CHESTERTON-ALARM AND SIDISCUTIO
Alone at some distance from the wasting walls of a disused
abbey I found half sunken in the grass the grey and goggle-eyed
visage of one of those graven monsters that made the ornamental
water-spouts in the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. It lay there,
scoured by ancient rains or striped by recent fungus, but still
looking like the head of some huge dragon slain by a primeval hero.
And as I looked at it, I thought of the meaning of the grotesque,
and passed into some symbolic reverie of the three great stages of art.
I Once upon a time there lived upon an island a merry and innocent people,
mostly shepherds and tillers of the earth. They were republicans,
like all primitive and simple souls; they talked over their affairs
under a tree, and the nearest approach they had to a personal ruler
was a sort of priest or white witch who said their prayers for them.
They worshipped the sun, not idolatrously, but as the golden crown
of the god whom all such infants see almost as plainly as the sun.
Now this priest was told by his people to build a great tower,
pointing to the sky in salutation of the Sun-god; and he pondered long
and heavily before he picked his materials. For he was resolved to use
nothing that was not almost as clear and exquisite as sunshine itself;
he would use nothing that was not washed as white as the rain
can wash the heavens, nothing that did not sparkle as spotlessly
as that crown of God. He would have nothing grotesque or obscure;
he would not have even anything emphatic or even anything mysterious.
He would have all the arches as light as laughter and as candid as logic.
He built the temple in three concentric courts, which were
cooler and more exquisite in substance each than the other.
For the outer wall was a hedge of white lilies, ranked so thick
that a green stalk was hardly to be seen; and the wall within
that was of crystal, which smashed the sun into a million stars.
And the wall within that, which was the tower itself, was a tower
of pure water, forced up in an everlasting fountain; and upon the very
tip and crest of that foaming spire was one big and blazing diamond,
which the water tossed up eternally and caught again as a child
catches a ball.
"Now," said the priest, "I have made a tower which is a little
worthy of the sun."
But about this time the island was caught in a swarm of pirates;
and the shepherds had to turn themselves into rude warriors and seamen;
and at first they were utterly broken down in blood and shame;
and the pirates might have taken the jewel flung up for ever from
their sacred fount. And then, after years of horror and humiliation,
they gained a little and began to conquer because they did not
mind defeat. And the pride of the pirates went sick within them
after a few unexpected foils; and at last the invasion rolled back
into the empty seas and the island was delivered. And for some reason
after this men began to talk quite differently about the temple
and the sun. Some, indeed, said, "You must not touch the temple;
it is classical; it is perfect, since it admits no imperfections."
But the others answered, "In that it differs from the sun, that shines
on the evil and the good and on mud and monsters everywhere.
The temple is of the noon; it is made of white marble clouds
and sapphire sky. But the sun is not always of the noon.
The sun dies daily, every night he is crucified in blood and fire."
Now the priest had taught and fought through all the war,
and his hair had grown white, but his eyes had grown young.
And he said, "I was wrong and they are right. The sun, the symbol
of our father, gives life to all those earthly things that are full
of ugliness and energy. All the exaggerations are right, if they
exaggerate the right thing. Let us point to heaven with tusks
and horns and fins and trunks and tails so long as they all point
to heaven. The ugly animals praise God as much as the beautiful.
The frog's eyes stand out of his head because he is staring at heaven.
The giraffe's neck is long because he is stretching towards heaven.
The donkey has ears to hear--let him hear."
And under the new inspiration they planned a gorgeous cathedral
in the Gothic manner, with all the animals of the earth
crawling over it, and all the possible ugly things making up
one common beauty, because they all appealed to the god.
The columns of the temple were carved like the necks of giraffes;
the dome was like an ugly tortoise; and the highest pinnacle was
a monkey standing on his head with his tail pointing at the sun.
And yet the whole was beautiful, because it was lifted up in one
living and religious gesture as a man lifts his hands in prayer.
But this great plan was never properly completed. The people had brought
up on great wagons the heavy tortoise roof and the huge necks of stone,
and all the thousand and one oddities that made up that unity,
the owls and the efts and the crocodiles and the kangaroos,
which hideous by themselves might have been magnificent if
reared in one definite proportion and dedicated to the sun.
For this was Gothic, this was romantic, this was Christian art;
this was the whole advance of Shakespeare upon Sophocles.
And that symbol which was to crown it all, the ape upside down,
was really Christian; for man is the ape upside down.
But the rich, who had grown riotous in the long peace, obstructed
the thing, and in some squabble a stone struck the priest on the head
and he lost his memory. He saw piled in front of him frogs and elephants,
monkeys and giraffes, toadstools and sharks, all the ugly things
of the universe which he had collected to do honour to God.
But he forgot why he had collected them. He could not remember
the design or the object. He piled them all wildly into one heap
fifty feet high; and when he had done it all the rich and influential
went into a passion of applause and cried, "This is real art!
This is Realism! This is things as they really are!"
That, I fancy, is the only true origin of Realism.
Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason.
This is so not merely in the sense of insanity but of suicide.
It has lost its reason; that is its reason for existing.
The old Greeks summoned godlike things to worship their god.
The medieval Christians summoned all things to worship theirs,
dwarfs and pelicans, monkeys and madmen. The modern realists
summon all these million creatures to worship their god;
and then have no god for them to worship. Paganism was in art
a pure beauty; that was the dawn. Christianity was a beauty created
by controlling a million monsters of ugliness; and that in my belief
was the zenith and the noon. Modern art and science practically
mean having the million monsters and being unable to control them;
and I will venture to call that the disruption and the decay.
The finest lengths of the Elgin marbles consist splendid houses
going to the temple of a virgin. Christianity, with its gargoyles
and grotesques, really amounted to saying this: that a donkey could
go before all the horses of the world when it was really going
to the temple. Romance means a holy donkey going to the temple.
Realism means a lost donkey going nowhere.
The fragments of futile journalism or fleeting impression which
are here collected are very like the wrecks and riven blocks
that were piled in a heap round my imaginary priest of the sun.
They are very like that grey and gaping head of stone that I
found overgrown with the grass. Yet I will venture to make
even of these trivial fragments the high boast that I am
a medievalist and not a modern. That is, I really have a notion
of why I have collected all the nonsensical things there are.
I have not the patience nor perhaps the constructive intelligence
to state the connecting link between all these chaotic papers.
But it could be stated. This row of shapeless and ungainly monsters
which I now set before the reader does not consist of separate
idols cut out capriciously in lonely valleys or various islands.
These monsters are meant for the gargoyles of a definite cathedral.
I have to carve the gargoyles, because I can carve nothing else;
I leave to others the angels and the arches and the spires.
But I am very sure of the style of the architecture, and of the
consecration of the church.
Evert man, though he were born in the very belfry of Bow and spent
his infancy climbing among chimneys, has waiting for him somewhere
a country house which he has never seen; but which was built for him
in the very shape of his soul. It stands patiently waiting to be found,
knee-deep in orchards of Kent or mirrored in pools of Lincoln;
and when the man sees it he remembers it, though he has never seen
it before. Even I have been forced to confess this at last, who am
a Cockney, if ever there was one, a Cockney not only on principle,
but with savage pride. I have always maintained, quite seriously,
that the Lord is not in the wind or thunder of the waste,
but if anywhere in the still small voice of Fleet Street.
I sincerely maintain that Nature-worship is more morally dangerous
than the most vulgar man-worship of the cities; since it can
easily be perverted into the worship of an impersonal mystery,
carelessness, or cruelty. Thoreau would have been a jollier fellow
if he had devoted himself to a greengrocer instead of to greens.
Swinburne would have been a better moralist if he had worshipped
a fishmonger instead of worshipping the sea. I prefer the
philosophy of bricks and mortar to the philosophy of turnips.
To call a man a turnip may be playful, but is seldom respectful.
But when we wish to pay emphatic honour to a man, to praise
the firmness of his nature, the squareness of his conduct,
the strong humility with which he is interlocked with his equals
in silent mutual support, then we invoke the nobler Cockney metaphor,
and call him a brick.
But, despite all these theories, I have surrendered; I have struck
my colours at sight; at a mere glimpse through the opening of a hedge.
I shall come down to living in the country, like any common Socialist
or Simple Lifer. I shall end my days in a village, in the character
of the Village Idiot, and be a spectacle and a judgment to mankind.
I have already learnt the rustic manner of leaning upon a gate;
and I was thus gymnastically occupied at the moment when my eye caught
the house that was made for me. It stood well back from the road,
and was built of a good yellow brick; it was narrow for its height,
like the tower of some Border robber; and over the front door
was carved in large letters, "1908." That last burst of sincerity,
that superb scorn of antiquarian sentiment, overwhelmed me finally.
I closed my eyes in a kind of ecstasy. My friend (who was helping me
to lean on the gate) asked me with some curiosity what I was doing.
"My dear fellow," I said, with emotion, "I am bidding farewell
to forty-three hansom cabmen."
"Well," he said, "I suppose they would think this county rather
outside the radius."
"Oh, my friend," I cried brokenly, "how beautiful London is!
Why do they only write poetry about the country? I could turn
every lyric cry into Cockney.
"'My heart leaps up when I behold
A sky-sign in the sky,'
"as I observed in a volume which is too little read, founded on
the older English poets. You never saw my 'Golden Treasury Regilded;
or, The Classics Made Cockney'--it contained some fine lines.
"'O Wild West End, thou breath of London's being,'
"or the reminiscence of Keats, beginning
"'City of smuts and mellow fogfulness.';
"I have written many such lines on the beauty of London;
yet I never realized that London was really beautiful till now.
Do you ask me why? It is because I have left it for ever."
"If you will take my advice," said my friend, "you will humbly
endeavour not to be a fool. What is the sense of this mad
modern notion that every literary man must live in the country,
with the pigs and the donkeys and the squires? Chaucer and Spenser
and Milton and Dryden lived in London; Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson
came to London because they had had quite enough of the country.
And as for trumpery topical journalists like you, why, they would
cut their throats in the country. You have confessed it yourself
in your own last words. You hunger and thirst after the streets;
you think London the finest place on the planet. And if by some
miracle a Bayswater omnibus could come down this green country lane
you would utter a yell of joy."
Then a light burst upon my brain, and I turned upon him
with terrible sternness.
"Why, miserable aesthete," I said in a voice of thunder, "that is
the true country spirit! That is how the real rustic feels. The real
rustic does utter a yell of joy at the sight of a Bayswater omnibus.
The real rustic does think London the finest place on the planet.
In the few moments that I have stood by this stile, I have grown
rooted here like an ancient tree; I have been here for ages.
Petulant Suburban, I am the real rustic. I believe that the streets
of London are paved with gold; and I mean to see it before I die."
The evening breeze freshened among the little tossing trees of that lane,
and the purple evening clouds piled up and darkened behind my
Country Seat, the house that belonged to me, making, by contrast,
its yellow bricks gleam like gold. At last my friend said:
"To cut it short, then, you mean that you will live in the country
because you won't like it. What on earth will you do here;
dig up the garden?"
"Dig!" I answered, in honourable scorn. "Dig! Do work at my
Country Seat; no, thank you. When I find a Country Seat, I sit
in it. And for your other objection, you are quite wrong.
I do not dislike the country, but I like the town more.
Therefore the art of happiness certainly suggests that I should live
in the country and think about the town. Modern nature-worship is
all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things;
terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side
of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.
I abominate and abjure the man who lives in London and wants to go
to the country; I do it with all the more heartiness because I
am that sort of man myself. We must learn to love London again,
as rustics love it. Therefore (I quote again from the great Cockney
version of The Golden Treasury)--
"'Therefore, ye gas-pipes, ye asbestos? stoves,
Forbode not any severing of our loves.
I have relinquished but your earthly sight,
To hold you dear in a more distant way.
I'll love the 'buses lumbering through the wet,
Even more than when I lightly tripped as they.
The grimy colour of the London clay
Is lovely yet,'
"because I have found the house where I was really born;
the tall and quiet house from which I can see London afar off,
as the miracle of man that it is."
A sunset of copper and gold had just broken down and gone to pieces
in the west, and grey colours were crawling over everything in earth
and heaven; also a wind was growing, a wind that laid a cold finger
upon flesh and spirit. The bushes at the back of my garden began to
whisper like conspirators; and then to wave like wild hands in signal.
I was trying to read by the last light that died on the lawn
a long poem of the decadent period, a poem about the old gods
of Babylon and Egypt, about their blazing and obscene temples,
their cruel and colossal faces.
"Or didst thou love the God of Flies who plagued
the Hebrews and was splashed
With wine unto the waist, or Pasht who had green
beryls for her eyes?"
I read this poem because I had to review it for the Daily News;
still it was genuine poetry of its kind. It really gave out
an atmosphere, a fragrant and suffocating smoke that seemed really
to come from the Bondage of Egypt or the Burden of Tyre There is not
much in common (thank God) between my garden with the grey-green
English sky-line beyond it, and these mad visions of painted
palaces huge, headless idols and monstrous solitudes of red
or golden sand. Nevertheless (as I confessed to myself) I can
fancy in such a stormy twilight some such smell of death and fear.
The ruined sunset really looks like one of their ruined temples:
a shattered heap of gold and green marble. A black flapping thing
detaches itself from one of the sombre trees and flutters to another.
I know not if it is owl or flittermouse; I could fancy it was
a black cherub, an infernal cherub of darkness, not with the wings
of a bird and the head of a baby, but with the head of a goblin
and the wings of a bat. I think, if there were light enough,
I could sit here and write some very creditable creepy tale,
about how I went up the crooked road beyond the church and met Something--
say a dog, a dog with one eye. Then I should meet a horse, perhaps,
a horse without a rider, the horse also would have one eye.
Then the inhuman silence would be broken; I should meet a man
(need I say, a one-eyed man?) who would ask me the way to my
own house. Or perhaps tell me that it was burnt to the ground.
I could tell a very cosy little tale along some such lines.
Or I might dream of climbing for ever the tall dark trees above me.
They are so tall that I feel as if I should find at their tops the nests
of the angels; but in this mood they would be dark and dreadful angels;
angels of death.
Only, you see, this mood is all bosh. I do not believe in it
in the least. That one-eyed universe, with its one-eyed
men and beasts, was only created with one universal wink.
At the top of the tragic trees I should not find the Angel's Nest.
I should only find the Mare's Nest; the dreamy and divine nest
is not there. In the Mare's Nest I shall discover that dim,
enormous opalescent egg from which is hatched the Nightmare.
For there is nothing so delightful as a nightmare--when you know
it is a nightmare.
That is the essential. That is the stern condition laid upon
all artists touching this luxury of fear. The terror must
be fundamentally frivolous. Sanity may play with insanity;
but insanity must not be allowed to play with sanity. Let such
poets as the one I was reading in the garden, by all means, be free
to imagine what outrageous deities and violent landscapes they like.
By all means let them wander freely amid their opium pinnacles
and perspectives. But these huge gods, these high cities, are toys;
they must never for an instant be allowed to be anything else.
Man, a gigantic child, must play with Babylon and Nineveh,
with Isis and with Ashtaroth. By all means let him dream
of the Bondage of Egypt, so long as he is free from it.
By all means let him take up the Burden of Tyre, so long as he can
take it lightly. But the old gods must be his dolls, not his idols.
His central sanctities, his true possessions, should be Christian
and simple. And just as a child would cherish most a wooden horse
or a sword that is a mere cross of wood, so man, the great child,
must cherish most the old plain things of poetry and piety;
that horse of wood that was the epic end of Ilium, or that cross
of wood that redeemed and conquered the world.
In one of Stevenson's letters there is a characteristically humorous
remark about the appalling impression produced on him in childhood by the
beasts with many eyes in the Book of Revelations: "If that was heaven,
what in the name of Davy Jones was hell like?" Now in sober truth
there is a magnificent idea in these monsters of the Apocalypse.
It is, I suppose, the idea that beings really more beautiful or more
universal than we are might appear to us frightful and even confused.
Especially they might seem to have senses at once more multiplex
and more staring; an idea very imaginatively seized in the multitude
of eyes. I like those monsters beneath the throne very much.
But I like them beneath the throne. It is when one of them goes
wandering in deserts and finds a throne for himself that evil
faiths begin, and there is (literally) the devil to pay--to pay
in dancing girls or human sacrifice. As long as those misshapen
elemental powers are around the throne, remember that the thing
that they worship is the likeness of the appearance of a man.
That is, I fancy, the true doctrine on the subject of Tales
of Terror and such things, which unless a man of letters do well
and truly believe, without doubt he will end by blowing his brains
out or by writing badly. Man, the central pillar of the world
must be upright and straight; around him all the trees and beasts
and elements and devils may crook and curl like smoke if they choose.
All really imaginative literature is only the contrast between
the weird curves of Nature and the straightness of the soul.
Man may behold what ugliness he likes if he is sure that he will
not worship it; but there are some so weak that they will
worship a thing only because it is ugly. These must be chained
to the beautiful. It is not always wrong even to go, like Dante,
to the brink of the lowest promontory and look down at hell.
It is when you look up at hell that a serious miscalculation has
probably been made.
Therefore I see no wrong in riding with the Nightmare to-night;
she whinnies to me from the rocking tree-tops and the roaring wind;
I will catch her and ride her through the awful air. Woods and
weeds are alike tugging at the roots in the rising tempest,
as if all wished to fly with us over the moon, like that wild
amorous cow whose child was the Moon-Calf. We will rise to that mad
infinite where there is neither up nor down, the high topsy-turveydom
of the heavens. I will answer the call of chaos and old night.
I will ride on the Nightmare; but she shall not ride on me.
My friend and I were walking in one of those wastes of pine-wood
which make inland seas of solitude in every part of Western Europe;
which have the true terror of a desert, since they are uniform,
and so one may lose one's way in them. Stiff, straight, and similar,
stood up all around us the pines of the wood, like the pikes of a
silent mutiny. There is a truth in talking of the variety of Nature;
but I think that Nature often shows her chief strangeness in
her sameness. There is a weird rhythm in this very repetition;
it is as if the earth were resolved to repeat a single shape until
the shape shall turn terrible.
Have you ever tried the experiment of saying some plain word,
such as "dog," thirty times? By the thirtieth time it has
become a word like "snark" or "pobble." It does not become tame,
it becomes wild, by repetition. In the end a dog walks about
as startling and undecipherable as Leviathan or Croquemitaine.
It may be that this explains the repetitions in Nature, it may be
for this reason that there are so many million leaves and pebbles.
Perhaps they are not repeated so that they may grow familiar.
Perhaps they are repeated only in the hope that they may at last
grow unfamiliar. Perhaps a man is not startled at the first cat he sees,
but jumps into the air with surprise at the seventy-ninth cat.
Perhaps he has to pass through thousands of pine trees before he finds
the one that is really a pine tree. However this may be, there is
something singularly thrilling, even something urgent and intolerant,
about the endless forest repetitions; there is the hint of something
like madness in that musical monotony of the pines.
I said something like this to my friend; and he answered with
sardonic truth, "Ah, you wait till we come to a telegraph post."
My friend was right, as he occasionally is in our discussions,
especially upon points of fact. We had crossed the pine forest
by one of its paths which happened to follow the wires of the
provincial telegraphy; and though the poles occurred at long intervals
they made a difference when they came. The instant we came to the
straight pole we could see that the pines were not really straight.
It was like a hundred straight lines drawn with schoolboy pencils all
brought to judgment suddenly by one straight line drawn with a ruler.
All the amateur lines seemed to reel to right and left. A moment
before I could have sworn they stood as straight as lances; now I could
see them curve and waver everywhere, like scimitars and yataghans.
Compared with the telegraph post the pines were crooked--and alive.
That lonely vertical rod at once deformed and enfranchised the forest.
It tangled it all together and yet made it free, like any grotesque
undergrowth of oak or holly.
"Yes," said my gloomy friend, answering my thoughts. "You don't know
what a wicked shameful thing straightness is if you think these trees
are straight. You never will know till your precious intellectual
civilization builds a forty-mile forest of telegraph poles."
We had started walking from our temporary home later in the day
than we intended; and the long afternoon was already lengthening
itself out into a yellow evening when we came out of the forest
on to the hills above a strange town or village, of which the lights
had already begun to glitter in the darkening valley. The change
had already happened which is the test and definition of evening.
I mean that while the sky seemed still as bright, the earth was growing
blacker against it, especially at the edges, the hills and the pine-tops.
This brought out yet more clearly the owlish secrecy of pine-woods;
and my friend cast a regretful glance at them as he came out under
the sky. Then he turned to the view in front; and, as it happened,
one of the telegraph posts stood up in front of him in the last sunlight.
It was no longer crossed and softened by the more delicate lines
of pine wood; it stood up ugly, arbitrary, and angular as any crude
figure in geometry. My friend stopped, pointing his stick at it,
and all his anarchic philosophy rushed to his lips.
"Demon," he said to me briefly, "behold your work. That palace of
proud trees behind us is what the world was before you civilized men,
Christians or democrats or the rest, came to make it dull with your dreary
rules of morals and equality. In the silent fight of that forest,
tree fights speechless against tree, branch against branch.
And the upshot of that dumb battle is inequality--and beauty.
Now lift up your eyes and look at equality and ugliness.
See how regularly the white buttons are arranged on that black stick,
and defend your dogmas if you dare."
"Is that telegraph post so much a symbol of democracy?" I asked.
"I fancy that while three men have made the telegraph to get dividends,
about a thousand men have preserved the forest to cut wood.
But if the telegraph pole is hideous (as I admit) it is not due to
doctrine but rather to commercial anarchy. If any one had a doctrine
about a telegraph pole it might be carved in ivory and decked with gold.
Modern things are ugly, because modern men are careless,
not because they are careful."
"No," answered my friend with his eye on the end of a splendid
and sprawling sunset, "there is something intrinsically deadening
about the very idea of a doctrine. A straight line is always ugly.
Beauty is always crooked. These rigid posts at regular intervals
are ugly because they are carrying across the world the real
message of democracy."
"At this moment," I answered, "they are probably carrying across the world
the message, 'Buy Bulgarian Rails.' They are probably the prompt
communication between some two of the wealthiest and wickedest of His
children with whom God has ever had patience. No; these telegraph
poles are ugly and detestable, they are inhuman and indecent.
But their baseness lies in their privacy, not in their publicity.
That black stick with white buttons is not the creation of
the soul of a multitude. It is the mad creation of the souls
of two millionaires."
"At least you have to explain," answered my friend gravely,
"how it is that the hard democratic doctrine and the hard telegraphic
outline have appeared together; you have... But bless my soul,
we must be getting home. I had no idea it was so late.
Let me see, I think this is our way through the wood. Come, let us
both curse the telegraph post for entirely different reasons and get
home before it is dark."
We did not get home before it was dark. For one reason or another
we had underestimated the swiftness of twilight and the suddenness
of night, especially in the threading of thick woods. When my
friend, after the first five minutes' march, had fallen over
a log, and I, ten minutes after, had stuck nearly to the knees
in mire, we began to have some suspicion of our direction.
At last my friend said, in a low, husky voice:
"I'm afraid we're on the wrong path. It's pitch dark."
"I thought we went the right way," I said, tentatively.
"Well," he said; and then, after a long pause, "I can't see any
telegraph poles. I've been looking for them."
"So have I," I said. "They're so straight."
We groped away for about two hours of darkness in the thick of
the fringe of trees which seemed to dance round us in derision.
Here and there, however, it was possible to trace the outline
of something just too erect and rigid to be a pine tree.
By these we finally felt our way home, arriving in a cold green
twilight before dawn.
In a small grey town of stone in one of the great Yorkshire dales,
which is full of history, I entered a hall and saw an old
puppet-play exactly as our fathers saw it five hundred years ago.
It was admirably translated from the old German, and was the original
tale of Faust. The dolls were at once comic and convincing;
but if you cannot at once laugh at a thing and believe in it,
you have no business in the Middle Ages. Or in the world,
for that matter.
The puppet-play in question belongs, I believe, to the fifteenth century;
and indeed the whole legend of Dr. Faustus has the colour of
that grotesque but somewhat gloomy time. It is very unfortunate
that we so often know a thing that is past only by its tail end.
We remember yesterday only by its sunsets. There are many instances.
One is Napoleon. We always think of him as a fat old despot, ruling
Europe with a ruthless military machine. But that, as Lord Rosebery
would say, was only "The Last Phase"; or at least the last but one.
During the strongest and most startling part of his career,
the time that made him immortal, Napoleon was a sort of boy,
and not a bad sort of boy either, bullet-headed and ambitious,
but honestly in love with a woman, and honestly enthusiastic for a cause,
the cause of French justice and equality.
Another instance is the Middle Ages, which we also remember
only by the odour of their ultimate decay. We think of the life
of the Middle Ages as a dance of death, full of devils and
deadly sins, lepers and burning heretics. But this was not
the life of the Middle Ages, but the death of the Middle Ages.
It is the spirit of Louis XI and Richard III, not of Louis IX
and Edward I.
This grim but not unwholesome fable of Dr. Faustus, with its rebuke
to the mere arrogance of learning, is sound and stringent enough; but it
is not a fair sample of the mediaeval soul at its happiest and sanest.
The heart of the true Middle Ages might be found far better,
for instance, in the noble tale of Tannhauser, in which the dead staff
broke into leaf and flower to rebuke the pontiff who had declared
even one human being beyond the strength of sorrow and pardon.
But there were in the play two great human ideas which the
mediaeval mind never lost its grip on, through the heaviest
nightmares of its dissolution. They were the two great jokes
of mediaevalism, as they are the two eternal jokes of mankind.
Wherever those two jokes exist there is a little health and hope;
wherever they are absent, pride and insanity are present.
The first is the idea that the poor man ought to get the better
of the rich man. The other is the idea that the husband is afraid
of the wife.
I have heard that there is a place under the knee which, when struck,
should produce a sort of jump; and that if you do not jump,
you are mad. I am sure that there are some such places in the soul.
When the human spirit does not jump with joy at either of those two
old jokes, the human spirit must be struck with incurable paralysis.
There is hope for people who have gone down into the hells of greed
and economic oppression (at least, I hope there is, for we are such
a people ourselves), but there is no hope for a people that does not
exult in the abstract idea of the peasant scoring off the prince.
There is hope for the idle and the adulterous, for the men
that desert their wives and the men that beat their wives.
But there is no hope for men who do not boast that their
wives bully them.
The first idea, the idea about the man at the bottom coming out on top,
is expressed in this puppet-play in the person of Dr. Faustus'
servant, Caspar. Sentimental old Tones, regretting the feudal times,
sometimes complain that in these days Jack is as good as his master.
But most of the actual tales of the feudal times turn on the idea
that Jack is much better than his master, and certainly it is so
in the case of Caspar and Faust. The play ends with the damnation
of the learned and illustrious doctor, followed by a cheerful and
animated dance by Caspar, who has been made watchman of the city.
But there was a much keener stroke of mediaeval irony earlier
in the play. The learned doctor has been ransacking all
the libraries of the earth to find a certain rare formula,
now almost unknown, by which he can control the infernal deities.
At last he procures the one precious volume, opens it at the proper page,
and leaves it on the table while he seeks some other part of his
magic equipment. The servant comes in, reads off the formula,
and immediately becomes an emperor of the elemental spirits.
He gives them a horrible time. He summons and dismisses them
alternately with the rapidity of a piston-rod working at high speed;
he keeps them flying between the doctor's house and their own more
unmentionable residences till they faint with rage and fatigue.
There is all the best of the Middle Ages in that; the idea
of the great levellers, luck and laughter; the idea of a sense
of humour defying and dominating hell.
One of the best points in the play as performed in this Yorkshire
town was that the servant Caspar was made to talk Yorkshire,
instead of the German rustic dialect which he talked in the original.
That also smacks of the good air of that epoch. In those old pictures
and poems they always made things living by making them local.
Thus, queerly enough, the one touch that was not in the old mediaeval
version was the most mediaeval touch of all.
That other ancient and Christian jest, that a wife is a holy terror,
occurs in the last scene, where the doctor (who wears a fur
coat throughout, to make him seem more offensively rich and refined)
is attempting to escape from the avenging demons, and meets
his old servant in the street. The servant obligingly points
out a house with a blue door, and strongly recommends Dr. Faustus
to take refuge in it. "My old woman lives there," he says,
"and the devils are more afraid of her than you are of them."
Faustus does not take this advice, but goes on meditating
and reflecting (which had been his mistake all along) until the clock
strikes twelve, and dreadful voices talk Latin in heaven.
So Faustus, in his fur coat, is carried away by little black imps;
and serve him right for being an Intellectual.
CHESTERTON-ALARM AND SIDISCUTIO