Alarms and Discursions | Page 8

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.

A Drama of Dolls
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