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.
