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at our disposal. His master, The M'Shin of Inversneishan, would be proud to house us for the night, and the game-car should convey us to the hospitable walls of Inversneishan forthwith. Tactfully worded doubts upon our part as to Bill's carrying capacity-we did not complicate matters by explaining upon what good authority we spoke -were waved aside with a Highlander's indifference to mere detail. The car was a grand car, and the Castle was distance at all. Mr Richards alone need be jettisoned. He could remain with The Greyhound all night, and on the morrow succour should be sent him.

no

Mr Richards, utterly demoralised by his recent fall from the summit of autocracy, meekly assented, and presently Bill Bailey, packed like the last 'bus on a Saturday night, staggered off upon his homeward way. My wife and I shared the front seat with the oleaginous youth in the overall, while the patriarchal ghillie hung on precariously behind, locked in the embrace of the dead stag. How or where The Gruffin travelled I do not know. She may have perched herself upon some outlying portion of the stag, or she may have attached herself to Bill Bailey's back-axle by her hair and sash,

and been towed home. Anyhow, when, two hours later, Bill Bailey, swaying beneath his burden and roaring like a Bull of Bashan, drew up with all standing at the portals of Inversneishan Castle, it was The Gruffin who, unkempt, scarlet, but triumphant, rang the bell and bearded the butler while my wife and I uncoiled ourselves from intimate association with the chauffeur, the ghillie, and the stag.

Next morning, in returning thanks for the princely manner in which our involuntary host had entertained us, I retailed to him the full story of our previous acquaintance with Bill Bailey. I further added, with my daughter's hot hand squeezing mine in passionate approval, an intimation that if ever Bill should again come into the market I thought I could find a purchaser for him.

He duly came back to us, at a cost of five pounds and his sea-passage, a few months later, and we have had him ever since.

Such is the tale of Bill Bailey. To-day he stands in a corner of my coach - house, an occupier of valuable space, a stumbling-block to all and sundry, and a lasting memorial to the omnipotence of human especially feminine-sentiment.

OBER-AMMERGAU-AN APPRECIATION.1

BY ALGERNON CECIL.

THE loss of secular import- half-forgotten deliverance in a ance, which Bavaria suffered at the foundation of the German Empire by her voluntary abandonment of all projects of geographical increase, has been compensated liberally and beyond all expectation in regions where even partial achievement seems to some of us more worth the having than even the largest additions to an already abundant territory of thriving fields and well-ordered towns. The kingdom of the Wittelsbacher has become in reality, what it was only before in appearance, the centre of Europe. From the OperaHouse at Baireuth music (μovσikn), in the original sense of that much-pollarded word, addresses its votaries in its most finished, most seductive tongue: from the theatre at Ober-Ammergau Nature, which is sometimes more than Art, makes its appeal to the mind, naturally Christian, assuaging the divisions of a hundred creeds, and filling with its deeper passion the thousand vacant spaces of the heart. Thither the annual and decennial pilgrimages go up in all the grotesque apparatus of modern travel to seek some transient vision of the Holy Graal, or, like the ancient Jews, to keep some memorial of their

vague hope that the eye may at last be satisfied with seeing and the ear with hearing. The crowd, as it streams over the mountains into Ober-Ammergau, is flecked with all the swearing colours of Western thought: the Canterbury Pilgrims were scarce so motley a crew. Religion is there-the Catholic Priest in his picturesque, old-world soutane, the Protestant Pastor in his ungainly coat and trousers: also the absence of religion-Dives, who has made his pile and is trying to enjoy it; Herod, who is curious to inspect every fresh manifestation of the supernatural; Gallio, who, if the conventional interpretation of the text is to be trusted, cared for none of these things. Certainty is there- the German Professor, who has disproved the very existence of that which he has come to see; and Uncertainty, writ large upon that vast crowd of human creatures who are neither for God nor against Him. The soldier, the doctor, the man of law, the "clerk of Oxenford," the "poure persoun of a toun," all, doubtless, are there; from the countryside itself come the ploughman "living in peace and perfect charity," and mine host, "bold of his speech, wise

1 The author wishes to express his thanks to Miss Edith Milner, without whose kindness he would not have been able to see nearly so much of Ober-Ammergau and its inhabitants as he did. She must, however, not be held in any way responsible for any of the sentiments or statements in the article.

and well-taught," to whom "of manhood lacked naught." And, if we miss the courtly prioress, who spoke French

“... full fair and fetishly, After the school of Stratford-atteBowe,

For French of Paris was to her unknow,”

we have the American girl, who has acquired the German of Munich and includes the Passion Play among the sights of the Old World.

It is a strange company in which to see the most solemn spectacle that the world affords, but not an unsuitable one. The noblest deeds are of necessity wrought in the blatant obscurity of common day, and it is no more than the proper proof of our own power of moral discrimination to be obliged to clear them from the clouds of adventitious circumstance. The mind, indeed, continues to shrink back, but chiefly from itself, from its own conscious unfitness to look into the mirror of Divine suffering; whilst the English mind, so painfully inarticulate from an ever-deepening religious reserve, is besides acutely sensible of the audacity of what is going to be done and recognises from afar the tremendous nature of its approaching experience.

But in the players themselves there is nothing of all this. They discharge their labour of love, consecrated and purified as it has been by centuries of meditation, with a certain grave diligence and simplicity, as of men required to fulfil in the most perfect manner pos

VOL. CLXXXVIII.—NO. MCXLI.

sible the ancestral pieties of the hearth. Others have laboured, and they have but entered into their labours. The little town is in truth a theocracy. Where the eye seeks the insignia of a King it will find the insignia of the King of kings. The houses are bright with fresco, setting forth by type and symbol the life and death of Christ. Here it is a crèche with the Infant Saviour lying in the manger; there a pietà with the Everlasting Arms above. The very name of the inn speaks of it— Gasthaus zum Weissen Lamm. The story is told again and again in the delicate industries of the place. The inhabitants think their thoughts into the rough blocks of birch and apple and pear- the woods that lend themselves readily to the finest work. The dying Saviour hangs in every house, in every passage, in every room; His face and form carved to a strong and solemn beauty by the hearts and hands of these German craftsmen. The shadow of the Cross falls everywhere, and behold it is sunshine! The summer fields are carpeted with the choicest flowers, and the children playing there enact the Crucifixion.

most

The tremendous thoughts with which they live and in which they have their being have passed into the faces of the men. Their splendid features, sunk in the massive background of long curling hair, are refined by the slight physical delicacy attendant on a sedentary life, and the light

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The many faces crowd."

And, as at some time more or less for all workers in the higher kinds of art, so also for them precisely and at an appointed time the burden of their work is concentrated, perhaps twice or at the most three times in their lives, within the compass of a few weeks, in respect of which all the rest appear like a preparation or a memory. The traditional, and one would think, if it were not in fact sometimes attained, the unattainable, condition of success in such work is namelessness, a complete self-abandonment, an indifference to results, a dying to live. But the mob, with its customary obtuseness, clamours for names and will not be satisfied unless it can fill its market-place with idols. Yet for all that, and sullied as it doubtless is by this obstinate and wilful pollution of its currents, the religious atmosphere of the place still maintains its freshness; the characters still possess a vitality which no art can give them; and the drama itself, by the gradual elimination of all that is base and trivial, of all the coarse relief inserted in the old mysteryplay of the Middle Age, still grows in grace and wisdom.

...

"Beloved friends," says the old priest, whose hand recast the ancient text in the middle of the last century, "God's pleasure and God's blessing will only accompany our work, if we undertake it with pure intentions and holy zeal. . . . If selfish reasons, if the mere desire of fame and gain were to inspire our actions, no blessing will rest upon them. God would look upon us in displeasure, and our work would then be an abuse degrading to the Most High, sinful and punishable." The spirit of Daisenberger, the spirit of that less militant, more actually catholic Catholicism, which still lingers uneasily among the Old Catholics of Bavaria, is felt in the serene Sophoclean dignity of the play itself, as imaginative persons may think they experience it in the restful little Klause above the town-an oratory of the rudest kind, which the children of the place built for their beloved pastor and where he worked and prayed.

All distinctions of creed and race are, indeed, necessarily blurred at the early crowded Mass in the Church, or as the spectator looks for the first time across the vast arena and past the stage towards that far-off green hill upon the right, sometimes almost hidden by the thin mists of an uncertain June, sometimes verdant in the summer sun. Is not this the very landscape that Perugino would have chosen to furnish a calm and spacious background to events

1 Greatorex, "The Homes of Ober-Ammergau,” p. 35.

mean

and lying mysteries of His work.
We are meant to follow in the
crowd and to measure the
singleness of our eye by the
depth of our sympathy. Yet
the eternal meaning is never
long out of view. In the
majestic, ever - recurring ad-
dresses of the Chorus, in the
wild and exquisite music of
Rochus Dedler, in the immo-
bile witness of the Allegorical
Tableaux, the events of Passion
Week are lifted beyond the gov-
ernance of individual human
wills, seem rather the climax
and consummation of a long
historical development, and are
weighed in the awful balance
of an absolute morality. For
these Chorio interludes, which
in the old mystery-plays of
Hrotswitha do not exist at
all, and in the earlier version
of the Passion Play appear so
valid and insufficient, have
grown
under the hand of
Daisenberger into an echo of
the Heavenly record.

which in their
narrow setting must have
seemed so full of turmoil and
failure? To detail the story
"wie es wirklich geschehen
ist," and yet to keep the light
of the imagination playing
about the facts, or, in other
words, to give to things at
once their temporal and eternal
values, is indeed a problem not
peculiar to the Passion Play,
yet only there perhaps experi-
enced in its full difficulty,
where so little poetic or drama-
tic licence can be conceded.
Nor is it any mere conflict
between Light and Darkness
that has to be depicted. For
the pathos of the great tragedy
lies of course partly in this,
that the promoters of it are
blind, that they see but do not
perceive, that they hear and
do not understand. The
Powers of Light are pitted
not against Darkness
against the Light which is
Darkness. And there may be
those who realise at Ober-
Ammergau for the first time
that the trial of Christ was
once an open question, upon
which they themselves might
have formed an unjust judg-
ment. His Life and Character
are required to struggle once
more for recognition at the
bar of human opinion, and it
is a poor criticism which finds
fault because no more dogmatic
emphasis is given to the under-

but

"Die Menschheit ist verbannt ans
Edens Au'n

Von Sünd' umnachtet und von Todes
Grau'n

Ihr ist zum Lebensbaum-der Eingang

ach! versperrt Es drohet in des Cherubs Hand das Flammenschwert.

"Doch von ferne, von Kalvariens

Höhen

Leuchtet durch die Nacht ein Mor-
genglüh'n

Aus des Kreuzesbaumes Zweigen wehen
Friedenslufte durch die Welten hin."1

1 Mankind is exiled from the fields of Eden,
Appalled at death, benighted by his sin,
The access to the Tree of Life denied him,
The flaming sword forbids him to pass in.

Yet far away on Calvary's sacred uplands

Are gleaming through the gloom the lights of morn,
The sighing winds, to earth its peace unfolding,
Athwart the branches of the Rood are borne.

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