The more I consider that strange inversion of idolatry which is the motive of Guy Fawkes Day and which annually animates the by-streets with the sound of processionals and of recessionals—­a certain popular version of “Lest we forget” their unvaried theme; the more I hear the cries of derision raised by the makers of this likeness of something unworshipful on the earth beneath, so much the more am I convinced that the national humour is that of banter, and that no other kind of mirth so gains as does this upon the public taste.

Here, for example, is the popular idea of a street festival; that day is as the people will actually have it, with their own invention, their own material, their own means, and their own spirit.  They owe nothing on this occasion to the promptings or the subscriptions of the classes that are apt to take upon themselves the direction and tutelage of the people in relation to any form of art.  Here on every fifth of November the people have their own way with their own art; and their way is to offer the service of the image-maker, reversed in hissing and irony, to some creature of their hands.

It is a wanton fancy; and perhaps no really barbarous people is capable of so overturning the innocent plan of original portraiture.  To make a mental image of all things that are named to the ear, or conceived in the mind, being an industrious custom of children and childish people which lapses in the age of much idle reading, the making of a material image is the still more diligent and more sedulous act, whereby the primitive man controls and caresses his own fancy.  He may take arms anon, disappointed, against his own work; but did he ever do that work in malice from the outset?

From the statue to the doll, images are all outraged in the person of the guy.  If it were but an antithesis to the citizen’s idea of something admirable which he might carry in procession on some other day, the carrying of the guy would be less gloomy; but he would hoot at a suspicion that he might admire anything so much as to make a good-looking doll in its praise.  There is absolutely no image-making art in the practice of our people, except only this art of rags and contumely.  Or, again, if the revenge taken upon a guy were that of anger for a certain cause, the destruction would not be the work of so thin an annual malice and of so heartless a rancour.

But the single motive is that popular irony which becomes daily—­or so it seems—­more and more the holiday temper of the majority.  Mockery is the only animating impulse, and a loud incredulity is the only intelligence.  They make an image of some one in whom they do not believe, to deride it.  Say that the guy is the effigy of an agitator in the cause of something to be desired; the street man and boy have then two motives of mocking:  they think the reform to be not worth doing, and they are willing to suspect the reformer of some kind of hypocrisy.  Perhaps the guy of this occasion is most characteristic of all guys in London.  The people, having him or her to deride, do not even wait for the opportunity of their annual procession.  They anticipate time, and make an image when it is not November, and sell it at the market of the kerb.