The Mayor of Troy | Page 9

who put her head out of
window and recommended for every man a damsel or two and a
specified amount of needlework. I ain't complainin', mind you; but
there's reason in all things."
You have heard how our movement was launched. Where it would
have ended none can tell, had not the Millennium interfered.
CHAPTER III.
THE MILLENNIUM.
Aristotle has laid it down that the highest drama concerns itself with
reversal of fortune befalling a man highly renowned and prosperous, of
better character rather than worse; and brought about less by vice than
by some great error or frailty. After all that has been said, you will
wonder how I can admit a frailty in Major Hymen. But he had one.

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 glassed 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, compassionately, 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 Helleston, and we may wash our hands
of it.
On the first Sunday of January 1800, the Vicar of Helleston (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 title 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
Helleston that Reflection was a retrospective process; that Man, as a
finite creature, could but anticipate events before they happened; and
that if the parishioners of Helleston 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 Helleston replied, tacitly admitting