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.
But there is no hope for men who do not boast that their