uld say,
was only "The Last Phase"; or at least the last but one. During the
strongest and most startling part of his career, the time that made him
immortal, Napoleon was a sort of boy, and not a bad sort of boy either,
bullet-headed and ambitious, but honestly in love with a woman, and
honestly enthusiastic for a cause, the cause of French justice and
equality.

Another instance is the Middle Ages, which we also remember only by the
odour of their ultimate decay. We think of the life of the Middle Ages
as a dance of death, full of devils and deadly sins, lepers and burning
heretics. But this was not the life of the Middle Ages, but the death
of the Middle Ages. It is the spirit of Louis XI and Richard III, not of
Louis IX and Edward I.

This grim but not unwholesome fable of Dr. Faustus, with its rebuke to
the mere arrogance of learning, is sound and stringent enough; but it is
not a fair sample of the mediaeval soul at its happiest and sanest. The
heart of the true Middle Ages might be found far better, for instance,
in the noble tale of Tannhauser, in which the dead staff broke into leaf
and flower to rebuke the pontiff who had declared even one human being
beyond the strength of sorrow and pardon.

But there were in the play two great human ideas which the mediaeval
mind never lost its grip on, through the heaviest nightmares of its
dissolution. They were the two great jokes of mediaevalism, as they are
the two eternal jokes of mankind. Wherever those two jokes exist
there is a little health and hope; wherever they are absent, pride and
insanity are present. The first is the idea that the poor man ought to
get the better of the rich man. The other is the idea that the husband
is afraid of the wife.

I have heard that there is a place under the knee which, when struck,
should produce a sort of jump; and that if you do not jump, you are mad.
I am sure that there are some such places in the soul. When the human
spirit does not jump with joy at either of those two old jokes, the
human spirit must be struck with incurable paralysis. There is hope
for people who have gone down into the hells of greed and economic
oppression (at least, I hope there is, for we are such a people
ourselves), but there is no hope for a people that does not exult in the
abstract idea of the peasant scoring off the prince. There is hope for
the idle and the adulterous, for the men that desert their wives and the
men that beat their wives.