He says:
"So has the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and the Derby Day, but people
go on describing them all the same, and apparently find other people to
read their descriptions. Say that the little village, clustered round
its mosque-domed church, nestles in the centre of a valley, surrounded by
great fir-robed hills, which stand, with the cross-crowned Kofel for
their chief, like stern, strong sentinels guarding its old-world peace
from the din and clamour of the outer world. Describe how the square,
whitewashed houses are sheltered beneath great overhanging gables, and
are encircled by carved wooden balconies and verandahs, where, in the
cool of the evening, peasant wood-carver and peasant farmer sit to smoke
the long Bavarian pipe, and chat about the cattle and the Passion Play
and village politics; and how, in gaudy colours above the porch, are
painted glowing figures of saints and virgins and such-like good folk,
which the rains have sadly mutilated, so that a legless angel on one side
of the road looks dejectedly across at a headless Madonna on the other,
while at an exposed corner some unfortunate saint, more cruelly dealt
with by the weather than he ever was even by the heathen, has been
deprived of everything that he could call his own, with the exception of
half a head and a pair of extra-sized feet.
"Explain how all the houses are numbered according to the date they were
built, so that number sixteen comes next to number forty-seven, and there
is no number one because it has been pulled down. Tell how
unsophisticated visitors, informed that their lodgings are at number
fifty-three, go wandering for days and days round fifty-two, under the
not unreasonable impression that their house must be next door, though,
as a matter of fact, it is half a mile off at the other end of the
village, and are discovered one sunny morning, sitting on the doorstep of
number eighteen, singing pathetic snatches of nursery rhymes, and trying
to plat their toes into door-mats, and are taken up and carried away
screaming, to end their lives in the madhouse at Munich.
"Talk about the weather. People who have stayed here for any length of
time tell me that it rains at Ober-Ammergau three days out of every four,
the reason that it does not rain on the fourth day being that every
fourth day is set apart for a deluge. They tell me, also, that while it
will be pouring with rain just in the village the sun will be shining
brightly all round about, and that the villagers, when the water begins
to come in through their roofs, snatch up their children and hurry off to
the nearest field, where they sit and wait until the storm is over."
"Do you believe them--the persons that you say tell you these tales?" I
ask.
"Personally I do not," he replies. "I think people exaggerate to me
because I look young and innocent, but no doubt there is a ground-work of
truth in their statements. I have myself left Ober-Ammergau under a
steady drenching rain, and found a cloudless sky the other side of the
Kofel.
"Then," he continues, "you can comment upon the hardihood of the Bavarian
peasant. How he or she walks about bare-headed and bare-footed through
the fiercest showers, and seems to find the rain only pleasantly cooling.
How, during the performance of the Passion Play, they act and sing and
stand about upon the uncovered stage without taking the slightest notice
of the downpour of water that is soaking their robes and running from
their streaming hair, to make great pools upon the boards; and how the
audience, in the cheaper, unroofed portion of the theatre, sit with equal
stoicism, watching them, no one ever dreaming even of putting up an
umbrella--or, if he does dream of doing so, experiencing a very rude
awakening from the sticks of those behind."
B. stops to relight his pipe at this point, and I hear the two ladies in
the next room fidgeting about and muttering worse than ever. It seems to
me they are listening at the door (our room and theirs are connected by a
door); I do wish that they would either get into bed again or else go
downstairs. They worry me.
"And what shall I say after I have said all that?" I ask B. when at last
he has started his pipe again.
"Oh! well, after that," he replies, "you can give the history of the
Passion Play; how it came to be played."
"Oh, but so many people have done that already," I say again.
"So much the better for you," is his reply. Having previously heard
precisely the same story from half a dozen other sources, the public will
be tempted to believe you when you repeat the account. Tell them that
during the thirty year's war a terrible plague (as if half a dozen
different armies, marching up and down their country, fighting each other
about the Lord only knows what, and living on them while doing it, was
not plague enough) swept over Bavaria, devastating each town and hamlet.
Of all the highland villages, Ober-Ammergau by means of a strictly
enforced quarantine alone kept, for a while, the black foe at bay. No
soul was allowed to leave the village; no living thing to enter it.
"But one dark night Caspar Schuchler, an inhabitant of Ober-Ammergau, who
had been working in the plague-stricken neighbouring village of
Eschenlohe, creeping low on his belly, passed the drowsy sentinels, and
gained his home, and saw what for many a day he had been hungering for--a
sight of his wife and bairns. It was a selfish act to do, and he and his
fellow-villagers paid dearly for it. Three days after he had entered his
house he and all his family lay dead, and the plague was raging through
the valley, and nothing seemed able to stay its course.
"When human means fail, we feel it is only fair to give Heaven a chance.
The good people who dwelt by the side of the Ammer vowed that, if the
plague left them, they would, every ten years, perform a Passion Play.
The celestial powers seem to have at once closed with this offer. The
plague disappeared as if by magic, and every recurring tenth year since,
the Ober-Ammergauites have kept their promise and played their Passion
Play. They act it to this day as a pious observance. Before each
performance all the characters gather together on the stage around their
pastor, and, kneeling, pray for a blessing upon the work then about to
commence. The profits that are made, after paying the performers a wage
that just compensates them for their loss of time--wood-carver Maier, who
plays the Christ, only receives about fifty pounds for the whole of the
thirty or so performances given during the season, to say nothing of the
winter's rehearsals--is put aside, part for the temporal benefit of the
community, and the rest for the benefit of the Church. From burgomaster
down to shepherd lad, from the Mary and the Jesus down to the meanest
super, all work for the love of their religion, not for money. Each one
feels that he is helping forward the cause of Christianity."
"And I could also speak," I add, "of grand old Daisenberger, the gentle,
simple old priest, 'the father of the valley,' who now lies in silence
among his children that he loved so well. It was he, you know, that
shaped the rude burlesque of a coarser age into the impressive
reverential drama that we saw yesterday. That is a portrait of him over
the bed. What a plain, homely, good face it is! How pleasant, how
helpful it is to come across a good face now and then! I do not mean a
sainted face, suggestive of stained glass and marble tombs, but a rugged
human face that has had the grit, and rain, and sunshine of life rubbed
into it, and that has gained its expression, not by looking up with
longing at the stars, but by looking down with eyes full of laughter and
love at the human things around it."
"Yes," assented B. "You can put in that if you like. There is no harm
in it. And then you can go on to speak of the play itself, and give your
impressions concerning it. Never mind their being silly. They will be
all the better for that. Silly remarks are generally more interesting
than sensible ones."
"But what is the use of saying anything about it at all?" I urge. "The
merest school-boy must know all about the Ober-Ammergau Passion Play by
this time."
"What has that to do with you?" answers B. "You are not writing for
cultured school-boys. You are writing for mere simple men and women.
They will be glad of a little information on the subject, and then when
the schoolboy comes home for his holiday they will be able, so far as
this topic, at all events, is concerned, to converse with him on his own
level and not appear stupid.
"Come," he says, kindly, trying to lead me on, "what did you think about
it?"
"Well," I reply, after musing for a while, "I think that a play of
eighteen acts and some forty scenes, which commences at eight o'clock in
the morning, and continues, with an interval of an hour and a half for
dinner, until six o'clock in the evening, is too long. I think the piece
wants cutting. About a third of it is impressive and moving, and what
the earnest student of the drama at home is for ever demanding that a
play should be--namely, elevating; but I consider that the other
two-thirds are tiresome."
"Quite so," answers B. "But then we must remember that the performance
is not intended as an entertainment, but as a religious service. To
criticise any part of it as uninteresting, is like saying that half the
Bible might very well have been omitted, and that the whole story could
have been told in a third of the space."