.” The crux here is not differences from the lower
forms of being, but rather commonalties that join us to other “higher”
forms—be they actual or possible.

2.2  The Evolutionary Perspective

How is it that persons have come to exist in the world? Like everything
else they have come to be there in the course of natural events inserted
into Nature’s scheme of things by the processes of evolution: first apes,
then humanoids, then proto-humans, and then full-fledged human per-
sons—and elsewhere conceivably either sort of persons emerged by analo-
gous developmental processes. There is no reason why a Nature capable of
evolutionary intelligence would not in due course engender rationality as
well, and the same with an emergence of agents whose doings are guided
by intelligence and reason. Like persons and people, in the course of natu-
ral processuality evolution has given rise to persons as well. There is no
need to think that anything super- or supranatural is at work here. Beings
with all sorts of abilities—physical, perceptual, cognitive, and imaginative
engaged in the course of Nature’s ongoing processuality. There is no need
to exert the manifold of personabilities from this course of things.
 1 PERSONHOOD 11

Thought, decision, speculation, and the rest are emergent capacities that
increasingly complex and substandard natural beings have come to muster.
Persons as we know them are the product of evolutionary develop-
ment. Apes evolved into humanoids; humanoids into humans, humans
into persons. Evolution brings new qualities to the fore that can transcend
origins. DNA molecules are an assemblage of physical atoms but they
encompass the key to organic life. Birds doubtless initially developed song
for signaling warnings of danger, but that did not preclude the evolution-
ary transmutation of song-behaviors into means for establishing territori-
ality against potential competition. The physical rooting of an activity or
process does not restrict or circumscribe its functional character.
The emergence of new modes and levels of operation, function, and
behavior that transcend the capabilities of their causal origination is in fact
characteristic of evolutionary processes. For the first microseconds of cos-
mic history after the big bang there was no chemistry. The early stages of
the universe had no place for biology. There was no foothold in nature for
laws of sociology or market-economics before the origin of man. The
emergence of new phenomena at different levels of scale and organiza-
tional complexity in nature means the emergence of new processes and
stats at these levels. The transition from protophysical to physical and then
to chemical and onwards to biological law reflects a succession of new
levels of operational complexity. And this holds good for purposive intel-
ligence as well—it is a new phenomenon that emerges at a new level of
operational complexity. New products and processes constantly develop
from earlier modes of organization. The emergence of the psychological
processes that open up meaning and purpose is simply another step in this
course of development of new levels of functional complexity.
It is important to bear in mind, however, that while causal explanation
proceeds from a mind-external point of view, cognitive functions like
meaning and purpose can be comprehended as such only from within—in
the order of hermeneutical understanding. The physical processes that lie
at the causal basis of thought are, as such, fully open to second-party
(“external”) examination, description, explanation, and modelling. But
the ideational aspect of thinking can of course only be apprehended in
one’s own first-hand experience (though of course it can be described to
others who have similar experiences at their disposal.) There is, accord-
ingly, a crucial difference between having a causally productive account of
the physical-process concomitants of human mental operations (of the
sort that biological evolution provides) and having experiential access to
12 N. RESCHER

its products “from within.” Meaning, intending, understanding, purpos-

ing are all resources that are only at the disposal of someone who himself
has the appropriate sort of foothold within the realm of mind.
Understanding them requires performing them, and performing them
requires being a mind and having those mental experiences. (Explaining
them, on the other hand, can, in principle, be managed by any sort of suf-
ficiently intelligent being.)
Proper heed of this distinction between the productive causal basis and
the descriptive functional nature of mental operations should lead to the
recognition that one should not ask an evolutionary account of mind to
do the impossible in this regard. Such an account can perfectly well explain
the developmental origination of mental operations in terms of their causal
basis, but it cannot make their inner experiential character intelligible. The
existence of mental functions like meaning and purpose can be accounted
for on evolutionary principles. But their qualitative nature is nevertheless
something that can be adequately comprehended only “from within,”
from a performer’s rather than an observer’s perspective. The purposive
intentionality of certain mental processes is part and parcel of the internal-
ized, experiential aspect of the workings of the mind.
One can fully understand a physical process like the spider’s web-­
weaving without being a spider—without ourselves being in a position to
perform this process and so without having what it feels like to perform
the activity. But one cannot fully understand a cognitive process like color-­
vision or symbol-interpretation or anger without experiencing that sort of
thing. It is one thing to explain how operations originate and another to
know what it is like to perform them. The physiology of inebriation can be
learned by everyone. But only the person who drinks can comprehend it
in the “inner” experiential mode of cognitive access. The mental perfor-
mances that reflect meaning and purpose can be understood only from
within the orbit of experience (though their occurrence can doubtless be
detected and accounted for through external scientific-causal examina-
tion). Talk of meaning, intending, purposing, and the like is bound to
experience—to performer’s perspective—and thus differs from the neuro-
physiology of brain processes which is wholly accessible to external observ-
ers. They reflect issues that evolutionary explanations simply do not
address, given their altogether different orientation to the causal dimen-
sion of the matter.
An evolutionary account of the physical processes involved in mental
operations is thus by no means reductive (or eliminative) of the inner
 1 PERSONHOOD 13

dimension of intentionality and meaning. In addressing the issue of the

physical conditions and processes that engender (i.e., causally produce)
those mental operations at issue with intending, purposing, meaning, etc.,
it is by its very nature silent regarding their phenomenological character,
which can be grasped only “from within.” An evolutionary productive/
causal account is developed from the angle of the observer’s perspective,
whereas the substantive content of these processes has of necessity to be
grasped from within the vantage point of a performer’s perspective. And
of course the former, scientific, evolutionary, neurophysiological account
of thought processes does nothing to eliminate or preclude the contextual
aspect of meaning and purpose which can be appreciated only from the
“internal,” performer’s standpoint. But incompleteness is one thing, and
defectiveness quite another. The former (evolutionary) account is nowise
deficient or defective for failing to provide for the latter (phenomenologi-
cal/hermeneutic) one—which is in principle impossible because of the
different levels of consideration that are involved.
All that we can reasonably ask of an evolutionary account of mental
operations is that it should explain the emergence of the capacities and
processes thought. The inner phenomenology of thinking lies beyond its
range—not because of its deficiencies, but because of the simple fact that
it addresses altogether different issues. We cannot fault an evolutionary
account of the origination of mind for failing to provide that which no
causal account of mind’s origination could possibly deliver on its own—
cognitive access to the inner, phenomenological nature of mental experi-
ence. The nature of the apparatus of thought does not restrict the substance
of our thinking. An evolutionary account of mind is not at odds with
intentionality, purpose, meaning, and the like because it does not even
address these issues. And this is not a shortcoming because it is designed
to answer very different sorts of questions—questions which lie in the
order of causal explanation rather than hermeneutic explication.
An evolutionary account of the development of our capacities for men-
tal operation accordingly leaves open scope for purpose and meaning
because it does not—and cannot by its very nature—shut the door on
issues that it simply does not address. And it clearly cannot be faulted for
failing to deal with an issue (viz. the nature of understanding and inten-
tionality) that lies entirely outside the range of its causal concerns.
Intentionality (aims and purposes and the like) forms part of the
thought-machinery of thinkers, even as mathematical objects triangles and
spheres do. They do not evolve in nature but come to feature in the
14 N. RESCHER

operations of (sufficiently sophisticated) minds operating in social interac-

tion. How minds arise and come to acquire their talents and capacities is
one thing, what they do with them is another. Biological evolution has to
do with the first; intentionality with the second. Evolution operates with
respect to the workings of mind—with its processes; intentionality is a
matter of its products. There is—and can be—no incompatibility between
them, seeing that different issues are involved.
To be sure, then, an evolutionary account of mind is predicated on a
position that is “materialistic” in viewing the mind as having a crucial basis
for its operations in the processes of the body (and the brain in particu-
lar).3 But this sort of causal-origin materialism is nowise at odds with an
hermeneutical idealism which maintains that we understand various of the
world’s processes in terms of concepts and categories drawn from the
“inner” experience of the mind’s self-observation.4 Evolution’s “mechani-
cal,” causal accounting for our experiences of purposiveness and inten-
tionality is nowise at odds with the inner experienced aspect of these
phenomena. The former issue belongs to the domain of the causal expla-
nation of experiencing as events in the physical world, the latter to the
phenomenology of our experiences as phenomena in the world of thought.
The long and short of it is that a Darwinian account of the origin of
mind does not—and by its very nature cannot—conflict with intentional-
ity and purpose because its range simply does not extend to this domain.
But of course, it would simply be foolish to deny the originative power of
evolutionary processes. To say that a purposive being cannot arise by evo-
lution in a theretofore purpose-lacking world is much like saying that a
seeing being cannot arise by evolution in a theretofore vision-lacking
world or that an intelligent being cannot arise by evolution in a thereto-
fore intelligence-lacking world. A commitment to the spirit of Darwinism
may well impede an acceptance of the purposiveness OF nature, but it
clearly does not and cannot impede an acceptance of purposiveness IN
nature, through the emergence within nature of beings who themselves
have purposes, intentions, goals, etc. No doubt, Darwinian natural selec-
tion ill-accords with an anthropomorphism of nature, but it certainly does
not preclude an anthropomorphism of man.
The long and short of it is that acceptance of an evolutionary account
of the origination and operation of human intelligence leaves ample scope
for meaning and purpose in the domain of our human doings and deal-
ings. And it would surely be both naive and mistaken to think that our
 1 PERSONHOOD 15

human assessment of purpose, meaning, and value is somehow under-

mined or neglected by an account which sees their origination in capacities
that have been acquired through development in the natural course of
evolutionary events. After all arranging that logical reasoning, like our
other capabilities, has come our way in the evolutionary course of things.
If indeed Homo sapiens were the only type of persons actually to exist in
the universe then this has to be seen as a matter of sheer contingency.
There can be no sense of fundamental principle of natural law why other,
different realizations of the class persons should not be in existence. The
principle of ontological uniformity. What can happen in fact once here and
now can possibly (in theory) happen once more there and then!
On this basis, there can, of course, be non-human persons. For it is
clear that there is no reason of principle—no basic laws of nature (be they
physical, chemical, or biological—that could preclude the possibility of
persons other than Homo sapiens. With a bit of speculation one can readily
construct a list of possibilities ranging from

• Humanoids: evolutionary antecedents to Homo sapiens

• Aliens
• Robots
• Creatures of fiction (e.g., Merlin)
• Superior beings (e.g., angels)

Theoretically persons can come into the world by artifice: science fic-
tion has long inured us to the idea of sophisticated robots that have
advanced from “artificial intelligence” to “artificial personality.” And—
however much precedence and principal rationality may stand in the
way—there is no reason of fundamental principle why this project cannot
be carried to successful completion in the creation of machines that have
the entire array of the personabililtes at their disposal.
Moreover, there is yet another natural way to realize this end, namely,
evolution. For in our own case, if authentic persons we indeed are, then
evolution is how we get there.
After all, the prospect of non-human persons—the concept of persons
over and above humans—should be seen as commonplace. It is a long-­
standing and familiar conception. We find it well entrenched in religion:
with gods, and angels, and the “persons” of the Trinity. We find it at work
in the concept of extraterrestrial aliens, common thought, science fiction
16 N. RESCHER

and not absence from science itself. It is at work in speculation about

robots and artificial beings combined in the laboratory.
Special complexities arise in the case of multi-modal compound per-
sons. There are various possibilities here. One striking example would be
a plurality of persons jointly and collectively operating as a single unified
power-steamer in a unified directorate. A single “body” is thus shared in a
joint governing board composed of otherwise distinct persons. In this
way, a plurality of persons join in an interactive collaboration to create yet
another additional person —a “legal person” as it were—constituted by the
entire collectivity.

2.3  Identifying and Re-identifying Persons

Let it be that we see ourselves duly entitled to accept X as a person. But
which person? How are persons to be identified?
Persons—as we know or can imagine them—are embodied beings. In
the usual course of things we can thus identify them via their bodies. But
in theory—and in imaginative science fiction—we can envision persons as
impersonal forces or agencies. Then we can identify them only by what
they do. And even when embodied the prospect of their changing bodies
becomes imaginable, as does their splitting—say as X or Y every other day.
Should this happen, one would need to rethink the issue of personal iden-
tify from the ground up. But in the meantime it is best to walk on the side
of the street where the sunshine of realism shines, proceeding—ad interim
at least—to have it that a person is defined by what it does and how it goes
about doing it in the physical realm.
The issue of reidentification can be addressed analogously. When are we
dealing with the same person as the one we dealt with a month or year or
decade ago? This too can be addressed on the principle that persons are
defined by what they physically do. Yet, even in the absence of physical
continuity there is the psychic continuity of thought life—the perpetuation
of capabilities, the continuity of recalled experience and perspective, of
decision and action, and the harming of experiential flux and its aid to
continuity in memory. The continuity of personhood, in sum, is encapsu-
lated in that of experience (cognitive and emotive) of mental life in gen-
eral. Reidentification of person lies in the continuous functioning of a
personality. And given the vast number of different ways in which each of
these requisites can be realized, and the multitude of the resulting
 1 PERSONHOOD 17

combinations, the uniqueness of persons in any finite universe should be

no surprise.
Every person is unique. Everyone has their own characteristic make-up,
their own way of thinking and doing, their own style. (Le style c’est
l’hommes). With persons this uniqueness is not physical (as with finger-
prints or facial identification parameters). Rather it is procedural, behav-
ioral, operational. It is this uniqueness of style that constitutes what is
called personality. And it is this that identifies persons as the individuals
they are.
The theology of divine or angelic persons gives rise to unique difficul-
ties of its own. The Neoplatonism and Christian doctrine of the trinity has
engendered endless theological and philosophical debates and disputes,
focusing on the mystery of how a single, unique being can be constituted
as three distinct persons. Possibly available here is the seemingly viable
idea of a single person with distinct personalities manifesting themselves in
different relationships (much as a single woman may in different contexts
function in different roles as a mother, a wife, and a physician). But no
single such resolution has ever proved adequate to the varying perspec-
tives and conceptions of all different parties to the discussion.
Even as embodied persons who can in theory be deathless and immor-
tal, replacing and renewing whatever constitutes their physical makeup,
happen to wear out. But as this process continues ongoingly over time, the
cognitive dynamism inherent in personhood eventually changes the pat-
terns of thought and cognate that we read the condition of the Ship of
Theseus puzzle where the question of self-identity becomes increasingly
pressing in the wake of an increasingly altered self. As the thread of same-
ness becomes increasingly stretched in an ever-changing universe to a
point where it is so thin that its identification becomes a matter of courtesy
rather that constituted fact. Theology is wise to emplace its eternal angels
into a heavenly realm detached from the ever-changing consolations of a
natural world.
Personality—the mode and manner of the comportment of persons as
manifested through their doings and dealings, their performative style—is
the secular equivalent of their traditional “mortal soul.”
Persons as a generic type is exemplified in particular individuals as
instances. These are unique, each possessed of a “one of a kind” persona.
From the perspective of others this is a “personality,” from the perspective
of the individual it is an ego. (Borrowing in this usage to indicate that
18 N. RESCHER

someone is outstandingly noteworthy, we also characterize such a “celeb-

rity” as a “personality.”)
The persona of a person consists in the unique amalgam of personal
characteristics (personabilities) that identify this individual and set it apart
from all others. Such a recognition of one’s own uniqueness and conse-
quent acknowledgment of the uniqueness of others is part and parcel of
the endowment of persons in general.
People define what they are by what they do. And this indeed is immor-
tal. It is what it is—now and forever. As the Poet Omar Khayyam has it in
his Rubaiyat: “The moving finger writes and, having wrote, moves on;
not all thy pretty not wit will call it back to cancel half-time; nor all thy
tears wash out a word of it.” What we do ever after remains part of the
world’s history. It may be but a drop in the vast ocean of world history,
but it is there as an indispensable and ineradicable part; and one in whose
absence the control could not be what it is.
Person-formulation is a characteristic proceeding. The aim of the pro-
cess is to one person for another by adopting adopt many of the individu-
al’s identifying features and personabilities. Of course this project can only
be carried through to a limited extent. It may, however, on some occur-
rences be sufficiently developed to mislead parties into mistaken beliefs.

3   Part III: Personhood as Transcendental

3.1  Personhood as Reflective
Persons, like books, have two dimensions: the concrete, physical, observ-
able open to sensory inspection, and the intrinsic, covert, reflective dimen-
sion of meaning that comes to expression only in the interaction with
others. The physical aspect of the book is observable to everyone—even to
him for whom its text is “all Greek.” And then there are those who can
enter into the meanings and messages that those ink-marks represent.
Similarly, a person has an exotic open to observation and inspection as well
as a covert to existence dimensions of personality and character accessible
only in interaction with persons, the individual itself included. A person is
thus Janus focused, presenting one aspect (the ontological) to the world
at large and another (the ethical) only to the world of persons.
A person thus occupies two realms: the overt realm of discernible con-
stitution and the covert and observation-transcendent reality of apprehen-
sible significance and symbolic meaning. And just as books can exist as
 1 PERSONHOOD 19

such (rather than as mere physical objects) only in a world where there are
minds to apprehend their message, so here are persons as such (rather than
mere physical beings) only in worlds where this is apprehensible by intel-
ligent agents (conservably including only the individual itself).5
Presumably we have no doubt that we ourselves are persons. But what
of others? To view someone as a person is to regard them as being most
like ourselves in all fundamental respects.
Attributions of personhood transcends the information provided by
sensory observation. For being a person calls for the capacity to consider
a whole host of mental operations—understanding evaluating feelings,
etc.,—whose functionary can at most be evidential but not established by
observational means. Observation tells one that you are following X—i.e.,
following with a view to finding X’s intended destination—is merely a
plausible conjecture about matters above and beyond the sensory realm
and invokes information supplements by plausible guesswork alone. That
and how you move is observable; why you do so is not (even though it
often can be inferred plausibly for the former). The imputation of purpose
is observation transcendent; it can be evidentiated but not established by
observational means.
When accepting someone as a bona fide person I am not making an
observation report but moving beyond the observable realm. So we now
stand at the threshold of a somewhat convoluted but crucially important
line of thought resting on two crucial considerations:

Point 1. Although ascriptions of personhood can be evidentiated and plau-

siblified, they cannot be conclusively established and incontestably
demonstrated.

This is so because personhood requires that the being in question is

• An intelligent agent
• Capable of forming a self-image
• Possessed of an action-guiding manifold of values and per-
ceived interests

None of these functions lie open to sensory inspiration.

Granted, the actions that reflect this modus operandi can be observed.
But neither individually nor collectively is this conclusive. Those
20 N. RESCHER

observables probabilify, plausibilify, substantiate—but they do not estab-

lish, prove, demonstrate. They confirm but do not establish. And this
leads to:

Point 2. In the final analysis, the ascription of personhood is not a matter of

established fact but is an evidence-transcending imputation. It involves a
move from likelihood and plausibility to assurance and factuality and accord-
ingly is not an observational report, but a transcendental imputation. Its
justification accordingly does not lie in the epistemic realm of factual knowl-
edge, but in the realm of situationally appropriate supposition.

The capabilities that are definitive of personhood fall into two groups:
the overt that readily admit of observational/empirical verification, and
the covert that do not. The grouping is as follows:

• Overt: intelligence and the behavioral-oriented goals that guide our

interactions with the external world)
• Obscure: will motivation and self-oriented values (reflexivity in self-­
concerned matters)

What actions we perform in the world is relatively open to inspection.

And so is what comprises the needs and wants at which those actions aim.
But objectives, plans, and the like are another matter. And as any intelli-
gence operative knows, capabilities are easy to master but intentions more
difficult to discern and are wide open to conjecture and guesswork, seeing
that crucial features of personhood relate to issues regarding how such a
being thinks and—above all—thinks of themselves.
Instantiation of humanity is basically observational and empiri-
cal, but personality is an observation-transcending (albeit observation-­
evidentiated) reflection of mind-geared capabilities, which turns on the
imputation of mental capabilities. The difference renders in the distinction
between seeing that something is so and seeing something as being so.
Personhood accordingly is not a matter of evidentiation but of
indication-­based imputation: its justifying crux is not overtly conclusive
evidentiation but plausible but conjectural imputation. It is out of reach of
observational determination. Its entanglement in matters of motivation
and reflexivity render it (to some extent) transcendental, so that its ascrip-
tion is always (to some extent), presumptive. The (remote) possibility of a
slip between cup and lip—between claim and actuality—is always there.
 1 PERSONHOOD 21

3.2  Grounding Claims to Personhood

Claims to personhood are made on behalf of two groups of individuals:
(1) the very small group consisting only of oneself and (2) others.
In claiming personhood for oneself, one has two pivotal resources:
introspection (i.e., reflexive self-appreciation) and observation. This dual-
ity greatly ensures the task by reducing the need for speculative conjecture
and reference by analogy. The self has prioritized access not to what it
overtly does, but to what it understands and undertakes thereby. With
others, by contrast, we rely to a far greater extent on analogy, supposition,
and speculation.
To claim personhood for oneself one must view oneself in a certain
particular light. One must attribute to oneself all of the various person-­
essential characteristic capacities and capabilities: intelligence, agency reac-
tivity(?), and the rest. One must, in sum, regard oneself in the light not
just as a species member (Homo sapiens) but as an intelligent and respon-
sible agent capable of making appropriately informed judgments and
decisions.
No doubt there are people who do not view themselves in this light.
Some do not bother to think of the matter being sufficiently engaged on
other fronts. Some have given the matter much thought (Lucretus and
Spinoza) and have come to hold other discordant view about humans
(themselves included). But no matter—as already emphasized the issue is
one of what people can do not what they actually do.
In failing to see oneself as a person and seeing oneself as something
else—a robot, perhaps, or a creature of someone else’s thought—one can
readily be mistaken. But what of the other side? Can we be mistaken in
thinking of oneself as a person? For sure we are—or can be—mistaken
about virtually anything! But if they indeed are intelligent beings who are
possessed of appropriately correct conceptions of the matter and who
think of themselves as persons on this basis, then this is something about
which they cannot (in the postulated circumstances) possibly be mistaken.
The ultimate reason for acknowledging others as persons lies in the eth-
ics of self-respect. The personhood we cherish in ourselves is entangled
with that yearning for companionship and that generosity of self-analysis
beings as dividing acknowledgment and affinity. We could not regard
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foot, and chamber men,” independently of the noble maidens who
tended her, and who seem to have been equally served by three
“valets de main, de pied, et de chambre.”
But short-lived was the glory; no, I will not say that, let me rather
remark that short-lived was the worldly splendor of the chivalrous
my-lady countess. She had rendered all the service she could, when
she fell wounded before Paris, and was basely abandoned for a
while by her own party. She was rescued, ultimately, by D’Alençon,
but only to be more disgracefully abandoned on the one side, and
evilly treated on the other. When as a bleeding captive she was
rudely dragged from the field at Compiègne; church, court, and
chivalry, ignobly abandoned the poor and brave girl who had served
all three in turn. By all three she was now as fiercely persecuted; and
it may safely be said, that if the English were glad to burn her as a
witch, to account for the defeat of the English and their allies, the
French were equally eager to furnish testimony against her.
Her indecision and vacillation after falling into the hands of her
enemies, would seem to show that apart from the promptings of
those who had guided her, she was but an ordinary personage. She,
however, never lost heart, and her natural wit did not abandon her.
“Was St. Michael naked when he appeared to you?” was a question
asked by one of the examining commissioners. To which Jeanne
replied, “Do you think heaven has not wherewith to dress him?” “Had
he any hair on his head?” was the next sensible question. Jeanne
answered it by another query, “Have the goodness to tell me,” said
she, “why Michael’s head should have been shaved?” It was easy, of
course, to convict a prejudged and predoomed person, of desertion
of her parents, of leading a vagabond and disreputable life, of
sorcery, and finally, of heresy. She was entrapped into answers
which tended to prove her culpability; but disregarding at last the
complicated web woven tightly around her, and aware that nothing
could save her, the heart of the knightly maiden beat firmly again,
and as a summary reply to all questions, she briefly and emphatically
declared: “All that I have done, all that I do, I have done well, and do
well to do it.” In her own words, “Tout ce que j’ai fait, tout ce que je
fais, j’ai bien fait, et fais bien de le faire;” and it was a simply-
dignified resume in presence of high-born ecclesiastics, who did not
scruple to give the lie to each other like common ploughmen.
She was sentenced to death, and suffered the penalty, as being
guilty of infamy, socially, morally, religiously, and politically. Not a
finger was stretched to save her who had saved so many. Her
murder is an indelible stain on two nations and one church; not the
less so that the two nations unite in honoring her memory, and that
the church has pronounced her innocent. Never did gallant
champion meet with such base ingratitude from the party raised by
her means from abject slavery to triumph; never was noble enemy
so ignobly treated by a foe with whom, to acknowledge and admire
valor, is next to the practice of it; and never was staff selected by the
church for its support, so readily broken and thrown into the fire
when it had served its purpose. All the sorrow in the world can not
wash out these terrible facts, but it is fitting that this sorrow should
always accompany our admiration. And so, honored be the memory
of the young girl of Orleans!
After all, it is a question whether our sympathies be not thrown away
when we affect to feel for Jeanne Darc. M. Delepierre, the Belgian
Secretary of Legation, has printed, for private circulation, his “Doute
Historique.” This work consists chiefly of official documents, showing
that the “Maid” never suffered at all, but that some criminal having
been executed in her place, she survived to be a pensioner of the
government, a married lady, and the mother of a family! The work in
which these documents are produced, is not to be easily procured,
but they who have any curiosity in the matter will find the subject
largely treated in the Athenæum. This “Historical Doubt” brings us so
closely in connection with romance, that we, perhaps, can not do
better in illustrating our subject, than turn to a purely romantic
subject, and see of what metal the champions of Christendom were
made, with respect to chivalry.
 THE CHAMPIONS OF CHRISTENDOM
GENERALLY
AND HE OF ENGLAND IN PARTICULAR.
“Are these things true?
Thousands are getting at them in the streets.”
Sejanus His Fall.

I can hardly express the delight I feel as a biographer in the

present instance, in the very welcome fact that no one knows
anything about the parentage of St. George. If there had been a
genealogical tree of the great champion’s race, the odds, are that I
should have got bewildered among the branches. As there is only
much conjecture with a liberal allowance of assertion, the task is
doubly easy, particularly as the matter itself is of the very smallest
importance.
The first proof that our national patron ever existed at all, according
to Mr. Alban Butler, is that the Greeks reverenced him by the name
of “the Great Martyr.” Further proof of a somewhat similar quality, is
adduced in the circumstance that in Greece and in various parts of
the Levant, there are or were dozens of churches erected in honor of
the chivalrous saint; that Georgia took the holy knight for its especial
patron; and that St. George, in full panoply, won innumerable battles
for the Christians, by leading forward the reserves when the
vanguard had been repulsed by the infidels, and the Christian
generals were of themselves too indolent, sick, or incompetent, to do
what they expected St. George to do for them.
From the East, veneration for this name, and some imaginary person
who once bore it, extended itself throughout the West. It is a curious
fact, that long before England placed herself under the shield of this
religious soldier, France had made selection of him, at least as a
useful adjutant or aide-de-camp to St. Denis. Indeed, our saint was
at one time nearly monopolized by France. St. Clotilde, the wife of
the first Christian king of France, raised many altars in his honor—a
fact which has not been forgotten in the decorations and illustrative
adornments of that splendid church which has just been completed
in the Faubourg St. Germain, and which is at once the pride and
glory of Paris. That city once possessed relics which were said to be
those of St. George; but of their whereabouts, no man now knows
anything. We do, however, know that the Normans brought over the
name of the saint with them, as that of one in whose arm of power
they trusted, whether in the lists or in battle. In this respect we, as
Saxons, if we choose to consider ourselves as such, have no
particular reason to be grateful to the saint, for his presence among
us is a symbol of national defeat if not of national humiliation. Not
above six centuries have, however, elapsed since the great council
of Oxford appointed his feast to be kept as a holyday of lesser rank
throughout England; and it is about five hundred years since Edward
III. established the Order of the Garter, under the patronage of this
saint. This order is far more ancient than that of St. Michael,
instituted by Louis XI.; of the Golden Fleece, invented by that ‘good’
Duke Philip of Burgundy, who fleeced all who were luckless enough
to come within reach of his ducal shears; and of the Scottish Order
of St. Andrew, which is nearly two centuries younger than that of St.
George. Venice, Genoa, and Germany, have also instituted orders of
chivalry in honor of this unknown cavalier.
These honors, however, and a very general devotion prove nothing
touching his birth, parentage, and education. Indeed, it is probably
because nothing is known of either, that his more serious
biographers begin with his decease, and write his history, which, like
one of Zschokke’s tales, might be inscribed “Alles Verkerht.” They tell
us that he suffered under Diocletian, in Nicomedia, and on the 23d of
April. We are further informed that he was a Cappadocian—a
descendant of those savagely servile people, who once told the
Romans that they would neither accept liberty at the hands of Rome,
nor tolerate it of their own accord. He was, it is said, of noble birth,
and after the death of his father, resided with his mother in Palestine,
on an estate which finally became his own. The young squire was a
handsome and stalwart youth, and, like many of that profession, fond
of a military life. His promotion must have been pretty rapid, for we
find him, according to tradition, a tribune or colonel in the army at a
very early age, and a man of much higher rank before he
prematurely died. His ideas of discipline were good, for when the
pagan emperor persecuted the Christians, George of Cappadocia
resigned his commission and appointments, and not till then, when
he was a private man, did he stoutly remonstrate with his imperial
ex-commander-in-chief against that sovereign’s bloody edicts and
fiercer cruelty against the Christians. This righteous boldness was
barbarously avenged; and on the day after the remonstrance the
gallant soldier lost his head. Some authors add to this account that
he was the “illustrious young man” who tore down the anti-Christian
edicts, when they were first posted up in Nicomedia, a conjecture
which, by the hagiographers is called “plausible,” but which has no
shadow of proof to give warrant for its substantiality.
The reason why all knights and soldiers generally have had
confidence in St. George, is founded, we are told, on the facts of his
reappearance on earth at various periods, and particularly at the
great siege of Antioch, in the times of the crusades. The Christians
had been well nigh as thoroughly beaten as the Russians at Silistria.
They were at the utmost extremity, when a squadron was seen
rushing down from a mountain defile, with three knights at its head,
in brilliant panoply and snow-white scarfs. “Behold,” cried Bishop
Adhemar, “the heavenly succor which was promised to you! Heaven
declares for the Christians. The holy martyrs, George, Demetrius,
and Theodore, come to fight for you.” The effect was electrical. The
Christian army rushed to victory, with the shout, “It is the will of God!”
and the effect of the opportune appearance of the three chiefs and
their squadron, who laid right lustily on the Saracens, was decisive of
one of the most glorious, yet only temporarily productive of triumphs.
When Richard I. was on his expedition against enemies of the same
race, he too was relieved from great straits by a vision of St. George.
The army, indeed, did not see the glorious and inspiring sight, but
the king affirmed that he did, which, in those credulous times was
quite as well. In these later days men are less credulous, or saints
are more cautious. Thus the Muscovites assaulted Kars under the
idea that St. Sergius was with them; at all events, Pacha Williams, a
good cause, and sinewy arms, were stronger than the Muscovite
idea and St. Sergius to boot.
Such, then, is the hagiography of our martial saint. Gibbon has
sketched his life in another point of view—business-like, if not
matter-of-fact. The terrible historian sets down our great patron as
having been born in a fuller’s shop in Cilicia, educated (perhaps) in
Cappadocia, and as having so won promotion, when a young man,
from his patrons, by the skilful exercise of his profession as a
parasite, as to procure, through their influence, “a lucrative
commission or contract to supply the army with bacon!” In this
commissariat employment he is said to have exercised fraud and
corruption, by which may be meant that he sent to the army bacon
as rusty as an old cuirass, and charged a high price for a worthless
article. In these times, when the name and character of St. George
are established, it is to be hoped that Christian purveyors for
Christian armies do not, in reverencing George the Saint, imitate the
practices alleged against him as George the Contractor. It would be
hard, indeed, if a modern contractor who sent foul hay to the cavalry,
uneatable food to the army generally, or poisonous potted-meat to
the navy, could shield himself under the name and example of St.
George. Charges as heavy are alleged against him by Gibbon, who
adds that the malversations of the pious rogue “were so notorious,
that George was compelled to escape from the pursuit of justice.” If
he saved his fortune, it is allowed that he made shipwreck of his
honor; and he certainly did not improve his reputation if, as is
alleged, he turned Arian. The career of our patron saint, as
described by Gibbon, is startling. That writer speaks of the splendid
library subsequently collected by George, but he hints that the
volumes on history, rhetoric, philosophy, and theology, were perhaps
as much proof of ostentation as of love for learning. That George
was raised by the intrigues of a faction to the pastoral throne of
Athanasius, in Alexandria, does not surprise us. Bishops were very
irregularly elected in those early days, when men were sometimes
summarily made teachers who needed instruction themselves; as is
the case in some enlightened districts at present. George displayed
an imperial pomp in his archiepiscopal character, “but he still
betrayed those vices of his base and servile extraction,” yet was so
impartial that he oppressed and plundered all parties alike. “The
merchants of Alexandria,” says the historian of the “Decline and
Fall,” “were impoverished by the unjust and almost universal
monopoly which he acquired of nitre, salt, paper, funerals, &c., and
the spiritual father of a great people condescended to practise the
vile and pernicious arts of an informer. He seems to have had as
sharp an eye after the profit to be derived from burials, as a certain
archdeacon, who thinks intramural burial of the dead a very sanitary
measure for the living, and particularly profitable to the clergy. Thus
the example of St. George would seem to influence very “venerable”
as well as very “martial” gentlemen. The Cappadocian most
especially disgusted the Alexandrians by levying a house tax, of his
own motion, and as he pillaged the pagan temples as well, all parties
rose at length against the common oppressor and “under the reign of
Constantine he was expelled by the fury and justice of the people.”
He was restored only again to fall. The accession of Julian brought
destruction upon the archbishop and many of his friends, who, after
an imprisonment of three weeks, were dragged from their dungeons
by a wild and cruel populace, and murdered in the streets. The
bodies were paraded in triumph upon camels (as that of Condé was
by his Catholic opponents, after the battle of Jarnac, on an ass), and
they were ultimately cast into the sea. This last measure was
adopted in order that, if the sufferers were to be accounted as
martyrs, there should at least be no relics of them for men to
worship. Gibbon thus concludes: “The fears of the Pagans were just,
and their precautions ineffectual. The meritorious death of the
archbishop obliterated the memory of his life. The rival of Athanasius
was dear and sacred to the Arians, and the seeming conversion of
those sectaries introduced his worship into the bosom of the Catholic
church. The odious stranger, disguising every circumstance of time
and place, assumed the rank of a martyr, a saint, and a Christian
hero; and the infamous George of Cappadocia has been
transformed into the famous St. George of England, the patron of
arms, of chivalry, and of the garter.”
The romancers have treated St. George and his knightly
confraternity after their own manner. As a sample of what reading
our ancestors were delighted with, especially those who loved
chivalric themes, I know nothing better than “The Famous History of
the Seven Champions of Christendom, St. George of England, St.
Denis of France, St. James of Spain, St. Anthony of Italy, St. Andrew
of Scotland, St. Patrick of Ireland, and St. David of Wales. Shewing
their honourable battles by sea and land. Their tilts, justs,
tournaments for ladies; their combats with gyants, monsters, and
dragons; their adventures in foreign nations; their enchantments in
the Holy Land; their knighthoods, prowess, and chivalry, in Europe,
Africa, and Asia; with their victories against the enemies of Christ;
also the true manner and places of their deaths, being seven
tragedies, and how they came to be called the Seven Saints of
Christendom.” The courteous author or publisher of the veracious
details, prefaces them with a brief address “to all courteous readers,”
to whom “Richard Johnson wisheth increase of virtuous knowledge.”
“Be not,” he says, “like the chattering cranes, nor Momus’s mates
that carp at everything. What the simple say, I care not. What the
spiteful say, I pass not; only the censure of the conceited,” by which
good Richard means the learned, “I stand unto; that is the mark I aim
at,”—an address, it may be observed, which smacks of the Malaprop
school; but which seemed more natural to our ancestors than it does
to us.
For these readers Richard Johnson presents a very highly-spiced
fare. He brings our patron saint into the world by a Cæsarean
operation performed by a witch, who stole him from his unconscious
mother, and reared him up in a cave, whence the young knight
ultimately escaped with the other champions whom the witch, now
slain, had kept imprisoned. The champions, it may be observed,
travel with a celerity that mocks the “Express,” and rivals the
despatch of the Electric Telegraph. They are scarcely departed from
the seven paths which led from the brazen pillar, each in search of
adventures, when they are all “in the thick of it,” almost at the
antipodes. A breath takes St. George from Coventry, his recovered
home, after leaving the witch, to Egypt. At the latter place he slays
that terrible dragon, which some think to imply the Arian overcoming
the Athanasian, and rescues the Princess Sabra, in whose very
liberal love we can hardly trace a symbol of the Church, although her
antipathies are sufficiently strong to remind one of the odium
theologicum. George goes on performing stupendous feats, and
getting no thanks, until he undertakes to slay a couple of lions for the
Soldan of Persia, and gets clapped into prison, during seven years,
for his pains. The biographer I suspect, shut the knight up so long, in
order to have an excuse to begin episodically with the life of St.
Denis.
The mystic number seven enters into all the principal divisions of the
story. Thus, St. Denis having wandered into Thessaly was reduced
to such straits as to live upon mulberries; and these so disagreed
with him that he became suddenly transformed into a hart; a very
illogical sequence indeed. But the mulberry tree was, in fact,
Eglantius the King’s daughter, metamorphosed for her pride. Seven
years he thus remained; at the end of which time, his horse, wise as
any regularly-ordained physician, administered to him a decoction of
roses which brought about the transformation of both his master and
his master’s mistress into their “humane shapes.” That they went to
court sworn lovers may be taken as a matter of course. There they
are left, in order to afford the author an opportunity of showing how
St. James, having most unorthodoxically fallen in love with a Jewish
maiden, was seven years dumb, in consequence. St. James,
however, is a patient and persevering lover. If I had an ill-will against
any one I would counsel him to read this very long-winded history,
but being at peace with all mankind, I advise my readers to be
content with learning that the apostolic champion and the young
Jewess are ultimately united, and fly to Seville, where they reside in
furnished lodgings, and lead a happy life;—while the author tells of
what befell to the doughty St. Anthony.
This notable Italian is a great hand at subduing giants and ladies.
We have a surfeit of combats and destruction, and love-making and
speechifying, in this champion’s life; and when we are compelled to
leave him travelling about with a Thracian lady, who accompanies
him, in a theatrical male dress, and looks in it like the Duchess—at
least, like Miss Farebrother, in the dashing white sergeant of the
Forty Thieves—we shake our head at St. Anthony and think how
very unlike he is to his namesake in the etching by Callot, where the
fairest of sirens could not squeeze a sigh from the anchorite’s
wrinkled heart.
While they are travelling about in the rather disreputable fashion
above alluded to, we come across St. Andrew of Scotland, who has
greater variety of adventure than any other of the champions. With
every hour there is a fresh incident. Now he is battling with spirits,
now struggling with human foes, and anon mixed up, unfavorably,
with beasts. At the end of all the frays, there is—we need hardly say
it—a lady. The bonny Scot was not likely to be behind his fellow-
champions in this respect. Nay, St. Andrew has six of them, who had
been swans, and are now natural singing lasses. What sort of a
blade St. Andrew was may be guessed by the “fact,” that when he
departed from the royal court, to which he had conducted the half
dozen ladies, they all eloped in a body, after him. There never was
so dashing a hero dreamed of by romance—though a rhymer has
dashed off his equal in wooing, and Burns’s “Finlay” is the only one
that may stand the parallel.
When the six Thracian ladies fall into the power of “thirty bloody-
minded satyrs,” who so likely, or so happy to rescue them as jolly St.
Patrick. How he flies to the rescue, slays one satyr, puts the rest to
flight, and true as steel, in love or friendship, takes the half dozen
damsels under his arm, and swings singingly along with them in
search of the roving Scot! As for St. David, all this while, he had not
been quite so triumphant, or so tried, as his fellows. He had fallen
into bad company, and “four beautiful damsels wrapped the drousie
champion in a sheet of fine Arabian silk, and conveyed him into a
cave, placed in the middle of a garden, where they laid him on a bed,
more softer than the down of Culvers.” In this agreeable company
the Welsh champion wiled away his seven years. It was pleasant but
not proper. But if the author had not thus disposed of him, how do
you think he would ever have got back to St. George of England?
The author indeed exhibits considerable skill, for he brings St.
George and St. David together, and the first rescues the second from
ignoble thraldom, and what is worse, from the most prosy enchanter
I ever met with in history, and who is really not enchanting at all. This
done, George is off to Tripoli.
There, near there, or somewhere else, for the romances are
dreadfully careless in their topography, he falls in with his old love
Sabra, married to a Moorish King. If George is perplexed at this,
seeing that the lady had engaged to remain an unmarried maiden till
he came to wed her, he is still more so when she informs him that
she has, in all essentials, kept her word, “through the secret virtue of
a golden chain steeped in tiger’s blood, the which she wore seven
times double about her ivory neck.” St. George does not know what
to make of it, but as on subsequently encountering two lions, Sabra,
while he was despatching one, kept the other quietly with its head
resting on her lap, the knight declared himself perfectly satisfied, and
they set out upon their travels, lovingly together.
By the luckiest chance, all the wandering knights and their ladies met
at the court of a King of Greece, who is not, certainly, to be heard of
in Gillies’ or Goldsmith’s history. The scenery is now on a
magnificent scale, for there is a regal wedding on foot, and
tournaments, and the real war of Heathenism against all
Christendom. As the Champions of Christendom have as yet done
little to warrant them in assuming the appellation, one would
suppose that the time had now arrived when they were to give the
world a taste of their quality in that respect. But nothing of the sort
occurs. The seven worthies separate, each to his own country, in
order to prepare for great deeds; but none are done for the benefit of
Christianity, unless indeed we are to conclude that when George and
Sabra travelled together, and he overcame all antagonists, and she
inspired with love all beholders;—he subdued nature itself and she
ran continually into danger, from which he rescued her:—and that
when, after being condemned to the stake, the young wife gave birth
to three babes in the wood, and was at last crowned Queen of
Egypt, something is meant by way of allegory, in reference to old
church questions, and in not very clear elucidation as to how these
questions were beneficially affected by the Champions of
Christendom!
I may add that when Sabra was crowned Queen of Egypt, every one
was ordered to be merry, on pain of death! It is further to be
observed there is now much confusion, and that the confusion by no
means grows less as the story thunders on. The Champions and the
three sons of St. George are, by turns, East, West, North, and South,
either pursuing each other, or suddenly and unexpectedly
encountering, like the principal personages in a pantomime. Battles,
love-making, and shutting up cruel and reprobate magicians from the
“humane eye,” are the chief events, but to every event there are
dozens of episodes, and each episode is as confusing, dazzling, and
bewildering as the trunk from which it hangs.
St. George, however, is like a greater champion than himself; and
when he is idle and in Italy, he does precisely what Nelson did in the
same place—fall in love with a lady, and cause endless mischief in
consequence. By this time, however, Johnson begins to think, rightly,
that his readers have had enough of it, and that it is time to dispose
of his principal characters. These too, are so well disposed to help
him, that when the author kills St. Patrick, the saint burys himself! In
memory of his deeds, of which we have heard little or nothing, some
are accustomed to honor him, says Mr. Johnson—“wearing upon
their hats, each of them, a cross of red silk, in token of his many
adventures under the Christian Cross.” So that the shamrock
appears to have been a device only of later times.
St. David is as quickly despatched. This champion enters Wales to
crush the pagans there. He wears a leek in his helmet, and his
followers adopt the same fashion, in order that friend may be
distinguished from foe. The doughty saint, of course, comes
conqueror out of the battle, but he is in a heated state, gets a chill
and dies after all of a common cold. Bruce, returning safe from
exploring the Nile, to break his neck by falling down his own stairs,
hardly presents a more practical bathos than this. Why the leek
became the badge of Welshmen need not be further explained.
It is singular that in recounting the manner of the death of the next
champion, St. Denis, the romancer is less romantic than common
tradition. He tells us how the knight repaired to then pagan France;
how he was accused of being a Christian, by another knight of what
we should fancy a Christian order, St. Michael, and how the pagan
king orders St. Denis to be beheaded, in consequence. There are
wonders in the heavens, at this execution, which convert the
heathen sovereign to Christianity; but no mention is made of St.
Denis having walked to a monastery, after his head was off, and with
his head under his arm. Of this prodigy Voltaire remarked, “Ce n’est
que le premier pas qui coute,” but of that the romancer makes no
mention. St. James suffers by being shut up in his chapel in Spain,
and starved to death, by order of the Atheist king. Anthony dies
quietly in a good old age, in Italy; St. Andrew is beheaded by the
cruel pagan Scots whom, in his old age, he had visited, in order to
bring them to conversion: and St. George, who goes on, riding down
wild monsters and rescuing timid maidens, to the last—and his
inclination, was always in the direction of the maidens—ultimately
meets his death by the sting of a venomous dragon.
And now it would seem that two or three hundred years ago, authors
were very much like the actors in the Critic, who when they did get
hold of a good thing, could never give the public enough of it.
Accordingly, the biography of the Seven Champions was followed by
that of their sons. I will spare my readers the turbulent details: they
will probably be satisfied with learning that the three sons of St.
George became kings, “according as the fairy queen had prophesied
to them,” and that Sir Turpin, son of David, Sir Pedro, son of James,
Sir Orlando, son of Anthony, Sir Ewen, son of Andrew, Sir Phelim,
son of Patrick, and Sir Owen, son of David, like their sires, combated
with giants, monsters, and dragons; tilted and tournamented in honor
of the ladies, did battle in defence of Christianity, relieved the
distressed, annihilated necromancers and table-turners, in short,
accomplished all that could be expected from knights of such
prowess and chivalry.
When Richard Johnson had reached this part of his history, he gave
it to the world, awaiting the judgment of the critics, before he
published his second portion: that portion wherein he was to unfold
what nobody yet could guess at, namely, wherefore the Seven
Champions were called par excellence, the Champions of
Christendom. I am afraid that meanwhile those terrible, god-like, and
inexorable critics, had not dealt altogether gently with him. The
Punch they offered him was not made exclusively of sweets. His St.
George had been attacked, and very small reverence been
expressed for his ladies. But see how calmly and courteously—all
the more admirable that there must have been some affectation in
the matter—he turns from the censuring judges to that benevolent
personage, the gentle reader. “Thy courtesy,” he says, “must be my
buckler against the carping malice of mocking jesters, that being
worse able to do well, scoff commonly at that they can not mend;
censuring all things, doing nothing, but (monkey-like) make apish
jests at anything they do in print, and nothing pleaseth them, except
it savor of a scoffing and invective spirit. Well, what they say of me I
do not care; thy delight is my sole desire.” Well said, bold Richard
Johnson. He thought he had put down criticism as St. George had
the dragon.
I can not say, however, that good Richard Johnson treats his gentle
reader fairly. This second part of his Champions is to a reader worse
than what all the labors of Hercules were to the lusty son of
Alcmena. An historical drama at Astley’s is not half so bewildering,
and is almost as credible, and Mr. Ducrow himself when he was
rehearsing his celebrated “spectacle drama” of “St. George and the
Dragon” at old Drury—and who that ever saw him on those
occasions can possibly forget him?—achieved greater feats, or was
more utterly unlike any sane individual than St. George is, as put
upon the literary stage by Master Johnson.
One comfort in tracing the tortuosities of this chivalric romance is
that the action is rapid; but then there is so much of it, and it is so
astounding! We are first introduced to the three sons of St. George,
who are famous hunters in England, and whose mother, the lady
Sabra, “catches her death,” by going out attired like Diana, to
witness their achievements. The chivalric widower thereupon sets
out for Jerusalem, his fellow-champions accompany, and George’s
three sons, Guy, Alexander, and David, upon insinuation from their
mother’s spirit, start too in pursuit. The lads were knighted by the
king of England before they commenced their journey, which they
perform with the golden spur of chivalry attached to their heels. They
meet with the usual adventures by the way: destroying giants, and
rescuing virgins, who in these troublesome times seem to have been
allowed to travel about too much by themselves. Meanwhile, their
sire is enacting greater prodigies still, and is continually delivering his
fellow-champions from difficulties, from which they are unable to
extricate themselves. Indeed, in all circumstances, his figure is the
most prominent; and although the other half-dozen must have
rendered some service on each occasion, St. George makes no
more mention of the same than Marshal St. Arnaud, in his letters on
the victory at the Alma, does of the presence and services of the
English.
It is said that Mrs. Radcliffe, whose horrors used to delight and
distress our mothers and aunts, in their younger days, became
herself affected by the terrors which she only paints to explain away
natural circumstances. What then must have been the end of
Richard Johnson? His scene of the enchantments of the Black
Castle is quite enough to have killed the author with bewilderment.
There is a flooring in the old palace of the Prince of Orange in
Brussels, which is so inlaid with small pieces of wood, of a thousand
varieties of patterns, as to be a triumph of its kind. I was not at all
surprised, when standing on that floor, to hear that when the artist
had completed his inconceivable labor, he gave one wild gaze over
the parquet of the palace, and dropped dead of a fit of giddiness. I
am sure that Richard Johnson must have met with some such
calamity after revising this portion of his history. It is a portion in
which it is impossible for the Champions or for the readers to go to
sleep. The noise is terrific, the incidents fall like thunderbolts, the
changes roll over each other in a succession made with electric
rapidity, and when the end comes we are all the more rejoiced,
because we have comprehended nothing; but we are especially glad
to find that the knight of the Black Castle, who is the cause of all the
mischief, is overcome, flies in a state of destitution to a neighboring
wood, and being irretrievably “hard up,” stabs himself with the first
thing at hand, as ruthlessly as the lover of the “Ratcatcher’s
Daughter.”
Time, place, propriety, and a respect for contemporary history, are
amusingly violated throughout the veracious details. Nothing can
equal the confusion, nothing can be more absurd than the errors. But
great men have committed errors as grave. Shakespeare opened a
seaport in Bohemia, and Mr. Macaulay wrote of one Penn what was
only to be attributed to another. And now, have the dramatists
treated St. George better than the romancers?
The national saint was, doubtless, often introduced in the Mysteries;
but the first occasion of which I have any knowledge of his having
been introduced on the stage, was by an author named John Kirke.
John was so satisfied with his attempt that he never wrote a second
play. He allowed his fame to rest on the one in question, which is
thus described on his title-page: “The Seven Champions of
Christendome. Acted at the Cocke Pit, and at the Red Bull in St.
John’s Streete, with a general liking, And never printed till this yeare
1638. Written by J. K.—London, printed by J. Okes, and are (sic) to
be sold by James Becket, at his Shop in the Inner Temple Gate,
1638.”
John Kirke treats his subject melodramatically. In the first scene,
Calib the Witch, in a speech prefacing her declarations of a love for
foul weather and deeds, tells the audience by way of prologue, how
she had stolen the young St. George from his now defunct parent,
with the intention of making a bath for her old bones out of his young
warm blood. Love, however, had touched her, and she had brought
up “the red-lipped boy,” with some indefinite idea of making
something of him when a man.
With this disposition the old lady has some fears as to the possible
approaching term of her life; but, as she is assured by “Tarfax the
Devill” that she can not die unless she love blindly, the witch, like a
mere mortal, accounting that she loves wisely, reckons herself a
daughter of immortality, and rejoices hugely. The colloquy of this
couple is interrupted by their son Suckabud, who, out of a head just
broken by St. George, makes complaint with that comic lack of fun,
which was wont to make roar the entire inside of the Red Bull. The
young clown retires with his sire, and then enters the great St.
George, a lusty lad, with a world of inquiries touching his parentage.
Calib explains that his lady mother was anything but an honest
woman, and that his sire was just the partner to match. “Base or
noble, pray?” asks St. George. To which the witch replies:—
 “Base and noble too;
Both base by thee, but noble by descent;
And thou born base, yet mayst thou write true gent:”

and it may be said, parenthetically, that many a “true gent” is by birth

equal to St. George himself.
Overcome by her affection, the witch makes a present to St. George
of the half-dozen champions of England whom she holds in chains
within her dwelling. One of them is described as “the lively, brisk,
cross-cap’ring Frenchman, Denis.” With these for slaves, Calib yields
her wand of power, and the giver is no sooner out of sight when
George invokes the shades of his parents, who not only appear and
furnish him with a corrected edition of his biography, but inform him
that he is legitimate Earl of Coventry, with all the appurtenances that
a young earl can desire.
Thereupon ensues a hubbub that must have shaken all the lamps in
the cockpit. George turns the Witch’s power against herself, and she
descends to the infernal regions, where she is punningly declared to
have gained the title of Duchess of Helvetia. The six champions are
released, and the illustrious seven companions go forth in search of
adventures, with Suckabus for a “Squire.” The father of the latter
gives him some counsel at parting, which is a parody on the advice
of Polonius to Laertes. “Lie,” says Torpax:—

“Lie to great profit, borrow, pay no debts,

Cheat and purloin, they are gaming dicers’ bets.”

“If Cottington outdo me,” says the son, “he be-whipt.” And so, after
the election of St. George as the seventh champion of Christendom,
ends one of the longest acts that Bull or Cockpit was ever asked to
witness and applaud.
The next act is briefer but far more bustling. We are in that
convenient empire of Trebizond, where everything happened which
never took place, according to the romances. The whole city is in a
state of consternation at the devastations of a detestable dragon,
and a lion, his friend and co-partner. The nobles bewail the fact in
hexameters, or at least in lines meant to do duty for them; and the
common people bewail the fact epigrammatically, and describe the
deaths of all who have attempted to slay the monsters, with a
broadness of effect that doubtless was acknowledged by roars of
laughter. Things grow worse daily, the fiends look down, and general
gloom is settling thick upon the empire, when Andrew of Scotland
and Anthony of Italy arrive, send in their cards, and announce their
determination to slay both these monsters.
Such visitors are received with more than ordinary welcome. The
emperor is regardless of expense in his liberality, and his daughter
Violetta whispers to her maid Carinthia that she is already in love
with one of them, but will not say which; a remark which is answered
by the pert maid, that she is in love with both, and would willingly
take either. All goes on joyously until in the course of conversation,
and it is by no means remarkable for brilliancy, the two knights let fall
that they are Christians. Now, you must know, that the established
Church at Trebizond at this time, which is at any period, was
heathen. The court appeared to principally affect Apollo and Diana,
while the poorer people put up with Pan, and abused him for
denouncing may-poles! Well, the Christians had never been
emancipated; nay, they had never been tolerated in Trebizond, and it
was contrary to law that the country should be saved, even in its dire
extremity, by Christian help. The knights are doomed to die, unless
they will turn heathens. This, of course, they decline with a dignified
scorn; whereupon, in consideration of their nobility, they are
permitted to choose their own executioners. They make choice of the
ladies, but Violetta and Carinthia protest that they can not think of
such a thing. Their high-church sire is disgusted with their want of
orthodoxy, and he finally yields to the knights their swords, that they
may do justice on themselves as the law requires. But Andrew and
Anthony are no sooner armed again than they clear their way to
liberty, and the drop scene falls upon the rout of the whole empire of
Trebizond.
The third act is of gigantic length, and deals with giants. There is
mourning in Tartary. David has killed the king’s son in a tournament,
and the king remarks, like a retired apothecary, that “Time’s plaster
must draw the sore before he can feel peace again.” To punish
David, he is compelled to undertake the destruction of the enchanter
Ormandine, who lived in a cavern fortress with “some selected
friends.” The prize of success is the reversion of the kingdom of
Tartary to the Welsh knight. The latter goes upon his mission, but he
is so long about it that our old friend Chorus enters, to explain what
he affirms they have not time to act—namely, the great deeds of St.
George, who, as we learn, had slain the never-to-be-forgotten
dragon, rescued Sabrina, been cheated of his reward, and held in
prison seven years upon bread and water. His squire, Suckabus,
alludes to giants whom he and his master had previously slain, and
whose graves were as large as Tothill Fields. He also notices
“Ploydon’s law,” and other matters, that could hardly have been
contemporaneous with the palmy days of the kingdom of Tartary.
Meanwhile, David boldly assaults Ormandine, but the enchanter
surrounds him with some delicious-looking nymphs, all thinly clad
and excessively seductive; and we are sorry to say that the Welsh
champion, not being cavalierly mounted on proper principles, yields
to seduction, and after various falls under various temptations, is
carried to bed by the rollicking nymph Drunkenness.
But never did good, though fallen, men want for a friend at a pinch.
St. George is in the neighborhood; and seedy as he is after seven
years in the dark, with nothing more substantial by way of food than
bread, and nothing more exhilarating for beverage than aqua pura,
the champion of England does David’s work, and with more
generosity than justice, makes him a present of the enchanter’s
head. David presents the same to the King of Tartary, that, according
to promise pledged in case of such a present being made, he may
be proclaimed heir-apparent to the Tartarian throne. With this bit of
cheating, the long third act comes to an end.
The fourth act is taken up with an only partially successful attack by
James, David, and Patrick, on a cruel enchanter, Argalio, who at
least is put to flight, and that, at all events, as the knights remark, is
something to be thankful for. The fifth and grand act reveals to us the
powerful magician, Brandron, in his castle. He holds in thrall the King
of Macedon—a little circumstance not noted in history; and he has in
his possession the seven daughters of his majesty transformed into
swans. The swans contrive to make captives of six of the knights as
they were taking a “gentle walk” upon his ramparts. They are
impounded as trespassers, and Brandron, who has some low
comedy business with Suckubus, will not release them but upon
condition that they fight honestly in his defence against St. George.
The six duels take place, and of course the champion of England
overcomes all his friendly antagonists; whereupon Brandron, with his
club, beats out his own brains, in presence of the audience.
At this crisis, the King of Macedon appears, restored to power, and
inquires after his daughters. St. George and the rest, with a use of
the double negatives that would have shocked Lindley Murray,
declare

“We never knew, nor saw no ladies here.”

The swans, however, soon take their pristine form, and the three
daughters appear fresh from their plumes and their long bath upon
the lake. Upon this follows the smart dialogue which we extract as a
sample of how sharply the King of Macedon looked to his family
interests, and how these champion knights were “taken in” before
they well knew how the fact was accomplished.

Mac. Reverend knights, may we desire to know which of you are

unmarried?
Ant., Den., and Pat. We are.
Geo. Then here’s these ladies, take ’em to your beds.
Mac. George highly honors aged Macedon.
The three Knights. But can the ladies’ love accord with us?
The three Ladies. Most willingly!
The three Knights. We thus then seal our contract.
Geo. Which thus we ratifie.
Sit with the brides, most noble Macedon;
And since kind fortune sent such happy chance,
We’ll grace your nuptials with a soldier’s dance.

And, fore George, as our fathers used to say, they make a night of it.
The piece ends with a double military reel, and the audiences at the