On Saturnalia
ONE of the bothers of writing is that words carry about upon their backs nowadays a great pack of past meanings and derivations, and that—particularly to-day—no word is standing still as it were and meaning something once and for all which a plain man can say without being laughed at for ignorance or for affectation. For instance, Saturnalia. To one man it means a certain bundle of ritual many centuries dead, common to a particular district of Italy and practised in midwinter. To another man it means a lot of poor people having an exaggerated beanfeast and thereby annoying the rich people. But it does not mean either of these things to the plain man. It means to the plain man occasion and specific occasion for turning things upside down and getting breathing space for a while from the crushing order of this world. That is what "Saturnalia" means to the ordinary user of the word, and note, he has no other word by which to express the idea—so thoroughly has the thing died out since modern English was formed. I suppose the nearest word for it in English—when such feasts were still known in England—was the vague word "Misrule." Anyhow, it is Saturnalia now, and Saturnalia it shall he here.
If a man were to come back from the past and watch the modern world into which he had tumbled he would note any number of things that would, I am certain, intoxicate him with wonder and delight. Just as one is intoxicated with wonder and delight on landing in youth upon the quays of a foreign port for the first time—that is, if the foreign port is well governed, for there is no wonder or delight either in barbarism or in decay. Such a man would be perpetually running to telephones, those curious toys, and marvelling at cinematographs and rejoicing in express trains and clear print and big guns and phonographs; he couldn't help it. Motor-cars moving by themselves would fill him with magic—but he would bitterly mislike certain absences, and he would complain that half a dozen things were very wrong with the world. So many men free and yet owning nothing—so much the greater part of men free and yet owning nothing—would seem to him a monstrous and perilous thing. The exact and mechanical accuracy that clocks and railways have made would offend him; he would see it as a disease wearing out men's nerves. The modern arguments all in a circle round and round the old insoluble problems would bore him dreadfully, and still more perhaps the fresh discoveries every week of principles and plain truths as old as the Mediterranean—but nothing surely would astonish him or grieve him or frighten him more than the absence of topsy-turvydom without some recurrent breath of which the soul of man perishes.
And why? There is a question you may ask some time before it will be answered. One thing is sure, though the sureness of it reposes on some base we cannot see: in the proportion that men are secure of their philosophy and social scheme, in that proportion they must in some fixed manner turn it upside down from time to time for their delight and show it on a stage or enact it in a religious ritual with all its rules reversed and the whole thing wrong way about. They have always done this in healthy States, and if ever our State gets healthy they will begin to do it again. It is a human craving, an intense craving—but why, it would be a business to say.
It must not be imagined that the craving or the expression of it has passed from us to-day. They have no more passed from us than the desire for property or for the tilling of the land. But their corporate character is broken up, they appear sporadically in individuals only, and are therefore often evil. They appear in the irony which is an increasing feature of our letters, in mad freaks and outbreaks for which men strained beyond bearing are punished, and they appear in fantastic prophecies of a changed world.
One sees that craving for a burst of misrule in quite unexpected enthusiasms for things remote from our lives, in great senseless mobs furious about minor things—the minor actions of a campaign or the minor details of law-making—in the public clamour about the misfortunes of some foreign prisoner or the politics of some alien State. One sees it in the men who suddenly start rules of life based on some careful negation of what all around them do, in the leaders and teachers who first note exactly what nearly all their fellow-beings eat or drink or wear, and then most loudly proclaim salvation to lie in not eating, drinking, or wearing these obviously necessary things. The neighbours stare! And no wonder—for private Saturnalia are dangerously near to vice in the sane, in the weak to insanity.
But true Saturnalia, public Saturnalia, were healthy because they were corporate. Custom and religion had dug a sort of channel into which all that emotion could commonly run, and in midwinter, when it had long been very dark, the mischiefs, the comic spirits came out of the woods and for some days possessed the souls of men, and these, by that possession, were purged and freed. So it was for hundreds upon hundreds of years—until quite the modern time. Why have we lost it, and how long must we wait for it to return?
When the relations of slave and master seemed as obvious and necessary as seem to us (let us say) the reading of a daily paper or the taking of a train, yet the obvious and necessary routine was broken in midwinter, the slave was the master for a moment and the master a slave.
When the ritual of the Church was as much a commonplace as the ritual of social life is to us today, there was a season (it was this season between Christmas and the Epiphany) when the dead weight of order was lifted and a boy was dressed as a bishop or a donkey was put to chaunt the office, and the people sang:—
Plebs autem respondet:
Hé sire Ane, ho! Chantez!
Vous aurez du foin assez
Et de l'avoine à manger!
When the awful authority of civil and hereditary powers was unquestioned they yet set up in English halls Lords of Misrule who governed that season. The Inns of Court, I believe, delighted in them, and certainly till quite late in the seventeenth century the peasantry of the villages.
It has gone. It will return. During its absence (and may that absence not be much prolonged) perhaps one can see its nature the more clearly because one sees it from the outside and as a distant though a desired thing. Perhaps we, living in a very unreasonable age, when realities are forgotten and imaginaries preferred, when we solemnly reiterate impossibilities, affirm our faith in scientific guesswork and our doubts upon the plain rules of arithmetic, can understand why our much more reasonable fathers thirsted for and obtained these feasts of unreason. It seems to have been a little like the natural craving for temporary oblivion (sleep—a chaos) once in every day; a sort of bath in that muddle or nothingness out of which the world was made. Equality, which lies at the base of society, was brought to surface by a paradox and shown at large. Intensity of conviction and of organisation took refuse in the relief of a momentary—and not meant—denial of that conviction and organisation, and the whole of society collectively expanded its soul by one collective foolery at high pressure, as does the healthy individual by one good farce or peal of laughter when occasion serves.
How the Saturnalia will return (as return they will) no one can say. The seeds of reaction from the tangle of the modern world lie all around in the customs and the demands of the populace: but seeds are never known or perceived till they have sprouted. Sometimes one catches the echo of the return in a chance jest; especially if it be a cabman's. Sometimes in a solemn hoax largely indulged in by many poor men against one richer than themselves. Sometimes in the voluntary humour and cynical goodness of heart of a powerful or wealthy man exposing the illusions of his kind.
Anyhow, one way or another, sooner or later, the Saturnalia will return; may it be sooner rather than later, and at the latest not later than 1938, when so many of us will be so very old.
For my part I shall look for the first signs in the provinces of rich and riotous blood as on the Border (and especially just north of it) or in Flanders, or, better still, in Burgundy from Nuits and Beaune northward and eastward. I have especially great hopes of the town of Dijon.