Page:Arthur Machen, The Secret Glory, 1922.djvu/216

The Secret Glory should not be necessary. The chain of thought is almost painfully obvious. But I am afraid it is necessary.

"Well: I once read an interesting article in the daily paper. It was written apropos of some Shakespearean celebrations or other, and its purport was that modern England was ever so much happier than mediæval or Elizabethian England. It is possible that an acute logician might find something to say on this thesis; but my interest lay in the following passages, which I quote:

Merrie England,' with its maypoles and its Whitsun Ales, and its Shrove-tide jousts and junketings is dead for us, from the religious point of view. The England that has survived is, after all, a greater England still. It is Puritan England. … The spirit has gone. Surely it is useless to revive the form. Wherefore should the May Queen be "holy, wise, and fair," if not to symbolise the Virgin Mary? And as for Shrove-tide, too, what point in jollity without a fast to follow?'

"The article is not over-illuminating, but I think the writer had caught a glimpse of the truth that there is a deep relation between Mirth and Sanctity; that no real mirth is possible without the apprehension of the mysteries as its ante- 200