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One could see something of that half-failure that haunts our artistic revivals of mediaeval dances, carols, or Bethlehem Plays. There are elements in all that has come to us from the more morally simple society of the Middle Ages: elements which moderns, even when they are mediaevalists, find it hard to understand and harder to imitate. The first is the primary idea of Mummery itself.
Nor are Americans of intelligence so ignorant of this as some may suppose. There is an admirable society called the Mediaevalists in Chicago; whose name and address will strike many as suggesting a certain struggle of the soul against the environment.
But he is sufficiently humble to be convinced that if he looks as little like himself as he can, he will be on the right road. This is the soul of Mumming; the ostentatious secrecy of men in disguise. There are, of course, other mediaeval elements in it which are also difficult to explain to the fastidious mediaevalists of to-day. There is, for instance, a certain output of violence into the void.
In the Peckwater Quadrangle are to be found the Library and the Guise collection of pictures, which contains curious specimens of that early school which the mad mediaevalists are now fond of imitating, and a few examples of the famous Italian masters who rose on the force of genius, which did not disdain study but did disdain imitation.
The Roman liturgy seems to favour the opinion that Mary of Magdala was the sister of Lazarus, and that she was a sinner and was possessed by seven devils. The history of Mary Magdalen after our Lord's death has been written, with large and varied additions of adventure, by pious mediaevalists. In the Western Church, traces of the saint's cultus are met with in Bede and his contemporaries.
But Aristotle, looking out on the world, an observer of human nature, a student of the human heart, sets up as more feasible, more practical, the phrase which the Middle Ages repeat, Private property and common use. The economics of a religious house are hardly of such a kind, thought the mediaevalists, as to suit the ways and fancies of this workaday world.
When quite a lad, in the days of the French Gothic mania which immediately succeeded to the great English-pointed revival under Britton, Pugin, Rickman, Scott, and other mediaevalists, he had crept away from the fashion to admire what was good in Palladian and Renaissance.
The wonderful piety of these men of old, saints and scholars, their beautiful comments, their glowing fervour, and above all their knowledge and love of the Bible text, surprise us all. Sometimes, of course, these mediaevalists run into far-fetched, outlandish comments, but the compilers give always the comments of the Masters, St. Thomas, St. Bede, etc.
That is Andreas Vesalius, of Brussels, dreaded and hated by the doctors of the old school suspect, moreover, it would seem to inquisitors and theologians, possibly to Alva himself; for he has dared to dissect human bodies; he has insulted the mediaevalists at Paris, Padua, Bologna, Pisa, Venice, in open theatre; he has turned the heads of all the young surgeons in Italy and France; he has written a great book, with prints in it, designed, some say, by Titian they were actually done by another Netherlander, John of Calcar, near Cleves in which he has dared to prove that Galen's anatomy was at fault throughout, and that he had been describing a monkey's inside when he had pretended to be describing a man's; and thus, by impudence and quackery, he has wormed himself this Netherlander, a heretic at heart, as all Netherlanders are, to God as well as to Galen into the confidence of the late Emperor Charles V., and gone campaigning with him as one of his physicians, anatomising human bodies even on the battle-field, and defacing the likeness of Deity; and worse than that, the most religious King Philip is deceived by him likewise, and keeps him in Madrid in wealth and honour; and now, in the prince's extreme danger, the king has actually sent for him, and bidden him try his skill a man who knows nothing save about bones and muscles and the outside of the body, and is unworthy the name of a true physician.
If even the twentieth century succeeds in doing these things, it will almost catch up with the twelfth. The principle covers, however, the whole of modern life. Morris and the merely aesthetic mediaevalists always indicated that a crowd in the time of Chaucer would have been brightly clad and glittering, compared with a crowd in the time of Queen Victoria.
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