And now here is my word of command! Everyone
into his right place!
Ogre: Spare me! Let me go this time!
Jester: Go out now! I will not bring a blemish
on this sword by striking off your ugly head. But
as you have been through seven years an enemy
to these young boys, keeping them in ignorance
and dirt, they that are sons of a king, I cross and
command you to go groping through holes and dirt
and darkness through three times seven years in
the shape of a rat, with every boy, high or low,
gentle or simple, your pursuer and your enemy.
And along with that I would recommend you to
keep out of the way of your own enchanted cats!
(Ogre gives a squeal and creeps away on all fours.)
Guardian: I think I will give up business and
go back to my old trade of Chamberlain and of
shutting out draughts from the Court. The
weight of years is coming on me, and it is time for
me to set my mind to some quiet path.
1st Dowager Messenger: Come home with us
so, and help us to attend to our cats, that they will
be able to destroy the rats of the world.
2nd Dowager Messenger: (To Princes.) It is best
for you come to your Godmother's Court, as your
Guardian is showing the way.
1st Prince: We may come and give news of our
doings at the end of a year and a day.
But now we will go with our comrades to learn
their work and their play.
2nd Prince: For lying on silken cushions, or
stretched on a feathery bed.
We would long again for the path by the lake,
and the wild swans overhead.
3d Prince: Till we'll harden our bodies with
wrestling and get courage to stand in a fight.
4th Prince: And not to be blind in the woods
or in dread of the darkness of night.
1st Wrenboy: And we who are ignorant blockheads,
and never were reared to know
The art of the languaged poets, it's along with
you we will go.
5th Prince: Come show us the wisdom of woods,
and the way to outrun the wild deer,
Till we'll harden our minds with courage, and
be masters of hardship and fear.
2nd Wrenboy: But you are candles of knowledge,
and we'll give you no ease or peace,
Till you'll learn us manners and music, and news
of the Wars of Greece.
1st Prince: Come on, we will help one another,
and going together we'll find,
Joy with those great companions, Earth, Water,
Fire, and Wind. (They join hands.)
Jester: It's likely you'll do great actions, for
there is an ancient word,
That comradeship is better than the parting of
the sword,
And that if ever two natures should join and
grow into one,
They will do more together than the world has
ever done.
So now I've ended my business, and I'll go, for
my road is long,
But be sure the Jester will find you out, if ever
things go wrong!
(He goes off singing.)
CURTAIN
NOTES FOR THE JESTER
I was asked one Christmas by a little schoolboy to write a play that could be acted at school; and in looking for a subject my memory went back to a story I had read in childhood called "The Discontented Children," where, though I forget its incidents, the gamekeeper's children changed places for a while with the children of the Squire, and I thought I might write something on these lines. But my mind soon went miching as our people (and Shakespeare) would say, and broke through the English hedges into the unbounded wonder-world. Yet it did not quite run out of reach of human types, for having found some almost illegible notes, I see that at the first appearance of Manannan I had put in brackets the initials "G.B.S." And looking now at the story of that Great Jester, in the history of the ancient gods, I see that for all his quips and mischief and "tricks and wonders," he came when he was needed to the help of Finn and the Fianna, and gave good teaching to the boy-hero, Cuchulain; and I read also that "all the food he would use would be a vessel of sour milk or a few crab-apples. And there never was any music sweeter than the music he used to be playing."
I have without leave borrowed a phrase from "The Candle of Vision," written by my liberal fellow-countryman, A.E., where he says, "I felt at times as one raised from the dead, made virginal and pure, who renews exquisite intimacies with the divine companions, with Earth, Water, Air, and Fire." And I think he will forgive me for quoting another passage now from the same book, for I think it must have been in my mind when I wrote of my Wrenboys: "The lands of Immortal Youth which flush with magic the dreams of childhood, for most sink soon below far horizons and do not again arise. For around childhood gather the wizards of the darkness and they baptize it and change its imagination of itself, as in the Arabian tales of enchantment men were changed by sorcerers who cried, 'Be thou beast or bird.' So ...is the imagination of life about itself changed and one will think he is a worm in the sight of Heaven, he who is but a god in exile.... What palaces they were born in, what dominions they are rightly heir to, are concealed from them as in the fairy tale the stolen prince lives obscurely among the swineherd. Yet at times men do not remember, in dreams or in the deeps of sleep, they still wear sceptre and diadem and partake of the banquet of the gods."
The Wrenboys still come to our door at Coole on St. Stephen's Day, as they used in my childhood to come to Roxborough, but it is in our bargain that the wren itself must be symbolic, unmolested, no longer killed in vengeance for that one in the olden times that awakened the sentinels of the enemy Danes by pecking at crumbs on a drum. And, indeed, these last two or three years the rhymes concerning that old history have been lessened, and their place taken by "The Soldiers Song."
I think the staging of the play is easy. The Ogre's hut may be but a shallow front scene, a curtain that can be drawn away. The masks are such as might be used by Wrenboys, little paper ones, such as one finds in a Christmas cracker, held on with a bit of elastic, and would help to get the change into the eyes of the audience, which Manannan's Mullein-dust may not have reached.