parcel of the city of New York, and there is hardly romance enough in the
entire metropolis to re-supply a Virginia “knight” with “chivalry,” in
case he happened to run out of it. Let the reader calmly and
dispassionately picture to himself “lists” in Brooklyn; heralds,
pursuivants, pages, garter king-at-arms–in Brooklyn; the marshalling of
the fantastic hosts of “chivalry” in slashed doublets, velvet trunks,
ruffles, and plumes–in Brooklyn; mounted on omnibus and livery-stable
patriarchs, promoted, and referred to in cold blood as “steeds,”
“destriers,” and “chargers,” and divested of their friendly, humble names
these meek old “Jims” and “Bobs” and “Charleys,” and renamed “Mohammed,”
“Bucephalus,” and “Saladin”–in Brooklyn; mounted thus, and armed with
swords and shields and wooden lances, and cased in paste board hauberks,
morions, greaves, and gauntlets, and addressed as “Sir” Smith, and “Sir”
Jones, and bearing such titled grandeurs as “The Disinherited Knight,”
the “Knight of Shenandoah,” the “Knight of the Blue Ridge,” the “Knight
of Maryland,” and the “Knight of the Secret Sorrow”–in Brooklyn; and at
the toot of the horn charging fiercely upon a helpless ring hung on a
post, and prodding at it in trepidly with their wooden sticks, and by and
by skewering it and cavorting back to the judges’ stand covered with
glory this in Brooklyn; and each noble success like this duly and
promptly announced by an applauding toot from the herald’s horn, and “the
band playing three bars of an old circus tune”–all in Brooklyn, in broad
daylight. And let the reader remember, and also add to his picture, as
follows, to wit: when the show was all over, the party who had shed the
most blood and overturned and hacked to pieces the most knights, or at
least had prodded the most muffin-rings, was accorded the ancient
privilege of naming and crowning the Queen of Love and Beauty–which
naming had in reality been done for, him by the “cut-and-dried” process,
and long in advance, by a committee of ladies, but the crowning he did in
person, though suffering from loss of blood, and then was taken to the
county hospital on a shutter to have his wounds dressed–these curious
things all occurring in Brooklyn, and no longer ago than one or two
yesterdays. It seems impossible, and yet it is true.
This was doubtless the first appearance of the “tournament” up here among
the rolling-mills and factories, and will probably be the last. It will
be well to let it retire permanently to the rural districts of Virginia,
where, it is said, the fine mailed and plumed, noble-natured, maiden-
rescuing, wrong-redressing, adventure-seeking knight of romance is
accepted and believed in by the peasantry with pleasing simplicity, while
they reject with scorn the plain, unpolished verdict whereby history
exposes him as a braggart, a ruffian, a fantastic vagabond; and an
ignoramus.
All romance aside, what shape would our admiration of the heroes of Ashby
de la Zouch be likely to take, in this practical age, if those worthies
were to rise up and come here and perform again the chivalrous deeds of
that famous passage of arms? Nothing but a New York jury and the
insanity plea could save them from hanging, from the amiable Bois-
Guilbert and the pleasant Front-de-Boeuf clear down to the nameless
ruffians that entered the riot with unpictured shields and did their
first murder and acquired their first claim to respect that day. The
doings of the so-called “chivalry” of the Middle Ages were absurd enough,
even when they were brutally and bloodily in earnest, and when their
surroundings of castles and donjons, savage landscapes and half-savage
peoples, were in keeping; but those doings gravely reproduced with tinsel
decorations and mock pageantry, by bucolic gentlemen with broomstick
lances, and with muffin-rings to represent the foe, and all in the midst
of the refinement and dignity of a carefully-developed modern
civilisation, is absurdity gone crazy.
Now, for next exhibition, let us have a fine representation of one of
those chivalrous wholesale butcheries and burnings of Jewish women and
children, which the crusading heroes of romance used to indulge in in
their European homes, just before starting to the Holy Land, to seize and
take to their protection the Sepulchre and defend it from “pollution.”