The Mummer / Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The night before Christmas Eve I heard a burst of musical voices so close

that they might as well have been inside the house instead of just outside;

so I asked them inside, hoping that they might then seem farther away.

Then I realised that they were the Christmas Mummers, who come every year

in country parts to enact the rather rigid fragments of the old Christmas

play of St. George, the Turkish Knight, and the Very Venal Doctor. I will

not describe it; it is indescribable; but I will describe my parallel

sentiments as it passed.

One could see something of that half-failure that haunts our artistic

revivals of mediaeval dances, carols, or Bethlehem Plays. There are

elements in all that has come to us from the more morally simple society

of the Middle Ages: elements which moderns, even when they are

mediaevalists, find it hard to understand and harder to imitate. The

first is the primary idea of Mummery itself. If you will observe a child

just able to walk, you will see that his first idea is not to dress up as

anybody--but to dress up. Afterwards, of course, the idea of being the

King or Uncle William will leap to his lips. But it is generally

suggested by the hat he has already let fall over his nose, from far

deeper motives. Tommy does not assume the hat primarily because it is

Uncle William's hat, but because it is not Tommy's hat. It is a ritual

investiture; and is akin to those Gorgon masks that stiffened the dances

of Greece or those towering mitres that came from the mysteries of Persia.

For the essence of such ritual is a profound paradox: the concealment of

the personality combined with the exaggeration of the person. The man

performing a rite seeks to be at once invisible and conspicuous. It is

part of that divine madness which all other creatures wonder at in Man,

that he alone parades this pomp of obliteration and anonymity. Man is not,

perhaps, the only creature who dresses himself, but he is the only

creature who disguises himself. Beasts and birds do indeed take the

colours of their environment; but that is not in order to be watched, but

in order not to be watched; it is not the formalism of rejoicing, but the

formlessness of fear. It is not so with men, whose nature is the

unnatural. Ancient Britons did not stain themselves blue because they

lived in blue forests; nor did Georgian beaux and belles powder their hair

to match an Arctic landscape; the Britons were not dressing up as

kingfishers nor the beaux pretending to be polar bears. Nay, even when

modern ladies paint their faces a bright mauve, it is doubted by some

naturalists whether they do it with the idea of escaping notice. So

merry-makers (or Mummers) adopt their costume to heighten and exaggerate

their own bodily presence and identity; not to sink it, primarily speaking,

in another identity. It is not Acting--that comparatively low

profession-comparatively I mean. It is Mummery; and, as Mr. Kensit would

truly say, all elaborate religious ritual is Mummery. That is, it is the

noble conception of making Man something other and more than himself when

he stands at the limit of human things. It is only careful faddists and

feeble German philosophers who want to wear no clothes; and be "natural"

in their Dionysian revels. Natural men, really vigorous and exultant men,

want to wear more and more clothes when they are revelling. They want

worlds of waistcoats and forests of trousers and pagodas of tall hats

toppling up to the stars.

Thus it is with the lingering Mummers at Christmas in the country. If our

more refined revivers of Miracle Plays or Morrice Dances tried to

reconstruct the old Mummers' Play of St. George and the Turkish Knight (I

do not know why they do not) they would think at once of picturesque and

appropriate dresses. St. George's panoply would be pictured from the best

books of armour and blazonry: the Turkish Knight's arms and ornaments

would be traced from the finest Saracenic arabesques. When my garden door

opened on Christmas Eve and St. George of England entered, the appearance

of that champion was slightly different. His face was energetically

blacked all over with soot, above which he wore an aged and very tall top

hat; he wore his shirt outside his coat like a surplice, and he flourished

a thick umbrella. Now do not, I beg you, talk about "ignorance"; or

suppose that the Mummer in question (he is a very pleasant Ratcatcher,

with a tenor voice) did this because he knew no better. Try to realise

that even a Ratcatcher knows St. George of England was not black, and did

not kill the Dragon with an umbrella. The Rat-catcher is not under this

delusion; any more than Paul Veronese thought that very good men have

luminous rings round their heads; any more than the Pope thinks that

Christ washed the feet of the twelve in a Cathedral; any more than the

Duke of Norfolk thinks the lions on a tabard are like the lions at the Zoo.

These things are denaturalised because they are symbols; because the

extraordinary occasion must hide or even disfigure the ordinary people.

Black faces were to mediaeval mummeries what carved masks were to Greek

plays: it was called being "vizarded." My Rat-catcher is not sufficiently

arrogant to suppose for a moment that he looks like St. George. But he is

sufficiently humble to be convinced that if he looks as little like

himself as he can, he will be on the right road.

This is the soul of Mumming; the ostentatious secrecy of men in disguise.

There are, of course, other mediaeval elements in it which are also

difficult to explain to the fastidious mediaevalists of to-day. There is,

for instance, a certain output of violence into the void. It can best be

defined as a raging thirst to knock men down without the faintest desire

to hurt them. All the rhymes with the old ring have the trick of turning

on everything in which the rhymsters most sincerely believed, merely for

the pleasure of blowing off steam in startling yet careless phrases. When

Tennyson says that King Arthur "drew all the petty princedoms under him,"

and "made a realm and ruled," his grave Royalism is quite modern. Many

mediaevals, outside the mediaeval republics, believed in monarchy as

solemnly as Tennyson. But that older verse

When good King Arthur ruled this land

He was a goodly King--

He stole three pecks of barley-meal

To make a bag-pudding.

is far more Arthurian than anything in The Idylls of the King. There are

other elements; especially that sacred thing that can perhaps be called

Anachronism. All that to us is Anachronism was to mediaevals merely

Eternity. But the main excellence of the Mumming Play lies still, I think,

in its uproarious secrecy. If we cannot hide our hearts in healthy

darkness, at least we can hide our faces in healthy blacking. If you

cannot escape like a philosopher into a forest, at least you can carry the

forest with you, like a Jack-in-the-Green. It is well to walk under

universal ensigns; and there is an old tale of a tyrant to whom a walking

forest was the witness of doom. That, indeed, is the very intensity of

the notion: a masked man is ominous; but who shall face a mob of masks?