the only objection to the excellent series of pageants that has adorned england of late is that they are made too expensive. the mass of the common people cannot afford to see the pageant; so they are obliged to put up with the inferior function of acting in it. i myself got in with the rabble in this way. it was to the church pageant; and i was much impressed with certain illuminations which such an experience makes possible. a pageant exhibits all the fun of a fancy dress ball, with this great difference: that its motive is reverent instead of irreverent. in the one case a man dresses up as his great-grandfather in order to make game of his great-grandfather; in the other case, in order to do him honour. what the great-grandfather himself would think of either of them we fortunately have not to conjecture. the alteration is important and satisfactory. all natural men regard their ancestors as dignified because they are dead; it was a great pity and folly that we had fallen into the habit of regarding the middle ages as a mere second-hand shop for comic costumes. medi?val costume and heraldry had been meant as the very manifestation of courage and publicity and a decent pride. colours were worn that they might be conspicuous across a battle-field; an animal was rampant on a helmet that he might stand up evident against the sky. the medi?val time has been talked of too much as if it were full of twilight and secrecies. it was a time of avowal and of what many modern people call vulgarity. a man’s dress was that of his family or his trade or his religion; and these are exactly the three things which we now think it bad taste to discuss. imagine a modern man being dressed in green and orange because he was a robinson. or imagine him dressed in blue and gold because he was an auctioneer. or imagine him dressed in purple and silver because he was an agnostic. he is now dressed only in the ridiculous disguise of a gentleman; which tells one nothing at all, not even whether he is one. if ever he dresses up as a cavalier or a monk it is only as a joke—very often as a disreputable and craven joke, a joke in a mask. that vivid and heraldic costume which was meant to show everybody who a man was is now chiefly worn by people at covent garden masquerades who wish to conceal who they are. the clerk dresses up as a monk in order to be absurd. if the monk dressed up as a clerk in order to be absurd i could understand it; though the escapade might disturb his monastic superiors. a man in a sensible gown and hood might possibly put on a top-hat and a pair of trousers in order to cover himself with derision, in some extravagance of mystical humility. but that a man who calmly shows himself to the startled sky every morning in a top-hat and trousers should think it comic to put on a simple and dignified robe and hood is a situation which almost splits the brain. things like the church pageant may do something towards snubbing this silly and derisive view of the past. hitherto the young stockbroker, when he wanted to make a fool of himself, dressed up as cardinal wolsey. it may now begin to dawn on him that he ought rather to make a wise man of himself before attempting the impersonation.
nevertheless, the truth which the pageant has to tell the british public is rather more special and curious than one might at first assume. it is easy enough to say in the rough that modern dress is dingy, and that the dress of our fathers was more bright and picturesque. but that is not really the point. at fulham palace one can compare the huge crowd of people acting in the pageant with the huge crowd of people looking at it. there is a startling difference, but it is not a mere difference between gaiety and gloom. there is many a respectable young woman in the audience who has on her own hat more colours than the whole pageant put together. there are belts of brown and black in the pageant itself: the puritans round the scaffold of laud, or the black-robed doctors of the eighteenth century. there are patches of purple and yellow in the audience: the more select young ladies and the less select young gentlemen. it is not that our age has no appetite for the gay or the gaudy—it is a very hedonistic age. it is not that past ages—even the rich symbolic middle ages—did not feel any sense of safety in what is sombre or restrained. a friar in a brown coat is much more severe than an 'arry in a brown bowler. why is it that he is also much more pleasant?
i think the whole difference is in this: that the first man is brown with a reason and the second without a reason. if a hundred monks wore one brown habit it was because they felt that their toil and brotherhood were well expressed in being clad in the coarse, dark colour of the earth. i do not say that they said so, or even clearly thought so; but their artistic instinct went straight when they chose the mud-colour for laborious brethren or the flame-colour for the first princes of the church. but when 'arry puts on a brown bowler he does not either with his consciousness or his subconsciousness (that rich soil) feel that he is crowning his brows with the brown earth, clasping round his temples a strange crown of clay. he does not wear a dust-coloured hat as a form of strewing dust upon his head. he wears a dust-coloured hat because the nobility and gentry who are his models discourage him from wearing a crimson hat or a golden hat or a peacock-green hat. he is not thinking of the brownness of brown. it is not to him a symbol of the roots, of realism, or of autochthonous humility; on the contrary, he thinks it looks rather “classy.”
the modern trouble is not that the people do not see splendid colours or striking effects. the trouble is that they see too much of them and see them divorced from all reason. it is a misfortune of modern language that the word “insignificant” is vaguely associated with the words “small” or “slight.” but a thing is insignificant when we do not know what it signifies. an african elephant lying dead in ludgate circus would be insignificant. that is, one could not recognize it as the sign or message of anything. one could not regard it as an allegory or a love-token. one could not even call it a hint. in the same way the solar system is insignificant. unless you have some special religious theory of what it means, it is merely big and silly, like the elephant in ludgate circus. and similarly, modern life, with its vastness, its energy, its elaboration, its wealth, is, in the exact sense, insignificant. nobody knows what we mean; we do not know ourselves. nobody could explain intelligently why a coat is black, why a waistcoat is white, why asparagus is eaten with the fingers, or why hammersmith omnibuses are painted red. the medi?vals had a much stronger idea of crowding all possible significance into things. if they had consented to waste red paint on a large and ugly hammersmith omnibus it would have been in order to suggest that there was some sort of gory magnanimity about hammersmith. a heraldic lion is no more like a real lion than a chimney-pot hat is like a chimney-pot. but the lion was meant to be a lion. and the chimney-pot hat was not meant to be like a chimney-pot or like anything else. the resemblance only struck certain philosophers (probably gutter-boys) afterwards. the top-hat was not intended as a high uncastellated tower; it was not intended at all. this is the real baseness of modernity. this is, for example, the only real vulgarity of advertisements. it is not that the colours on the posters are bad. it is that they are much too good for the meaningless work which they serve. when at last people see—as at the pageant—crosses and dragons, leopards and lilies, there is scarcely one of the things that they now see as a symbol which they have not already seen as a trade-mark. if the great “assumption of the virgin” were painted in front of them they might remember blank’s blue. if the emperor of china were buried before them, the yellow robes might remind them of dash’s mustard. we have not the task of preaching colour and gaiety to a people that has never had it, to puritans who have neither seen nor appreciated it. we have a harder task. we have to teach those to appreciate it who have always seen it.
