Stable Secrets
By MOTH.
THIS paragraph appeared recently in a newspaper, under the heading, " Wassailing the Apple-Trees " :
" Weird scenes took place at Carhampton to-day, when the villagers carried out their strange ritual of wassailing the apple. trees. Gunshots summoned the villagers to the orchard. There they gathered round the largest appletree, while ' wassail men' sang incantations to it and exhorted it to bloom well and bear well. Pieces of cider-soaked toast were hung in the tree to please the `good spirits' and robins. The wassailers sang, shouted, cheered, fired guns, and made as much noise as possible to scare away bad spirits.' The rite is an ancient pagan custom. Its power to secure a large apple crop is still believed."
It struck me, when I saw this, that readers of the Spectator might be interested to hear something of a very similar ritual which plays—little though they know it— a small but important part in their own lives. For of all the varied and strenuous activities which are crowned, every Friday morning, by the publication of an issue of the Spectator, " wassailing," or something very like it, is not the least indispensable.
The task of producing a weekly paper is a formidable one. Think what it means. Apart from the mundane but colossal labours of printing and distribution, the duties of the editorial staff subject its personnel to an intellectual strain of the most frightful severity. By their exertions alone, thousands of readers are provided, Friday after Friday, with a fresh, clean copy of the Spectator, profound, witty, intensely grammatical, and always differing, however slightly, from the one they read the week before. It is the proud boast of the editorial staff that no two issues of the Spectator have ever been proved identical. Sometimes it is the phraseology that is different, sometimes the order or titles of the articles are changed. If the same thing is said, it is said in a different way. If the same words are used, they are used of some- thing else. That has always been the tradition. If not variety, then at least divergence. Scraper ideal, sed nunquam verbatim.
glorious, but a gruelling tradition. Its maintenance demands of the editorial staff some spark of the divine fire, sonic quality more positive than even the most heroic endurance, the most transatlantic efficiency— something, in fine, which the human machine cannot be relied on to produce once a week without external stimulus. That is where wassailing comes in.
Wassailing takes place on Wednesdays. Our ritual curiously parallels that of the Somersetshire orchards; Gun shots summon the contributors, and these hasten to gather round the editor, while " wassail men "—picked members of the Printers, Compositors, and Italie- Moulders' Operatic Society—sing incantations to him,' exhorting him—mutatis mutandis, of course—to bloom well and bear well. The scene may be presumed to be an impressive one. No one has ever actually witnessed it, for the Spectator's traditions of anonymity naturally require that all participants shall be blindfolded. It was, as a matter of interest, this circumstance which led, at the close of the last century, to the omission from the ceremony of a short but rather complicated dance.' Unaccustomed, for the most part, to violent physical exertion and totally unable to see what they were doing, the giants of the Victorian.Age used to caracole with no less reluctance than ineptitude. There were often ugly,' and sometimes painful, scenes. Men of whom it had been said that they could write a leader with their eyes shut were humiliated and enraged by their inability to cut a caper under similar conditions. More than one disciple of Wordsworth, embittered by the injuries he received: took to vers fibre and sank to the Yellow Book. A power- ful series of articles attacking the then fashionable game of croquet—which the Spectator (rightly, as I believe) conceived of as imperilling the sanctity of the home, Free Trade, and the Salic Law—terminated with a gavotte to l' etourdie which carried its author out of a second-story window. Moreover, under cover of this Terpsichorean Blind Man's Bluff, the dramatic critic of the day succeeded (as has since been proved) in filching from the office a handsome ink-well, in ivory and gun- metal, presented to the editor in recognition of his services on their behalf by the Society for the Suppression of the Use of Mineral Waters and Other Intoxicants in Bowls Containing Gold Fish. So clearly the dance had to go.
In other respects, however, the ritual of wassailing has remained unchanged through the years. It continues, in its later phases, to bear a striking resemblance to that observed by the apple growers of Somerset. Not, of course, " pieces of eider-soaked toast," but small segments of Empire-grown indiarubber are hung out to please the " good spirits." (The robins we ignore. It is difficult to see how robins could affect the Spectator. It would be sheer waste of time to propitiate the robins.) We, like the villagers, sing, shout, cheer, fire guns, and make as much noise as possible, though in the case of the Spectator the " bad spirits " whom it is hoped thus to intimidate are represented by misprints, split infinitives, and gross misstatements of fact ; we have little or nothing to fear from the boll-weevil or from small, felonious boys. The proceedings conclude with a short address by the editor on some such subject as " The Need for a Main Verb," while the wassail men sing, in descant, extracts from the more reliable works of reference. Seed-cake is given to the reviewers in an ante-room.
While it is, of course, impossible to gauge the precise effect on our labours of this exotic but time-honoured stimulus, it may be fairly assumed to be a beneficial one. One at least of the articles in this week's issue could hardly have been written if no such practice as I have described had ever existed in journalistic circles. Is it necessary to say more ?
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