Literary Remains, vol 2 | Page 9

of the birth of
Christ and its circumstances. I heard two instances mentioned to me at
different times, one in Sicily and the other in Rome, of noble devotees,
the ruin of whose fortunes was said to have commenced in the
extravagant expense which had been incurred in presenting the
'præsepe' or manger. But these Mysteries, in order to answer their
design, must not only be instructive, but entertaining; and as, when they
became so, the people began to take pleasure in acting them
themselves--in interloping,--(against which the priests seem to have
fought hard and yet in vain) the most ludicrous images were mixed
with the most awful personations; and whatever the subject might be,
however sublime, however pathetic, yet the Vice and the Devil, who
are the genuine antecessors of Harlequin and the Clown, were
necessary component parts. I have myself a piece of this kind, which I
transcribed a few years ago at Helmstadt, in Germany, on the education
of Eve's children, in which after the fall and repentance of Adam, the
offended Maker, as in proof of his reconciliation, condescends to visit
them, and to catechise the children,--who with a noble contempt of
chronology are all brought together from Abel to Noah. The good
children say the ten Commandments, the Belief and the Lord's Prayer;
but Cain and his rout, after he had received a box on the ear for not
taking off his hat, and afterwards offering his left hand, is prompted by

the devil so to blunder in the Lord's Prayer as to reverse the petitions
and say it backward! [2]
Unaffectedly I declare I feel pain at repetitions like these, however
innocent. As historical documents they are valuable; but I am sensible
that what I can read with my eye with perfect innocence, I cannot
without inward fear and misgivings pronounce with my tongue.
Let me, however, be acquitted of presumption if I say that I cannot
agree with Mr. Malone, that our ancestors did not perceive the
ludicrous in these things, or that they paid no separate attention to the
serious and comic parts. Indeed his own statement contradicts it. For
what purpose should the Vice leap upon the Devil's back and belabour
him, but to produce this separate attention? The people laughed heartily,
no doubt. Nor can I conceive any meaning attached to the words
"separate attention," that is not fully answered by one part of an
exhibition exciting seriousness or pity, and the other raising mirth and
loud laughter. That they felt no impiety in the affair is most true. For it
is the very essence of that system of Christian polytheism, which in all
its essentials is now fully as gross in Spain, in Sicily and the south of
Italy, as it ever was in England in the days of Henry VI.--(nay, more so;
for a Wicliffe had then not appeared only, but scattered the good seed
widely,) it is an essential part, I say, of that system to draw the mind
wholly from its own inward whispers and quiet discriminations, and to
habituate the conscience to pronounce sentence in every case according
to the established verdicts of the church and the casuists. I have looked
through volume after volume of the most approved casuists,--and still I
find disquisitions whether this or that act is right, and under what
circumstances, to a minuteness that makes reasoning ridiculous, and of
a callous and unnatural immodesty, to which none but a monk could
harden himself, who has been stripped of all the tender charities of life,
yet is goaded on to make war against them by the unsubdued hauntings
of our meaner nature, even as dogs are said to get the 'hydrophobia'
from excessive thirst. I fully believe that our ancestors laughed as
heartily, as their posterity do at Grimaldi;--and not having been told
that they would be punished for laughing, they thought it very
innocent;--and if their priests had left out murder in the catalogue of

their prohibitions (as indeed they did under certain circumstances of
heresy,) the greater part of them,--the moral instincts common to all
men having been smothered and kept from development,--would have
thought as little of murder. However this may be, the necessity of at
once instructing and gratifying the people produced the great
distinction between the Greek and the English theatres;--for to this we
must attribute the origin of tragi-comedy, or a representation of human
events more lively, nearer the truth, and permitting a larger field of
moral instruction, a more ample exhibition of the recesses of the human
heart, under all the trials and circumstances that most concern us, than
was known or guessed at by Æschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides;--and at
the same time we learn to account for, and--relatively to the
author--perceive the necessity of, the