The Mummer

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