You will wonder yet more when you hear it defined. To tell the truth, he--our foremost citizen--yet missed being a perfect Trojan.
We were far indeed from suspecting it; he was our fine flower, our representative man. Yet in the light of later events I can see now, and plainly enough, where he fell short.
A University Extension Lecturer who descended upon us the other day and, encouraged by the crowds that flocked to hear him discourse on English Miracle Plays, advertised a second series of lectures, this time on English Moralities, but only to find his audience diminished to one young lady (whom he promptly married)--this lecturer, I say, whose text-books indeed indicated several points of difference between the Miracle Play and the Morality, but nothing to account for so marked a subsidence in the register, departed in a huff, using tart language and likening us to a pack of children blowing bubbles.
There is something in the fellow"s simile. When an idea gets hold of us in Troy, we puff at it, we blow it out and distend it to a globe, pausing and calling on one another to mark the prismatic tints, the fugitive images, symbols, meanings of the wide world gla.s.sed upon our pretty toy. We launch it. We follow it with our eyes as it floats from us--an irrecoverable delight. We watch until the microcosm goes pop! Then we laugh and blow another.
That is where the fellow"s simile breaks down. While the game lasts we are profoundly in earnest, serious as children: but each bubble as it bursts releases a shower of innocent laughter, flinging it like spray upon the sky. There in a chime it hangs for a moment, and so comes dropping--dropping--back to us until:
"Quite through our streets, with silver sound"
The flood of laughter flows, and for weeks the narrow roadways, the quays and alleys catch and hold its refluent echoes. Your true Trojan, in short, will don and doff his folly as a garment. Do you meet him, grave as a judge, with compressed lip and corrugated brow?
Stand aside, I warn you: his fit is on him, and he may catch you up with him to heights where the ridiculous and the sublime are one and all the Olympians as drunk as Chloe. Better, if you have no head for heights, wait and listen for the moment--it will surely come--when the bubble cracks, and with a laugh he is sane, hilariously sane.
Just here it was that our Mayor fell out with our _genius loci_.
He could smile--paternally, magisterially, benignantly, gallantly, with patronage, in deprecation, compa.s.sionately, disdainfully (as when he happened to mention Napoleon Bonaparte); subtly and with intention; or frankly, in mere _bonhomie_; as a Man, as a Major, as a Mayor. But he was never known to laugh.
Through this weakness he fell. But he was a great man, and it took the Millennium-nothing less--to undo him.
Here let me say, once for all, that the Millennium was no invention of ours. It started with the Vicar of h.e.l.leston, and we may wash our hands of it.
On the first Sunday of January 1800, the Vicar of h.e.l.leston (an unimportant town in the extreme southwest of Cornwall, near the Lizard) preached a sermon which, at the request of a few parishioners, he afterwards published under the t.i.tle of _Reflections on the New Century_. In delight, no doubt, at finding himself in print, he sent complimentary copies to a number of his fellow-clergy, and, among others, to the Vicar of Troy.
Our Vicar, being a scholar and a gentleman, but a determined foe to loose thinking (especially in Cambridge men), courteously acknowledged the gift, but took occasion to remind his brother of h.e.l.leston that Reflection was a retrospective process; that Man, as a finite creature, could but antic.i.p.ate events before they happened; and that if the parishioners of h.e.l.leston wished to reflect on the New Century they would have to wait until January 1901, or something more than a hundred years.
The Vicar of h.e.l.leston replied, tacitly admitting his misuse of language, but demanding to know if in the Vicar of Troy"s opinion the new century would begin on January 1st, 1801: for his own part he had supposed, and was prepared to maintain, that it had begun on January 1st, 1800.
To this the Vicar of Troy retorted that undoubtedly the new century would begin on the first day of January 1801, and that anyone who held another opinion must suffer from confusion of mind.
The Vicar of h.e.l.leston stuck to his contention, and a terrific correspondence ensued. With the arguments exchanged--which tended more and more to appeal from common sense to metaphysics--we need not concern ourselves. The most of them reappeared the other day (1900-1901) in the public press, and will doubtless reappear at the alleged beginning of every century to come. But in his sixth letter the Vicar of h.e.l.leston opened what I may call a masked battery.
He said--and I believe the fellow had been leading up to this from the start--that he desired to thresh the question out not only on general grounds, but officially as Vicar of h.e.l.leston; since he had reason to believe that a certain day in the opening year of the new century would bring a term to the Millennium; that the Millennium had begun in h.e.l.leston close on a thousand years ago; and that (as he calculated, on the 8th of May next approaching) Satan might reasonably be expected to regain his liberty (see Revelation xx.).
For evidence he adduced a local tradition that in his parish the Archangel Michael (whose Mount stands at no great distance) had met and defeated the Prince of Darkness, had cast him into a pit, and had sealed the pit with a great stone; which stone might be seen by any visitor on application to the landlord of the "Angel" Inn and payment of a trifling fee. Moreover, the stone was black as your hat (unless you were a free-thinking Radical and wore a white one; in which case it was blacker). He pointed out that the name of h.e.l.leston--_i.q._, h.e.l.l"s Stone--corroborated this tradition. He went on to say that annually, on the 8th of May, from time immemorial his parishioners had met in the streets and engaged in a public dance which either commemorated mankind"s deliverance from the Spirit of Evil, or had no meaning at all.
The Vicar of Troy, warming to this new contention, riposted in masterly style. He answered h.e.l.leston"s claim to a monopoly, or even a predominant interest, in the Devil by pelting his opponent with Devil"s Quoits, Devil"s Punch-bowls, Walking-sticks, Frying-pans, Pudding-dishes, Ploughshares; Devil"s Strides, Jumps, Footprints, Fingerprints; Devil"s Hedges, Ditches, Ridges, Furrows; Devil"s Cairns, Cromlechs, Wells, Monoliths, Caves, Castles, Cliffs, Chasms; Devil"s Heaths, Moors, Downs, Commons, Copses, Furzes, Marshes, Bogs, Streams, Sands, Quicksands, Estuaries; Devil"s High-roads, By-roads, Lanes, Footpaths, Stiles, Gates, Smithies, Cross-roads; from every corner of the Duchy. He matched h.e.l.leston"s May-dance with at least a score of similar May-day observances in different towns and villages of Cornwall. He quoted the Padstow Hobby-horse, the Towednack Cuckoo-feast, the Madron Dipping Day, the Troy May-dragon, and proved that the custom of ushering in the summer with song and dance and some symbolical rite of purgation was well-nigh universal throughout Cornwall. He followed the custom overseas, to Brittany, Hungary, the Black Forest, Moldavia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland, the Caucasus. . . . He wound up by sardonically congratulating the worthy folk of h.e.l.leston: if the events of the past thousand years satisfied their notion of a Millennium, they were easily pleased.
And then--
Well, the next thing to happen was that the Vicar of h.e.l.leston published a pamphlet of 76 pages 8vo, ent.i.tled _Considerations Proper to the New Century, with some Reflections on the Millennium_. Note, pray, the artfulness of the t.i.tle, and, having noted it, let us pa.s.s on. Our Vicar did not trouble to reply, being off by this time on a scent of his own.
The dispute had served its purpose. On the morning of March 25th, 1804, he knocked at the Major"s door, and, pushing past Scipio, rushed into the breakfast-parlour unannounced.
"My dear Vicar! What has happened? Surely the French--"
The Major bounced up from his chair, napkin in hand.
"The Millennium, Major! I have it, I tell you!"
Miss Marty sat down the tea-pot with a trembling hand. She was always timid of infectious disease.
"O--oh!" The Major"s tone expressed his relief. "I thought for the moment--and you not shaved this morning--"
"The fellow had hold of the stick all the while. I"ll do him that credit. He had hold of the stick, but at the wrong end. I"ve been working it out, and "tis plain (excuse me) as the nose on your face.
The moment you see "Napoleon" with the numbers under him--"
"Eh? Then it _is_ the French!" Again the Major bounced up from his chair.
"The French? Yes, of course--but, excuse me--"
"_What_ numbers?" The Major"s voice shook, though he bravely tried to control it.
"Six hundred--"
"Good Lord! _Where_?"
"--And sixty and six. In Revelation thirteen, eighteen--I thought you knew!" went on the Vicar reproachfully, as his friend dropped back upon his chair, and, resting an elbow on the table, shaded his eyes and their emotion. "As I can now prove to you in ten minutes, the Corsican"s name spells accurately the Number of the Beast. But that"s only the beginning. Power, you remember, was given to the Beast to continue forty and two months. Add forty and two months to the first day of the century, which I have shown to be January 1st, 1801, and you come to May 1st, 1804: that is to say, next May-day. You perceive the significance of the date?"
"Not entirely," confessed the Major, still a trifle pale. "Why, my dear sir, all these rites and customs over which the Vicar of h.e.l.leston and I have been disputing--these May-day observances, in themselves apparently so puerile but so obviously symbolical to one who looks below the surface--turn out to be not retrospective, not reminiscent, not commemorative at all, but antic.i.p.atory. On every 1st of May our small urchins form a dragon or devil out of old pots and saucepans, and flog it through the streets. _Ex ore infantum_-- on the 1st of May next (mark my words) we shall see Satan laid hold upon and bound for a thousand years."
"Good Lord!" exclaimed the Major once again.
"In the middle of spring-cleaning, too!" quavered Miss Marty.
"You"ll find it as clear as daylight," the Vicar a.s.sured them, pulling out a pocket Testament and tapping the open page.
"Will it," the Major began timorously, "will it make an appreciable difference?"
"To what?"
"To--to our daily life--our routine? Call it humdrum, if you will--"
"My good friend, the Millennium!"
"I know, I know. Still, at my age a man has formed habits.
Of course"--the Major pulled himself together--"if it"s a question of Satan"s being bound for a thousand years, on general grounds one can only approve. Yes, decidedly, on principle one welcomes it.
Nevertheless, coming so suddenly--"
The Vicar tapped his Testament again. "It has been _here_ all the time."
"Yes, yes," the Major sighed impatiently. "Still, it"s upsetting, you"ll admit."
"The end of the world!" Miss Marty gripped her ap.r.o.n, as if to cast it over her head.
"The Millennium, Miss Marty, is not the end of the world."
"Oh, isn"t it?"
"It merely means that Satan will be bound for a thousand years to come."
"If that"s all"--Miss Marty walked to the bell-rope--"there"s no harm in ringing for Scipio to bring in the omelet."