MARGINAL COMMENTS
By ROSE MACAULAY
BY the time these words appear, the Fifths will have come and gone, and the notorious Mr. Fawkes will have perished again all over England in a thousand bonfires. Poor old Guy, the children call him, in indulgent affection. Yet is he so poor after all ? A man of ambitious ideals, a would-be assassin on the grand scale, who meant so largely and so little did, he has reaped his reward in fame. He suffered and died for his failed plan, but suffer and die we all must ; and to how few of us it is given to become a Guy, a puppet 'for the jubilant pyromania of children, through centuries of history. If Guy, peering out from the place of shades where he and his so violent Unfulfilled intentions now rest, should know his fate at young posterity's hands, should hear his once execrated name bandied about, with familiar and compassionate epithets attached, in murky English Novembers, should see his black-a-vised image (he is, apparently, held by the juvenile populace to have been of negroid extraction) carried about in dolls' perambu- lators, and finally encharioted in soaring flames, should hear the banging, the popping, the squibbing, that makes the anniversary of his strange and spirited performance of three centuries ago to sound like the uncorking of a thousand champagne bottles at some. birthday feast— if Guy should remark all these goings on, one imagines that he cannot but be pleased.
What has caused the singling out of this one assassin, among so many, for so high a destiny ? There have been other, and more successful assassins of kings ; though perhaps no other has trained his ammunition on the two Houses of Parliament in session. • It was a great aim, and its failure proportionately resounding. Any how, Guy, brave tool of less courageous superiors, has reaped the harvest of notoriety.
No one now dislikes Guy ; on the contrary, he is a very popular character. The bonfires and fireworks have lit him a warm corner in our hearts. Pyrotechnics seem such an antidote to unpopularity that it seems a pity we do not have more Guys. It is said that in East London Sir Oswald Mosley is frequently to be found filling this honourable position ; the more often his image dissolves in flames, the more will East London hearts warm towards him. He himself might well thus purge with fire his imperfect sympathies towards Coin- inunistS and Jews. Most men hive -their private Guys, whom they would like to parade through the streets in the guise of golliwogs and then burn. By all means let us make use of this admirable vent for distaste ; it will relieve the soul and enliven and illuminate the night. Do you dislike any of your relations or friends, your landlady, some politician, writer, crooner, dictator, newspaper proprietor, policeman or bore ? Does your blood boil when you think on General Franco, Senor Largo Caballero, Herr Hitler, Signor Mussolini, M. Stalin, or other of the world's loud men ? Do not brood over them ; let theM not fester in the blood ; tip and make their puppets, black their faces, stick them in perambu- lators, and wheel them for derision through. the streets, requesting as you go pennies for the poor old Guy, and make of them at last a holocaust, a blazing sacrifice, that their cinders and your hate may disperse on the winds together.
There are, of course, who hold that such exercises have the further advantage of inflieting pains on the originals of the tortured mammets. Tliis is as may be'.. But even without this additional merit, to make GuyS is a fine healthy employment, and will be found a good remedy against the spleen. Anyhow, why should poor harmless Mr. Fawkes hold the field for ever ? There are so many worse men.
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