Page:On everything.djvu/57

On Saturnalia 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 41