CHRISTMAS

There is no more dangerous or disgusting habit than that of celebrating

Christmas before it comes, as I am doing in this article. It is the

very essence of a festival that it breaks upon one brilliantly and

abruptly, that at one moment the great day is not and the next moment

the great day is. Up to a certain specific instant you are feeling

ordinary and sad; for it is only Wednesday. At the next moment your

heart leaps up and your soul and body dance together like lovers; for

in one burst and blaze it has become Thursday. I am assuming (of

course) that you are a worshipper of Thor, and that you celebrate his

day once a week, possibly with human sacrifice. If, on the other hand,

you are a modern Christian Englishman, you hail (of course) with the

same explosion of gaiety the appearance of the English Sunday. But I

say that whatever the day is that is to you festive or symbolic, it is

essential that there should be a quite clear black line between it and

the time going before. And all the old wholesome customs in connection

with Christmas were to the effect that one should not touch or see or

know or speak of something before the actual coming of Christmas Day.

Thus, for instance, children were never given their presents until the

actual coming of the appointed hour. The presents were kept tied up in

brown-paper parcels, out of which an arm of a doll or the leg of a

donkey sometimes accidentally stuck. I wish this principle were adopted

in respect of modern Christmas ceremonies and publications. Especially

it ought to be observed in connection with what are called the

Christmas numbers of magazines. The editors of the magazines bring out

their Christmas numbers so long before the time that the reader is more

likely to be still lamenting for the turkey of last year than to have

seriously settled down to a solid anticipation of the turkey which is

to come. Christmas numbers of magazines ought to be tied up in brown

paper and kept for Christmas Day. On consideration, I should favour the

editors being tied up in brown paper. Whether the leg or arm of an

editor should ever be allowed to protrude I leave to individual choice.

Of course, all this secrecy about Christmas is merely sentimental and

ceremonial; if you do not like what is sentimental and ceremonial, do

not celebrate Christmas at all. You will not be punished if you don’t;

also, since we are no longer ruled by those sturdy Puritans who won for

us civil and religious liberty, you will not even be punished if you

do. But I cannot understand why any one should bother about a

ceremonial except ceremonially. If a thing only exists in order to be

graceful, do it gracefully or do not do it. If a thing only exists as

something professing to be solemn, do it solemnly or do not do it.

There is no sense in doing it slouchingly; nor is there even any

liberty. I can understand the man who takes off his hat to a lady

because it is the customary symbol. I can understand him, I say; in

fact, I know him quite intimately. I can also understand the man who

refuses to take off his hat to a lady, like the old Quakers, because he

thinks that a symbol is superstition. But what point would there be in

so performing an arbitrary form of respect that it was not a form of

respect? We respect the gentleman who takes off his hat to the lady; we

respect the fanatic who will not take off his hat to the lady. But what

should we think of the man who kept his hands in his pockets and asked

the lady to take his hat off for him because he felt tired?

This is combining insolence and superstition; and the modern world is

full of the strange combination. There is no mark of the immense

weak-mindedness of modernity that is more striking than this general

disposition to keep up old forms, but to keep them up informally and

feebly. Why take something which was only meant to be respectful and

preserve it disrespectfully? Why take something which you could easily

abolish as a superstition and carefully perpetuate it as a bore? There

have been many instances of this half-witted compromise. Was it not

true, for instance, that the other day some mad American was trying to

buy Glastonbury Abbey and transfer it stone by stone to America? Such

things are not only illogical, but idiotic. There is no particular

reason why a pushing American financier should pay respect to

Glastonbury Abbey at all. But if he is to pay respect to Glastonbury

Abbey, he must pay respect to Glastonbury. If it is a matter of

sentiment, why should he spoil the scene? If it is not a matter of

sentiment, why should he ever have visited the scene? To call this kind

of thing Vandalism is a very inadequate and unfair description. The

Vandals were very sensible people. They did not believe in a religion,

and so they insulted it; they did not see any use for certain

buildings, and so they knocked them down. But they were not such fools

as to encumber their march with the fragments of the edifice they had

themselves spoilt. They were at least superior to the modern American

mode of reasoning. They did not desecrate the stones because they held

them sacred.

Another instance of the same illogicality I observed the other day at

some kind of “At Home.” I saw what appeared to be a human being dressed

in a black evening-coat, black dress-waistcoat, and black

dress-trousers, but with a shirt-front made of Jaegar wool. What can be

the sense of this sort of thing? If a man thinks hygiene more important

than convention (a selfish and heathen view, for the beasts that perish

are more hygienic than man, and man is only above them because he is

more conventional), if, I say, a man thinks that hygiene is more

important than convention, what on earth is there to oblige him to wear

a shirt-front at all? But to take a costume of which the only

conceivable cause or advantage is that it is a sort of uniform, and

then not wear it in the uniform way—this is to be neither a Bohemian

nor a gentleman. It is a foolish affectation, I think, in an English

officer of the Life Guards never to wear his uniform if he can help it.

But it would be more foolish still if he showed himself about town in a

scarlet coat and a Jaeger breast-plate. It is the custom nowadays to

have Ritual Commissions and Ritual Reports to make rather unmeaning

compromises in the ceremonial of the Church of England. So perhaps we

shall have an ecclesiastical compromise by which all the Bishops shall

wear Jaeger copes and Jaeger mitres. Similarly the King might insist on

having a Jaeger crown. But I do not think he will, for he understands

the logic of the matter better than that. The modern monarch, like a

reasonable fellow, wears his crown as seldom as he can; but if he does

it at all, then the only point of a crown is that it is a crown. So let

me assure the unknown gentleman in the woollen vesture that the only

point of a white shirt-front is that it is a white shirt-front.

Stiffness may be its impossible defect; but it is certainly its only

possible merit.

Let us be consistent, therefore, about Christmas, and either keep

customs or not keep them. If you do not like sentiment and symbolism,

you do not like Christmas; go away and celebrate something else; I

should suggest the birthday of Mr. M’Cabe. No doubt you could have a

sort of scientific Christmas with a hygienic pudding and highly

instructive presents stuffed into a Jaeger stocking; go and have it

then. If you like those things, doubtless you are a good sort of

fellow, and your intentions are excellent. I have no doubt that you are

really interested in humanity; but I cannot think that humanity will

ever be much interested in you. Humanity is unhygienic from its very

nature and beginning. It is so much an exception in Nature that the

laws of Nature really mean nothing to it. Now Christmas is attacked

also on the humanitarian ground. Ouida called it a feast of slaughter

and gluttony. Mr. Shaw suggested that it was invented by poulterers.

That should be considered before it becomes more considerable.

I do not know whether an animal killed at Christmas has had a better or

a worse time than it would have had if there had been no Christmas or

no Christmas dinners. But I do know that the fighting and suffering

brotherhood to which I belong and owe everything, Mankind, would have a

much worse time if there were no such thing as Christmas or Christmas

dinners. Whether the turkey which Scrooge gave to Bob Cratchit had

experienced a lovelier or more melancholy career than that of less

attractive turkeys is a subject upon which I cannot even conjecture.

But that Scrooge was better for giving the turkey and Cratchit happier

for getting it I know as two facts, as I know that I have two feet.

What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul

of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business. Nothing shall

induce me to darken human homes, to destroy human festivities, to

insult human gifts and human benefactions for the sake of some

hypothetical knowledge which Nature curtained from our eyes. We men and

women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other

a terrible and tragic loyalty. If we catch sharks for food, let them be

killed most mercifully; let any one who likes love the sharks, and pet

the sharks, and tie ribbons round their necks and give them sugar and

teach them to dance. But if once a man suggests that a shark is to be

valued against a sailor, or that the poor shark might be permitted to

bite off a nigger’s leg occasionally; then I would court-martial the

man—he is a traitor to the ship.

And while I take this view of humanitarianism of the anti-Christmas

kind, it is cogent to say that I am a strong anti-vivisectionist. That

is, if there is any vivisection, I am against it. I am against the

cutting-up of conscious dogs for the same reason that I am in favour of

the eating of dead turkeys. The connection may not be obvious; but that

is because of the strangely unhealthy condition of modern thought. I am

against cruel vivisection as I am against a cruel anti-Christmas

asceticism, because they both involve the upsetting of existing

fellowships and the shocking of normal good feelings for the sake of

something that is intellectual, fanciful, and remote. It is not a human

thing, it is not a humane thing, when you see a poor woman staring

hungrily at a bloater, to think, not of the obvious feelings of the

woman, but of the unimaginable feelings of the deceased bloater.

Similarly, it is not human, it is not humane, when you look at a dog to

think about what theoretic discoveries you might possibly make if you

were allowed to bore a hole in his head. Both the humanitarians’ fancy

about the feelings concealed inside the bloater, and the

vivisectionists’ fancy about the knowledge concealed inside the dog,

are unhealthy fancies, because they upset a human sanity that is

certain for the sake of something that is of necessity uncertain. The

vivisectionist, for the sake of doing something that may or may not be

useful, does something that certainly is horrible. The anti-Christmas

humanitarian, in seeking to have a sympathy with a turkey which no man

can have with a turkey, loses the sympathy he has already with the

happiness of millions of the poor.

It is not uncommon nowadays for the insane extremes in reality to meet.

Thus I have always felt that brutal Imperialism and Tolstoian

non-resistance were not only not opposite, but were the same thing.

They are the same contemptible thought that conquest cannot be

resisted, looked at from the two standpoints of the conqueror and the

conquered. Thus again teetotalism and the really degraded gin-selling

and dram-drinking have exactly the same moral philosophy. They are both

based on the idea that fermented liquor is not a drink, but a drug. But

I am specially certain that the extreme of vegetarian humanity is, as I

have said, akin to the extreme of scientific cruelty—they both permit a

dubious speculation to interfere with their ordinary charity. The sound

moral rule in such matters as vivisection always presents itself to me

in this way. There is no ethical necessity more essential and vital

than this: that casuistical exceptions, though admitted, should be

admitted as exceptions. And it follows from this, I think, that, though

we may do a horrid thing in a horrid situation, we must be quite

certain that we actually and already are in that situation. Thus, all

sane moralists admit that one may sometimes tell a lie; but no sane

moralist would approve of telling a little boy to practise telling

lies, in case he might one day have to tell a justifiable one. Thus,

morality has often justified shooting a robber or a burglar. But it

would not justify going into the village Sunday school and shooting all

the little boys who looked as if they might grow up into burglars. The

need may arise; but the need must have arisen. It seems to me quite

clear that if you step across this limit you step off a precipice.

Now, whether torturing an animal is or is not an immoral thing, it is,

at least, a dreadful thing. It belongs to the order of exceptional and

even desperate acts. Except for some extraordinary reason I would not

grievously hurt an animal; with an extraordinary reason I would

grievously hurt him. If (for example) a mad elephant were pursuing me

and my family, and I could only shoot him so that he would die in

agony, he would have to die in agony. But the elephant would be there.

I would not do it to a hypothetical elephant. Now, it always seems to

me that this is the weak point in the ordinary vivisectionist argument,

“Suppose your wife were dying.” Vivisection is not done by a man whose

wife is dying. If it were it might be lifted to the level of the

moment, as would be lying or stealing bread, or any other ugly action.

But this ugly action is done in cold blood, at leisure, by men who are

not sure that it will be of any use to anybody—men of whom the most

that can be said is that they may conceivably make the beginnings of

some discovery which may perhaps save the life of some one else’s wife

in some remote future. That is too cold and distant to rob an act of

its immediate horror. That is like training the child to tell lies for

the sake of some great dilemma that may never come to him. You are

doing a cruel thing, but not with enough passion to make it a kindly

one.

So much for why I am an anti-vivisectionist; and I should like to say,

in conclusion, that all other anti-vivisectionists of my acquaintance

weaken their case infinitely by forming this attack on a scientific

speciality in which the human heart is commonly on their side, with

attacks upon universal human customs in which the human heart is not at

all on their side. I have heard humanitarians, for instance, speak of

vivisection and field sports as if they were the same kind of thing.

The difference seems to me simple and enormous. In sport a man goes

into a wood and mixes with the existing life of that wood; becomes a

destroyer only in the simple and healthy sense in which all the

creatures are destroyers; becomes for one moment to them what they are

to him—another animal. In vivisection a man takes a simpler creature

and subjects it to subtleties which no one but man could inflict on

him, and for which man is therefore gravely and terribly responsible.

Meanwhile, it remains true that I shall eat a great deal of turkey this

Christmas; and it is not in the least true (as the vegetarians say)

that I shall do it because I do not realise what I am doing, or because

I do what I know is wrong, or that I do it with shame or doubt or a

fundamental unrest of conscience. In one sense I know quite well what I

am doing; in another sense I know quite well that I know not what I do.

Scrooge and the Cratchits and I are, as I have said, all in one boat;

the turkey and I are, to say the most of it, ships that pass in the

night, and greet each other in passing. I wish him well; but it is

really practically impossible to discover whether I treat him well. I

can avoid, and I do avoid with horror, all special and artificial

tormenting of him, sticking pins in him for fun or sticking knives in

him for scientific investigation. But whether by feeding him slowly and

killing him quickly for the needs of my brethren, I have improved in

his own solemn eyes his own strange and separate destiny, whether I

have made him in the sight of God a slave or a martyr, or one whom the

gods love and who die young—that is far more removed from my

possibilities of knowledge than the most abstruse intricacies of

mysticism or theology. A turkey is more occult and awful than all the

angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an

angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has

never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live

turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the

enigma has rather increased than diminished.