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 the female trippers are overdressed, at least they are not overdressed and underdressed at the same time.  It is better to ride a donkey than to be a donkey.  It is better to deal with the Cockney festival which asks men and women to change hats, rather than with the modern Utopia that wants them to change heads.

But the truth is that such small, but real, element of vulgarity as there is indeed in the tripper, is part of a certain folly and falsity which is characteristic of much modernity, and especially of the very people who persecute the poor tripper most.  There is something in the whole society, and even especially in the cultured part of it, that does things in a clumsy and unbeautiful way.

A case occurs to me in the matter of Stonehenge, which I happened to visit yesterday.  Now to a person really capable of feeling the poetry of Stonehenge it is almost a secondary matter whether he sees Stonehenge at all.  The vast void roll of the empty land towards Salisbury, the gray tablelands like primeval altars, the trailing rain-clouds, the vapour of primeval sacrifices, would all tell him of a very ancient and very lonely Britain.  It would not spoil his Druidic mood if he missed Stonehenge.  But it does spoil his mood to find Stonehenge—­surrounded by a brand-new fence of barbed wire, with a policeman and a little shop selling picture post-cards.