In his two-sided development of the dramatic values in this story, the author established a method which one might have expected to be followed by his contemporaries, a method actually followed, a little later, in the development of the native English drama. In reality, however, the play occupies a solitary position in its own day and age. To the author must be given the credit of original creation, of being ahead of his time. But this credit the author must share with the story of his play, for has not the name of St. Nicholas through all the centuries, down to our own time, been constantly associated, not only with the idea of noble beneficence, but with a peculiar quality of good nature and fun?
[CHAPTER VIII]
ST. NICHOLAS AS PATRON SAINT
Anyone brought up in a Protestant country, in the Protestant faith, will not find it easy to form an adequate conception of the nature of saint worship. Such a person, however, if he should visit certain of the less progressive provinces of Catholic Christendom, would find surviving in much of its pristine vigor, with much of its original naïveté, the saint worship once universal in the Christian world. In Sicily, for instance, he would find each city with its patron saint revered and honored very much as in the earlier days. If he should happen to be in Catania on one of the two days in the year devoted to the honor of Catania’s patron saint Agatha, he would see the image of St. Agatha surrounded by native offerings of extravagant value, in a resplendent car drawn by white-robed men, and he would hear enthusiastic shouts of “Viva Sant’ Agatha!” whenever a new candle for the car was offered by one of the votaries of the saint. In Palermo he would find like honor paid on her festival day to St. Rosalia, the patron saint of Palermo; in Syracuse he would find St. Lucy; in Taormina, St. Pancras, similarly honored. These Sicilian celebrations of saints’ days, featured as they are by the presence of such modern, ultra-secular inventions as fireworks, nevertheless retain not only much of the form but to some extent the spirit of earlier celebrations.
Triumphal Car of St. Lucy used in the Annual Procession in Honor of the Saint at Syracuse in Sicily.
Nor is the Sicilian worship of saints entirely one-sided. On the one hand honors are paid, but on the other hand benefits are supposed to be received. An idea of the nature of the protection afforded by the saints and of the intimate relation existing between saint and votary may be gained by a visit to the church of San Nicola at Girgenti. There one will find the picture of the saint surrounded by representations, in silver, or more often in wax or carved and painted wood, of swollen limb, cancerous breast, goitered throat, injured eye, carbuncle, and the like, healed through the intervention of the saint. Even more specific, more living, record of protection received is afforded by the votive offerings on one wall of the church in the form of naïve little paintings illustrating the aid afforded by St. Nicholas, one “showing a spirited donkey running away with a painted cart, the terrified occupant frantically making signals of distress to S. Nicola in heaven who is preparing promptly to check the raging ass, others showing S. Nicola drawing a petitioner from the sea, or turning a mafia dagger aside, or finding a lost child in the mountains.”[76]
In Catholic Brittany, too, one will find similar forms of saint worship. One will find the so-called “Pardons,” or pilgrimages on different days of the year to different ones of the famous shrines of Brittany, occasions celebrated with festal processions accompanying the image or the relics of the saint honored. In the Breton churches also one will find the same form of testimony, as in Sicily, to the protection offered by the various saints. In the church of St. Sauveur at Dinan, in the chapel of St. Roch, one will find a representation of the saint over the altar and on the wall a framed vœu, to the effect that St. Roch confers many benefits, especially in case of pestilence, that he saved the city from pestilence in 16—, and that the vœu is for the sake of preserving the memory of his goodness to the city. On the wall also are framed litanies to St. Roch and individual votive offerings with dates, many in the form of hearts, others framed inscriptions with “Merci Bon St. Roch,” accompanied by the date of the benefit received. Over the door of a house in Brittany also one often finds the image of the patron saint of the occupant.