Alarms and Discursions | Page 9

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.

The Man and His Newspaper
At a little station, which I decline to specify, somewhere between
Oxford and Guildford, I missed a connection or miscalculated a route
in such manner that I was left stranded for rather more than an hour. I
adore waiting at railway stations, but this was not a very sumptuous
specimen. There was nothing on the platform except a chocolate
automatic machine, which eagerly absorbed pennies but produced no
corresponding chocolate, and a small paper-stall with a few remaining
copies of a cheap imperial organ which we will call the Daily Wire. It
does not matter which imperial organ it was, as they all say the same
thing.
Though I knew it quite well already, I read it with gravity as I strolled
out of the station and up the country road. It opened with the striking
phrase that the Radicals were setting class against class. It went on to
remark that nothing had contributed more to make our Empire happy
and enviable, to create that obvious list of glories which you can supply
for yourself, the prosperity of all classes in our great cities, our
populous and growing villages, the success of our rule in Ireland, etc.,
etc., than the sound Anglo-Saxon readiness of all classes in the State
"to work heartily hand-in-hand." It was this alone, the paper assured me,
that had saved us from the horrors of the French Revolution. "It is easy
for the Radicals," it went on very solemnly, "to make jokes about the
dukes. Very few of these revolutionary gentlemen have given to the
poor one half of the earnest thought, tireless unselfishness, and truly
Christian patience that are given to