Christmas already! However welcome its coming, Christmas always seems to
take us by surprise. Is the year really so soon at the end of its
journey? Why, it seems only yesterday that it needed a special effort of
remembrance to date our letters with the new "_anno domini_." And have
you noticed that one always does that reluctantly, with something almost
of misgiving? The figures of the old year have a warm human look, but
those of the new wear a chill, unfamiliar, almost menacing expression.
Nineteen hundred and--we know. It is nearly "all in." It has done its
best--and its worst. Between Christmas Day and New-Year it has hardly
time to change its character. Good or bad, as it may have been, we feel
at home with it, and we are fain to keep the old almanac a little longer
on the wall. But the last leaves are falling, the days are shortening.
There is a smell of coming snow in the air, and for weeks past it has
already been Christmas in the shops.
Yes, however it strikes us, we are a year older. On the first of January
last we had twelve brand-new months of a brand-new year to spend, and
now the last of them is all but spent. We had a new spring to look out
for, like the coming of one's sweetheart, a new summer bounteous in
prospect with inexhaustible wealth of royal sunshine, a new autumn, with
ruddy orchards and the glory of the tapestried woods; and now of the
four new seasons that were to be ours but one remains:
And here is but December left and I,
To wonder if the hawthorn bloomed in May,
And if the wild rose with so fine a flush
Mantled the cheek of June, and if the way
The stream went singing foamed with meadow sweet,
And if the throstle sang in yonder bush,
And if the lark dizzied with song the sky.
I watched and listened--yet so sweet, so fleet,
The mad young year went by!
Strange, that feeling at the end of the year that somehow we have missed
it, have failed to experience it all to the full, taken it too
carelessly, not dwelt sufficiently on its rich, expressive hours. Each
year we feel the same, and however intent we may have been, however we
have watched and listened, sensitively eager to hold and exhaust each
passing moment, when the year-end has come, we seem somehow to have been
cheated after all. Who, at the beginning of each year, has not promised
himself a stricter attentiveness to his experience? This year he will
"load every rift with ore."
This year, I said, when first along the lane
With tiny nipples of the tender green
The winter-blackened hedge grew bright again,
This year I watch and listen; I have seen
So many springs steal profitless away,
This year I garner every sound and sweet.
And you, young year, make not such haste to bring
Hawthorn and rose; nor jumble, indiscreet,
Treasure on treasure of the precious spring;
But bring all softly forth upon the air,
Unhasting to be fair...
Yet, for all our watchfulness, the year seems to have escaped us. We
know that the birds sang, that the flowers bloomed, that the grass was
green, but it seems to us that we did not take our joy of them with
sufficient keenness; our sweetheart came, but we did not look deep
enough into her eyes. If only we live to see the wild rose again! But
meanwhile here is the snow.
Unless we are still numbered among those happy people for whom
Christmas-trees are laden and lit, this annual prematurity of Christmas
cannot but make us a little meditative amid our mirth, and if, while
Santa Claus is dispensing his glittering treasures, our thoughts grow a
little wistful, they will not necessarily be mournful thoughts, or on
that account less seasonable in character; for Christmas is essentially
a retrospective feast, and we may, with fitness, with indeed a proper
piety of unforgetfulness, bring even our sad memories, as it were to
cheer themselves, within the glow of its festivity. Ghosts have always
been invited to Christmas parties, and whether they are seen or not,
they always come; nor is any form of story so popular by the Christmas
fire as the ghost-story--which, when one thinks of it, is rather odd,
considering the mirthful character of the time. Yet, after all, what are
our memories but ghost-stories? Ah! the beautiful ghosts that come to
the Christmas fire!
Christmas too is pre-eminently the Feast of the Absent, the Festival of
the Far-Away, for the most prosperous ingathering of beloved faces about
the Christmas fire can but include a small number of those we would fain
have there; and have you ever realized that the absent are ghosts? That
is, they live with us sheerly as spiritual presences, dependent upon our
faithful remembrance for their embodiment. We may not, with our physical
eyes, see them once a year; we may not even have so seen them for twenty
years; it may be decreed that we shall never see them again; we seldom,
perhaps never, write to each other; all we know of each other is that we
are alive and love each other across space and time. Alive--but how?
Scarce otherwise, surely, than the unforgotten dead are alive--alive in
unforgetting love.
It is rather strange, if you will give it a thought, how much of our
real life is thus literally a ghost-story. Probably it happens with the
majority of us that those who mean most to us, by the necessities of
existence, must be far away, met but now and then in brief flashes
of meeting that often seem to say so much less than absence; our
intercourse is an intercourse of the imagination--yet how real! They
belong to the unseen in our lives, and have all its power over us. The
intercourse of a mother and a son--is it not often like that in a world
which sends its men on the four winds, to build and fight, while the
mother must stay in the old nest? Seldom at Christmas can a mother
gather all her children beneath the wing of her smile. Her big boys are
seven seas away, and even her girls have Christmas-trees of their own.
But motherhood is in its very nature a ghostly, a spiritual, thing, and
the big boys and the old mother are not really divided. They meet
unseen by the Christmas fire, as they meet all the year round in that
mysterious ether of the soul, where space and time are not.
Yes, it is strange to think how small a proportion of our lives we spend
with those we love; even when we say that we spend all our time with
them. Husband and wife even--how much of the nearness of the closest of
human relations is, and must be, what Rossetti has called "parted
presence!" The man must go forth to his labour until the evening. How
few of the twenty-four hours can these two beings who have given their
whole lives to each other really give! Husband and wife even must be
content to be ghosts to each other for the greater part of each day.
As Rossetti says in his poem, eyes, hands, voice, lips, can meet so
strangely seldom in the happiest marriage; only in the invisible home of
the heart can the most fortunate husband and wife be always together:
Your heart is never away,
But ever with mine, forever,
Forever without endeavour,
Tomorrow, love, as today;
Two blent hearts never astray,
Two souls no power may sever,
Together, O my love, forever!
When I said that the absent were ghosts, I don't think you quite liked
the saying. It gave you a little shiver. It seemed rather grimly
fantastic. But do you not begin to see what I meant? Begin to see the
comfort in the thought? begin to see the inner connection between
Christmas and the ghost-story? Yes, the real lesson of Christmas is the
ever presence of the absent through love; the ghostly, that is to say
the spiritual, nature of all human intercourse. Our realities can exist
only in and through our imaginations, and the most important part of our
lives is lived in a dream with dream-faces, the faces of the absent and
the dead--who, in the consolation of this thought, are alike brought
near.
I have a friend who is dead--but I say to myself that he is in New
Zealand; for, if he were really in New Zealand, we should hardly seem
less distant, or be in more frequent communication. We should say that
we were both busy men, that the mails were infrequent, but that between
us there was no need of words, that we both "understood." That is what I
say now. It is just as appropriate. Perhaps he says it too. And--we
shall meet by the Christmas fire.
I have a friend who is alive. He is alive in England. We have not met
for twelve years. He never writes, and I never write. Perhaps we shall
never meet, never even write to each other, again. It is our way, the
way of many a friendship, none the less real for its silence--friendship
by faith, one might say, rather than by correspondence. My dead friend
is not more dumb, not more invisible. When these two friends meet me
by the Christmas fire, will they not both alike be ghosts--both, in a
sense, dead, but both, in a truer sense, alive?
It is so that, without our thinking of it, our simple human feelings one
for another at Christmas-time corroborate the mystical message which
it is the church's meaning to convey by this festival of "peace and
good-will to men"--the power of the Invisible Love; from the mystical
love of God for His world, to the no less, mystical love of mother and
child, of lover and lover, of friend and friend.
And, when you think of it, is not this festival founded upon what,
without irreverence, we may call the Divine Ghost-Story of Christmas?
Was there ever another ghost-story so strange, so full of marvels, a
story with so thrilling a message from the unseen? Taken just as a
story, is there anything in the _Arabian Nights_ so marvellous as this
ghost-story of Christmas? The world was all marble and blood and bronze,
against a pitiless sky of pitiless gods. The world was Rome. No rule
ever stood builded so impregnably from earth to stars--a merciless wall
of power. Strength never planted upon the earth so stern a foot. Never
was tyranny so invincibly bastioned to the cowed and conquered eye.
And against all this marble and blood and bronze, what frail fantastic
attack is this? What quaint expedition from fairy-land that comes so
insignificantly against these battlements on which the Roman helmets
catch the setting sun?
A Star in the Sky. Some Shepherds from Judea. Three Wise Men from the
East. Some Frankincense and Myrrh. A Mother and Child.
Yes, a fairy-tale procession--but these are to conquer Rome, and that
child at his mother's breast has but to speak three words, for all that
marble and bronze to melt away: "Love One Another."
It may well have seemed an almost ludicrous weapon--three gentle words.
So one might attack a fortress with a flower. But Rome fell before them,
for all that, and cruel as the world still is, so cruel a world can
never be again. The history of Christianity from Christ to Tolstoi
is the history of a ghost-story; and as Rome fell before the men it
martyred, so Russia has been compelled at last to open its prison doors
by the passive imperative of the three gentle words. Stone and iron are
terribly strong to the eye and even to the arm of man, but they are as
vapour before the breath of the soul. Many enthroned and magisterial
authorities seem so much more important and powerful than the simple
human heart, but let the trial of strength come, and we see the might of
the delicate invisible energy that wells up out of the infinite mystery
to support the dreams of man.
Christmas is the friendly human announcement of this ghostly truth; its
holly and boar's-head are but a rough-and-tumble emblazonment of that
mystic gospel of--The Three Words; the Gospel of the Unseen Love.
And how well has the church chosen this particular season of the year
for this most subtly spiritual of all its festivals, so subtle because
its ghostly message is so ruddily disguised in human mirth, and thus the
more unconsciously operative in human hearts!
Winter, itself so ghostly a thing, so spiritual in its beauty, was
indeed the season to catch our ears with this ghost-story of the
Invisible and Invincible Love. The other seasons are full of sensuous
charm and seductiveness. With endless variety of form and colour and
fragrance, they weave "a flowery band to bind us to the earth." They are
running over with the pride of sap, the luxury of green leaves, and the
intoxicating fulness of life. The summer earth is like some voluptuous
enchantress, all ardour and perfume, and soft dazzle of moted sunshine.
But the beauty of winter seems a spiritual, almost a supernatural,
thing, austere and forbidding at first, but on a nearer approach found
to be rich in exquisite exhilaration, in rare and lofty discoveries and
satisfactions of the soul. Winter naturally has found less favour with
the poets than the other seasons. Praise of it has usually a strained
air, as though the poet were making the best of a barren theme, like a
portrait-painter reluctantly flattering some unattractive sitter. But
one poet has seen and seized the mysterious beauty of winter with
unforced sympathy--Coventry Patmore, whose "Odes," in particular,
containing as they do some of the most rarely spiritual meditation in
English poetry, are all too little known. In one of these he has these
beautiful lines, which I quote, I hope correctly, from memory:
I, singularly moved
To love the lovely that are not beloved,
Of all the seasons, most love winter, and to trace
The sense of the Trophonian pallor of her face.
It is not death, but plenitude of peace;
And this dim cloud which doth the earth enfold
Hath less the characters of dark and cold
Than light and warmth asleep,
And intermittent breathing still doth keep
With the infant harvest heaving soft below
Its eider coverlet of snow.
The beauty of winter is like the beauty of certain austere classics of
literature and art, and as with them, also, it demands a certain almost
moral strenuousness of application before it reveals itself. The
loftiest masterpieces have something aloof and cheerless about them at
our first approach, something of the cold breath of those starry spaces
into which they soar, and to which they uplift our spirits. When we
first open Dante or Milton, we miss the flowers and the birds and the
human glow of the more sensuous and earth-dwelling poets. But after
awhile, after our first rather bleak introduction to them, we grow aware
that these apparently undecorated and unmusical masterpieces are radiant
and resounding with a beauty and a music which "eye hath not seen nor
ear heard." For flowers we are given stars, for the song of birds the
music of the spheres, and for that human glow a spiritual ecstasy.
Similarly with winter. It has indeed a strange beauty peculiar to
itself, but it is a beauty we must be at some pains to enjoy. The beauty
of the other seasons comes to us, offers itself to us, without effort.
To study the beauty of summer, it is enough to lie under green boughs
with half-closed eyes, and listen to the running stream and the murmur
of a million wings. But winter's is no such idle lesson. In summer we
can hardly stay indoors, but in winter we can hardly be persuaded to
go out. We must gird ourselves to overcome that first disinclination,
else we shall know nothing of winter but its churlish wind and its
ice-in-the-pail. But, the effort made, and once out of doors on a
sunlit winter's morning, how soon are we finding out the mistake we
were making, coddling ourselves in the steam-heat! Indoors, indeed,
the prospect had its Christmas-card picturesqueness; snow-clad roofs,
snow-laden boughs, silhouetted tracery of leafless trees; but we said
that it was a soulless spectacular display, the beauty of death, and
the abhorred coldness thereof. We have hardly walked a hundred yards,
however, before impressions very different are crowding upon us,
among which the impression of cold is forgotten, or only retained as
pleasantly heightening the rest.
Far from the world's being dead, as it had seemed indoors, we are
presently, in some strange indefinable way, made intensely conscious of
a curious overwhelming sense of life in the air, as though the crystal
atmosphere was, so to say, ecstatically charged with the invisible
energy of spiritual forces. In the enchanted stillness of the snow, we
seem to hear the very breathing of the spirit of life. The cessation of
all the myriad little sounds that rise so merrily and so musically from
the summer surface of the earth seems to allow us to hear the solemn
beat of the very heart of earth itself. We seem very near to the sacred
mystery of being, nearer than at any other season of the year, for in
other seasons we are distracted by its pleasurable phenomena, but in
winter we seem close to the very mystery itself; for the world seems to
have put on robes of pure spirit and ascended into a diviner ether.
The very phenomena of winter have a spiritual air which those of summer
lack, a phantom-like strangeness. How mysterious this ice, how ghostly
this snow, and all the beautiful fantastic shapes taken by both; the
dream-like foliage, and feathers and furs of the snow, the Gothic
diablerie of icicled eaves, all the fairy fancies of the frost, the
fretted crystal shapes that hang the brook-side with rarer than Venetian
glass, the strange flowers that stealthily overlay the windows, even
while we watch in vain for the unseen hand! No flowers of summer seem so
strange as these, make us feel so weirdly conscious of the mystery of
life. As the ghostly artist covers the pane, is it not as though a
spirit passed?
As we walk on through the shining morning, we ourselves seem to grow
rarefied as the air. Our senses seem to grow finer, purged to a keener
sensitiveness. Our eyes and ears seem to become spiritual rather than
physical organs, and an exquisite elation, as though we were walking on
shining air, or winging through celestial space, fills all our being.
The material earth and our material selves seem to grow joyously
transparent, and while we are conscious of our earthly shoe-leather
ringing out on the iron-bound highway, we seem, nevertheless, to be
spirits moving without effort, in a world of spirit. Seldom, if ever,
in summer are we thus made conscious of, so to say, our own ghosts,
thus lifted up out of our material selves with a happy sense of
disembodiment.
There would, indeed, seem to be some relation between temperature and
the soul, and something literally purifying about cold. Certain it is
that we return from our winter's walk with something sacred in our
hearts and something shining in our faces, which we seldom, if ever,
bring back with us in summer. Without understanding the process, we seem
to have been brought nearer to the invisible mystery, and a solemn peace
of happy insight seems for a little while at least to possess our souls.
Our white walk in the snow-bright air has in some way quickened the
half-torpid immortal within us, revived awhile our sluggish sense of our
spiritual significance and destiny, made us once more, if only for a
little, attractively mysterious to ourselves. Yes! there is what one
might call a certain monastic discipline about winter which impels the
least spiritual minded to meditation on his mortal lot and its immortal
meanings; and thus, as I said, the Church has done wisely to choose
winter for its most Christian festival. The heart of man, thus prepared
by the very elements, is the more open to the message of the miraculous
love, and the more ready to translate it into terms of human goodness.
And thus, I hope, the ghostly significance of mince-pie is made clear.
But enough of ghostly, grown-up thoughts. Let us end with a song for
the children:
O the big red sun,
And the wide white world,
And the nursery window
Mother-of-pearled;
And the houses all
In hoods of snow,
And the mince-pies,
And the mistletoe;
And Christmas pudding,
And berries red,
And stockings hung
At the foot of the bed;
And carol-singers,
And nothing but play--
O baby, this is
Christmas Day!