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.