y 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
fai