forking of the boughs a candle burned. A little lower down a cross
gleamed. Under the cross a white dove hung poised, its pinions
outstretched as though descending out of the infinite upon some
earthly object below. From many of the branches tiny bells swung.
There were little horns and little trumpets. Other boughs sagged
under the weight of silvery cornucopias. Native and tropical fruits
were tied on here and there; and dolls were tied on also with cords
around their necks, their feet dangling. There were smiling masks,
like men beheaded and smiling in their death. Near the base of the
Tree there was a drum. And all over the Tree from pinnacle to base
glittered a tinsel like golden fleece--looking as the moss of old
Southern trees seen at yellow sunset.
He stood for a while absorbed in contemplation of it. This year at his
own request the decorations had been left wholly to him; now he seemed
satisfied.
He turned to her eagerly.
“Do you remember what took place on Christmas Eve last year?” he
asked, with a reminiscent smile. “You sat where you are sitting and I
stood where I am standing. After I had finished lighting the Tree, do
you remember what you said?”
After a moment she stirred and passed her fingers across her brows.
“Recall it to me,” she answered. “I must have said many things. I did
not know that I had said anything that would be remembered a year.
Recall it to me.”
“You looked at the Tree and said what a mystery it is. When and where
did it begin, how and why?--this Tree that is now nourished in the
affections of the human family round the world.”
“Yes; I remember that.”
“I resolved to find out for you. I determined to prepare during what
hours I could spare from my regular college work the gratification of
your wish for you as a gift from me. If I could myself find the way
back through the labyrinth of ages, then I would return for you and
lead you back through the story of the Christmas Tree as that story
has never been seen by any one else. All this year’s work, then, has
been the threading of the labyrinth. Now Christmas Eve has come again,
my work is finished, my gift to you is ready.”
He made this announcement and stopped, leaving it to clear the air of
mystery--the mystery of the secret work.
Then he resumed: “Have you, then, been the Incident in this toil as
yesterday you intimated that you were? Do you now see that you have
been the whole reason of it? You were excluded from any share in the
work only because you could not help to prepare your own gift! That is
all. What has looked like a secret in this house has been no
secret. You are blinded and bewildered no longer; the hour has come
when holly and cedar can speak for themselves.”
Sunlight broke out all over his face.
She made no reply but said within herself:
“Ah, no! That is not the trouble. That has nothing to do with the
trouble. The secret of the house is not a misunderstanding; it is
life. It is not the doing of a year; it is the undoing of the
years. It is not a gift to enrich me with new happiness; it is a
lesson that leaves me poorer.”
He went on without pausing:
“It is already late. The children interrupted us and took up part of
your evening. But it is not too late for me to present to you some
little part of your gift. I am going to arrange for you a short story
out of the long one. The whole long story is there,” he added,
directing his eyes toward the manuscript at her elbow; and his voice
showed how he felt a scholar’s pride in it. “From you it can pass out
to the world that celebrates Christmas and that often perhaps asks the
same question: What is the history of the Christmas Tree? But now my
story for you!”
“Wait a moment,” she said, rising. She left the package where it was;
and with feet that trembled against the soft carpet crossed the room
and seated herself at one end of a deep sofa.
Gathering her dignity about her, she took there the posture of a
listener--listening at her ease.
The sofa was of richly carved mahogany. Each end curved into a scroll
like a landward wave of the sea. One of her foam-white arms rested on
one of the scrolls. Her elbow, reaching beyond, touched a small table
on which stood a vase of white frosted glass; over the rim of it
profuse crimson carnations hung their heads. They were one of her
favorite winter flowers, and he had had these sent out to her this
afternoon from a hothouse of the distant town by a half-frozen
messenger. Near her head curtains of crimson brocade swept down the
wall to the floor from the golden-lustred window cornices. At her back
were cushions of crimson silk. At the other end of the sofa her piano
stood and on it lay the music she played of evenings to him, or played
with thoughts of him when she was alone. And other music also which
she many a time read; as Beethoven’s Great Nine.
Now, along this wall of the parlor from window curtain to window
curtain there stretched a festoon of evergreens and ribands put there
by the children for their Christmas-Night party; and into this festoon
they had fastened bunches of mistletoe, plucked from the walnut tree
felled the day before--they knowing nothing, happy children!
There she reclined.
The lower outlines of her figure were lost in a rich blackness over
which points of jet flashed like swarms of silvery fireflies in some
too warm a night of the warm South. The blackness of her hair and the
blackness of her brows contrasted with the whiteness of her bare arms
and shoulders and faultless neck and faultless throat bared also. Not
far away was hid the warm foam-white thigh, curved like Venus’s of old
out of the sea’s inaccessible purity. About her wrists garlands of old
family corals were clasped--the ocean’s roses; and on her breast,
between the night of her gown and the dawn of the flesh, coral buds
flowered in beauty that could never be opened, never be rifled.
When she had crossed the room to the sofa, two aged
house-dogs--setters with gentle eyes and gentle ears and gentle
breeding--had followed her and lain down at her feet; and one with a
thrust of his nose pushed her skirts back from the toe of her slipper
and rested his chin on it.
“I will listen,” she said, shrinking as yet from other speech. “I wish
simply to listen. There will be time enough afterwards for what I have
to say.”
“Then I shall go straight through,” he replied. “One minute now while
I put together the story for you: it is hard to make a good short
story out of so vast a one.”
During these moments of waiting she saw a new picture of him. Under
stress of suffering and excitement discoveries denied to calmer hours
often arrive. It is as though consciousness receives a shock that
causes it to yawn and open its abysses: at the bottom we see new
things: sometimes creating new happiness; sometimes old happiness is
taken away.
As he stood there--the man beside the Tree--into the picture entered
three other men, looking down upon him from their portraits on the
walls.
One portrait represented the first man of his family to scale the
mountains of the Shield where its eastern rim is turned away from the
reddening daybreak. Thence he had forced his way to its central
portions where the skin of ever living verdure is drawn over the
rocks: Anglo-Saxon, backwoodsman, borderer, great forest chief, hewing
and fighting a path toward the sunset for Anglo-Saxon women and
children. With his passion for the wilderness--its game, enemies,
campfire and cabin, deep-lunged freedom. This ancestor had a lonely,
stern, gaunt face, no modern expression in it whatsoever--the timeless
face of the woods.
Near his portrait hung that of a second representative of the
family. This man had looked out upon his vast parklike estates hi the
central counties; and wherever his power had reached, he had used it
on a great scale for the destruction of his forests. Woods-slayer,
field-maker; working to bring in the period on the Shield when the
hand of a man began to grasp the plough instead of the rifle, when the
stallion had replaced the stag, and bellowing cattle wound fatly down
into the pastures of the bison. This man had the face of his
caste--the countenance of the Southern slave-holding feudal lord. Not
the American face, but the Southern face of a definite era--less than
national, less than modern; a face not looking far in any direction
but at things close around.
From a third portrait the latest ancestor looked down. He with his
contemporaries had finished the thinning of the central forest of the
Shield, leaving the land as it is to-day, a rolling prairie with
remnants of woodland like that crowning the hilltop near this
house. This immediate forefather bore the countenance that began to
develop in the Northerner and in the Southerner after the Civil War:
not the Northern look nor the Southern look, but the American look--a
new thing in the American face, indefinable but unmistakable.
These three men now focussed their attention upon him, the fourth of
the line, standing beside the tree brought into the house. Each of
them in his own way had wrought out a work for civilization, using the
woods as an implement. In his own case, the woods around him having
disappeared, the ancestral passion had made him a student of forestry.
The thesis upon which he took his degree was the relation of modern
forestry to modern life. A few years later in an adjunct professorship
his original researches in this field began to attract attention.
These had to do with the South Appalachian forest in its relation to
South Appalachian civilization and thus to that of the continent.
This work had brought its reward; he was now to be drawn away from his
own college and country to a Northern university.
Curiously in him there had gone on a corresponding development of an
ancestral face. As the look of the wilderness hunter had changed into
that of the Southern slave-holding baron, as this had changed into the
modern American face unlike any other; now finally in him the national
American look had broadened into something more modern still--the look
of mere humanity: he did not look like an American--he looked like a
man in the service of mankind.
This, which it takes thus long to recapitulate, presented itself to
her as one wide vision of the truth. It left a realization of how the
past had swept him along with its current; and of how the future now
caught him up and bore him on, part in its problems. The old passion
living on in him--forest life; a new passion born in him--human
life. And by inexorable logic these two now blending themselves
to-night in a story of the Christmas Tree.
But womanlike she sought to pluck out of these forces something
intensely personal to which she could cling; and she did it in this
wise.
In the Spring following their marriage, often after supper they would
go out on the lawn in the twilight, strolling among her flowers; she
leading him this way and that way and laying upon him beautiful
exactions and tyrannies: how he must do this and do that; and not do
this and not do that; he receiving his orders like a grateful slave.
Then sometimes he would silently imprison her hand and lead her down
the lawn and up the opposite hill to the edge of the early summer
evening woods; and there on the roots of some old tree--the shadows of
the forest behind them and the light of the western sky in their
faces--they would stay until darkness fell, hiding their eyes from
each other.
The burning horizon became a cathedral interior--the meeting of love’s
holiness and the Most High; the crescent dropped a silver veil upon
the low green hills; wild violets were at their feet; the mosses and
turf of the Shield under them. The warmth of his body was as the day’s
sunlight stored in the trunk of the tree; his hair was to her like its
tawny bloom, native to the sun.
Life with him was enchanted madness.
He had begun. He stretched out his arm and slowly began to write on
the air of the room. Sometimes in earlier years she had sat in his
classroom when he was beginning a lecture; and it was thus, standing
at the blackboard, that he sometimes put down the subject of his
lecture for the students. Slowly now he shaped each letter and as he
finished each word, he read it aloud to her:
“A STORY OF THE CHRISTMAS TREE, FOR JOSEPHINE, WIFE OF FREDERICK”
IV. THE WANDERING TALE
“Josephine!”
He uttered her name with beautiful reverence, letting the sound of it
float over the Christmas Tree and die away on the garlanded walls of
the room: it was his last tribute to her, a dedication.
Then he began:
“Josephine, sometimes while looking out of the study window a spring
morning, I have watched you strolling among the flowers of the lawn. I
have seen you linger near a honeysuckle in full bloom and question the
blossoms in your questioning way--you who are always wishing to probe
the heart of things, to drain out of them the red drop of their
significance. But, gray-eyed querist of actuality, those fragrant
trumpets could blow to your ear no message about their origin. It was
where the filaments of the roots drank deepest from the mould of a
dead past that you would have had to seek the true mouthpieces of
their philosophy.
“So the instincts which blossom out thickly over the nature of modern
man to themselves are mute. The flower exhibits itself at the tip of
the vine; the instinct develops itself at the farthest outreach of
life; and the point where it clamors for satisfaction is at the
greatest possible distance from its birthplace. For all these
instincts send their roots down through the mould of the uncivilized,
down through the mould of the primitive, down into the mould of the
underhuman--that ancient playhouse dedicated to low tragedies.
“While this may seem to you to be going far for a commencement of the
story, it is coming near to us. The kind of man and woman we are to
ourselves; the kind of husband and wife we are to each other; the kind
of father and mother we are to our children; the kind of human beings
we are to our fellow beings--the passions which swell as with sap the
buds of those relations until they burst into their final shapes of
conduct are fed from the bottom of the world’s mould. You and I
to-night are building the structures of our moral characters upon
life-piles that sink into fathomless ooze. All we human beings dip our
drinking cups into a vast delta sweeping majestically towards the sea
and catch drops trickling from the springs of creation.
“It is in a vast ancestral country, a Fatherland of Old Desire, that
my story lies for you and for me: drawn from the forest and from human
nature as the two have worked in the destiny of the earth. I have
wrested it from this Tree come out of the ancient woods into the house
on this Night of the Nativity.”
He made the scholar’s pause and resumed, falling into the tone of easy
narrative. It had already become evident that this method of telling
the story would be to find what Alpine flowers he could for her amid
Alpine snows.
He told her then that the oldest traceable influence in the life of
the human race is the sea. It is true that man in some ancestral form
was rocked in the cradle of the deep; he rose from the waves as the
islanded Greeks said of near Venus. Traces of this origin he still
bears both in his body and his emotions; and together they make up his
first set of memories--Sea Memories.
He deliberated a moment and then put the truth before her in a single
picturesque phrase:
“Man himself is a closed living sea-shell in the chambers of which the
hues of the first ocean are still fresh and its tempests still are
sounding.”
Next he told her how man’s last marine ancestor quit one day the sea
never again to return to the deep, crossed the sands of the beach and
entered the forest; and how upon him, this living sea-shell, soft to
impressions, the Spirit of the Forest fell to work, beginning to shape
it over from sea uses to forest uses.
A thousand thousand ages the Spirit of the Forest worked at the
sea-shell.
It remodelled the shell as so much clay; stood it up and twisted and
branched it as young pliant oak; hammered it as forge-glowing iron;
tempered it as steel; cast it as bronze; chiselled it as marble;
painted it as a cloud; strung and tuned it as an instrument; lit it up
as a life tower--the world’s one beacon: steadily sending it onward
through one trial form after another until at last had been perfected
for it that angelic shape in which as man it was ever afterwards to
sob and to smile.
And thus as one day a wandering sea-shell had quit the sea and entered
the forest, now on another day of that infinite time there reappeared
at the edge of the forest the creature it had made. On every wall of
its being internal and external forest-written; and completely
forest-minded: having nothing but forest knowledge, forest feeling,
forest dreams, forest fancies, forest faith; so that in all it could
do or know or feel or dream or imagine or believe it was
forest-tethered.
At the edge of the forest then this creature uncontrollably impelled
to emerge from the waving green sea of leaves as of old it had been
driven to quit the rolling blue ocean of waters: Man at the dawn of
our history of him.
And if the first set of race memories--Sea Memories--still endure
within him, how much more powerful are the second set--the Forest
Memories!
So powerful that since the dawn of history millions have perished as
forest creatures only; so powerful that there are still remnant races
on the globe which have never yet snapped the primitive tether and
will become extinct as mere forest creatures to the last; so powerful
that those highest races which have been longest out in the open--as
our own Aryan race--have never ceased to be reached by the influence
of the woods behind them; by the shadows of those tall morning trees
falling across the mortal clearings toward the sunset.
These Master Memories, he said, filtering through the sandlike
generations of our race, survive to-day as those pale attenuated
affections which we call in ourselves the Love of Nature; these
affections are inherited: new feelings for nature we have none. The
writers of our day who speak of civilized man’s love of nature as a
developing sense err wholly. They are like explorers who should
mistake a boundary for the interior of a continent. Man’s knowledge of
nature is modern, but it no more endows him with new feeling than
modern knowledge of anatomy supplies him with a new bone or his latest
knowledge about his blood furnishes him with an additional artery.
Old are our instincts and passions about Nature: all are Forest
Memories.
But among the many-twisted mass of them there is one, he said, that
contains the separate buried root of the story: Man’s Forest Faith.
When the Spirit of the Forest had finished with the sea-shell, it had
planted in him--there to grow forever--the root of faith that he was a
forest child. His origin in the sea he had not yet discovered; the
science of ages far distant in the future was to give him that. To
himself forest-tethered he was also forest-born: he believed it to be
his immediate ancestor, the creative father of mankind. Thus the
Greeks in their oldest faith were tethered to the idea that they were
descended from the plane tree; in the Sagas and Eddas the human race
is tethered to the world-ash. Among every people of antiquity this
forest faith sprang up and flourished: every race was tethered to some
ancestral tree. In the Orient each succeeding Buddha of Indian
mythology was tethered to a different tree; each god of the later
classical Pantheon was similarly tethered: Jupiter to the oak, Apollo
to the laurel, Bacchus to the vine, Minerva to the olive, Juno to the
apple, on and on. Forest worship was universal--the most impressive
and bewildering to modern science that the human spirit has ever built
up. At the dawn of history began The Adoration of the Trees.
Then as man, the wanderer, walked away from his dawn across the ages
toward the sunset bearing within him this root of faith, it grew with
his growth. The successive growths were cut down by the successive
scythes of time; but always new sprouts were put forth.
Thus to man during the earliest ages the divine dwelt as a bodily
presence within the forest; but one final day the forest lost the
Immortal as its indwelling creator.
Next the old forest worshipper peopled the trees with an intermediate
race of sylvan deities less than divine, more than human; and long he
beguiled himself with the exquisite reign and proximity of these; but
the lesser could not maintain themselves in temples from which the
greater had already been expelled, and they too passed out of sight
down the roadway of the world.
Still the old forest faith would not let the wanderer rest; and during
yet later ages he sent into the trees his own nature so that the woods
became freshly endeared to him by many a story of how individuals of
his own race had succeeded as tenants to the erstwhile habitations of
the gods. Then this last panorama of illusion faded also, and
civilized man stood face to face with the modern woods--inhabitated
only by its sap and cells. The trees had drawn their bark close around
them, wearing an inviolate tapestry across those portals through which
so many a stranger to them had passed in and passed out; and
henceforth the dubious oracle of the forest--its one reply to all
man’s questionings--became the Voice of its own Mystery.
After this the forest worshipper could worship the woods no more. But
we must not forget that civilization as compared with the duration of
human life on the planet began but yesterday: even our own
Indo-European race dwells as it were on the forest edge. And the
forest still reaches out and twines itself around our deepest
spiritual truths: home--birth--love--prayer--death: it tries to
overrun them all, to reclaim them. Thus when we build our houses,
instinctively we attempt by some clump of trees to hide them and to
shelter ourselves once more inside the forest; in some countries
whenever a child is born, a tree is planted as its guardian in nature;
in our marriage customs the forest still riots as master of ceremonies
with garlands and fruits; our prayers strike against the forest shaped
hi cathedral stone--memory of the grove, God’s first temple; and when
we die, it is the tree that is planted beside us as the sentinel of
our rest. Even to this day the sight of a treeless grave arouses some
obscure instinct in us that it is God-forsaken.
Yes, he said, whatsoever modern temple man has anywhere reared for his
spirit, over the walls of it have been found growing the same leaf and
tendril: he has introduced the tree into the ritual of every later
world-worship; and thus he has introduced the evergreen into the
ritual of Christianity.
This then is the meaning of the Christmas Tree and of its presence at
the Nativity. At the dawn of history we behold man worshipping the
tree as the Creator literally present on the earth; in our time we see
him using that tree in the worship of the creative Father’s Son come
to earth in the Father’s stead.
“On this evergreen in the room falls the radiance of these brief
tapers of the night; but on it rests also the long light of that
spiritual dawn when man began his Adoration of the Trees. It is the
forest taking its place once more beside the long-lost Immortal.”
Here he finished the first part of his story. That he should address
her thus and that she thus should listen had in it nothing unusual for
them. For years it had been his wont to traverse with her the ground
of his lectures, and she shared his thought before it reached
others. It was their high and equal comradeship. Wherever his mind
could go hers went--a brilliant torch, a warming sympathy.
But to-night his words had fallen on her as withered leaves on a
motionless figure of stone. If he was sensible of this change in her,
he gave no sign. And after a moment he passed to the remaining part of
the story.