270 THE GERMAN PASSION-PLA Y 



spirit, it is also a superficial view of human nature. In 

 real life the ridiculous is close to the sublime, and the 

 naive spirit of the Middle Ages realised this, much as 

 Shakespeare realised it. There is something incongruous 

 to the modern mind in the manner in which Shakespeare 

 expresses this great truth by the introduction of fool 

 interludes, yet we do not hold him incapable of appre- 

 ciating the higher phases of human feeling. It is from 

 the same standpoint that we must judge the passion-play, 

 nay, much of mediaeval art and literature, if we would 

 really understand the naive mixture of the earnest and 

 the grotesque which, indeed, characterises all popular 

 expression, but especially that of the Middle Ages. It 

 marks no want of reverence, it is no sign of loss of faith. 

 It is a childlike, semi-conscious recognition of a great 

 truth, the form of which often becomes traditional, and in 

 the mediaeval spirit received, as everything else, a symbolic 

 expression. Two of the most popular and most effective 

 books of the fifteenth century illustrate this principle, 

 the one from the religious and the other from the moral 

 standpoint. No more earnest books exist than the Art 

 of Dying and The Ship of Fools, yet, both verbally and 

 pictorially, they bring the most weird humour into juxta- 

 position with the deepest moral and religious teaching 

 of their day. 1 Without that mingling they never would 

 have won the position they did among the people, and 

 those who would write for the moral or religious profit of 

 the masses to-day would do well to bear this fact in mind. 

 The Christianity of Jesus was not polytheistic, nor festive, 



1 Even more characteristic, perhaps, of this combination of the solemn and 

 the grotesque are the Dances of Death, already referred to in Essay I. 



