ntest 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?

THE ARISTOCRATIC 'ARRY

The Cheap Tripper, pursued by the curses of the aesthetes and the
antiquaries, really is, I suppose, a symptom of the strange and almost
unearthly ugliness of our diseased society. The costumes and customs
of a hundred peasantries are there to prove that such ugliness does
not necessarily follow from mere poverty, or mere democracy, or mere
unlettered simplicity of mind.

But though the tripper, artistically considered, is a sign of our
decadence, he is not one of its worst signs, but relatively one of its
best; one of its most innocent and most sincere. Compared with many
of the philosophers and artists who denounce him; he looks like a God
fearing fisher or a noble mountaineer. His antics with donkeys and
concertinas, crowded charabancs, and exchanged hats, though clumsy, are
not so vicious or even so fundamentally vulgar as many of the amusements
of the overeducated. People are not more crowded on a char-a-banc than
they are at a political "At Home," or even an artistic soiree; and if