DRAMATIC REALISM

111

show, but making believe to summon unwilling folk before the justice.

I shall close these remarks with yet another scene of dramatic realism, chosen from the Coventry Plays. It occurs in the Pageant of the Woman taken in Adultery. A Scribe and a Pharisee are consulting how they may entrap Christ, and bring Him to confusion. A third person, who is styled Accusator, suggests that they should present Him with the puzzling case of a woman detected in the act of sin :

A fair young quean here by doth dwell,
Both fresh and gay upon to look ;

And a tall man with her doth mell:

The way into her chamber right even he took.

Let us there now go straight thither;

The way

full even I shall you lead;

And we shall take them both together,

While that they do that sinful deed.

The Pharisee and Scribe assent. The Accuser leads them to the house. They break open the door, and the tall man comes rushing out, pursued by the three witnesses. The stage direction runs as follows:

[Hic juvenis quidam extra currit in diploide, caligis non ligatis, et braccas in manu tenens, et dicit Accusator]

Accusator

Stow that harlot, some earthly wight!
That in advowtry here is found!

Juvenis

If any man stow me this night,
I shall him give a deadly wound.
If any man my way doth stop,
Or we depart dead shall I be ;
I shall this dagger put in his crop;
I shall him kill or he shall me!

Pharisee

Great God his curse may go with thee!
With such a shrew will I not mell.

Juvenis

That same blessing I give you three,
And queath you all to the devil of hell.

[Turning to the audience, and showing them in what
a plight he stands.]

In faith I was so sore afraid

Of yon three shrews, the sooth to say,
My breech be not yet well up tied,

I had such haste to run away:

They shall never catch me in such affray—
I am full glad that I am gone.

Adieu, adieu! a twenty devils' way!

And God his curse have ye every one!

What follows, when the Scribe, the Pharisee, and the Accuser drag the woman forth, is too foul-mouthed for quotation. It proves that the monkish author of the text shrank from nothing which could make his point clear, or could furnish sport to the spectators. The scene acquires dignity as it proceeds. Christ writes in silence with His finger on the sand, while the three witnesses utter voluble invective, ply Him with citations from the law of Moses, and taunt Him with inability to answer. At last He lifts His head and speaks:

Jesus

Look which of you that never sin wrought,

But is of life cleaner than she,

Cast at her stones and spare her nought,

Clean out of sin if that ye be.

[Hic JESUS iterum se inclinans scribet in terra, et omnes accusatores quasi confusi separatim in tribus locis se disjungent.]

Pharisee

Alas, alas! I am ashamed.

I am afeard that I shall die.

All mine sins even properly named

Yon prophet did write before mine eye.

If that my fellows that did espy,

They will tell it both far and wide;

My sinful living if they out cry

I wot never where mine head to hide!

HUMOUR AND RELIGION

113

The same effect is produced on the other witnesses by Christ's mystic writing in the sand. They slink away, abashed or silenced, while the woman makes confession and receives absolution:

When man is contrite, and hath won grace,

God will not keep old wrath in mind;
But better love to them He has,

Very contrite when He them find.

Some reflections are forced upon the mind by the mixture of comedy with sacred things in these old plays, and by their gross material realism. In order to comprehend what strikes a modern student as profanity, we must place ourselves at the medieval point of view. The Northern races who adopted Christianity delighted in grotesqueness. The broad hilarity of their Yule rites and festivals added mirth to Christmas. To separate the indulgence of this taste for humour from religion would have been impossible; because religion was the fullest expression of their life, absorbing all their intellectual energies. The Cathedral, which embodied the highest spiritual aspirations in a monumental work of art, admitted grotesquery in details and flung wide its gate at certain seasons to buffoonery. Grinning gargoils, monstrous Lombard centaurs, mermaids clasped with men, indecent miserere stalls, festivals of Fools and Asses, burlesque Masses performed by boy-bishops, travesties of holiest rites did not offend, as it would seem, the sense of men who reared the spire of Salisbury, who carved the portals of Chartres, who glazed the chancel windows of Le Mans, who struck the unison of arch and curve and column, and could span in thought the vacant air with aisles more bowery than forest glades. We, in this later age of colder piety and half-extinguished art, explore the relics of the past, scrutinise and ponder, classify and criticise. It is hardly given to us to understand the harmony of parts apparently so diverse. It shocks our taste to dwell on coarseness and religion blent in one consistent whole. We forget that the artists we admire our masters in design how unapproachably beyond the reach of modern

genius!-lived their whole lives out in what they wrought. For those folk, so simple in their mental state, so positive in their belief, it was both right and natural that the ludicrous and even the unclean should find a place in art and in religious mysteries.

ΧΙ

As a last word on the subject of Miracle Plays, I may suggest that those who are curious to form an adequate conception of the pageants as they were performed should pay a visit to the Sacro Monte at Varallo. There, on the broad flat summit of a rocky hill some thousand feet above the valley of the Sesia, is a sanctuary surrounded with numberless chapels embowered in chestnut woods. Each chapel contains a scene from sacred history, expressed by figures of life size, vividly painted, and accompanied with simple scenery in fresco on the walls. The whole series sets forth the life of Christ with special reference to the Passion. Architecture, plastic groups, and wall-paintings date alike from a period in the middle of the sixteenth century, and are the work of no mean craftsmen. The great Gaudenzio Ferrari plied his brush there together with painters of Luini's school. But the method of treatment, particularly in episodes of vehement emotion, such as the Massacre of the Innocents, the Flagellation, and the Crucifixion, indicates antique tradition. Designed for the people who crowd this festival in summer time on pilgrimage from all the neighbouring hill country and cities of the plain, they are no finished masterpieces of Renaissance art, but simply realistic pageants bringing facts. with rude dramatic force before the eyes. It seems to me impossible to approach the Miracles, as they were probably exhibited in Coventry and Chester, more closely than on this Holy Mountain, where the popular art of the sixteenth century is still in close relation with the religious sentiments of a rustic population.

CHAPTER IV

MORAL PLAYS

I. Development of Minor Religious Plays from the Cyclical Miracle-Intermediate Forms between Miracle and Drama-Allegory and Personification.-II. Allegories in the Miracle-Detached from the Miracle-Medieval Contrasti, Dialogi, and Disputationes-Emergence of the Morality-Its essentially Transitional Character.-III. Stock Personages in Moral Plays-Devil and Vice-The Vice and the Clown -IV. Stock Argument-Protestant and Catholic- Mundus et Infans.'-V. The 'Castle of Perseverance'-'Lusty Juventus'—' Youth.' -VI. 'Hick Scorner '-A real Person introduced-New Custom ' 'Trial of Treasure '--' Like will to Like.'-VII. Everyman '—The Allegorical Importance of this Piece.-VIII. Moral Plays with an Attempt at Plot- Marriage of Wit and Wisdom '-' Marriage of Wit and Science '- 'The Four Elements '-'Microcosmus.'-IX. Advance in Dramatic Quality-The Nice Wanton '-'The Disobedient Child.' -X. How Moral Plays were Acted-Passage from the old Play of 'Sir Thomas More.'-XI. Hybrids between Moral Plays and Drama'King Johan '-Mixture of History and Allegory- The Vice in Appius and Virginia'-In Cambyses.'

(N.B.-The majority of the Plays discussed in this chapter will be found in Hazlitt's Dodsley, vols. i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi.)

I

THE examples already given of humorous passages occurring in the Miracles suffice to prove that comedy was ready to detach itself from the religious drama, and to assert its independence. But other causes had to operate, and a whole phase of evolution had to be accomplished before the emancipation of tragedy, that far more highly organised artistic form, could be effected. In proportion as the Miracles passed more and more into the hands of laymen, and characters like Herod or Pilate acquired greater prominence, the transition from the Cyclical Mystery to an intermediate type, out of