|I think, on the whole, that I began the New Year with rather a good
display of moral fireworks, and as fireworks are meant to be seen
(and admired) I propose to let them off in public. When I awoke in
the morning I made a good resolution.... At this point, if I am
not mistaken, I observe a slight shudder on your part, madam. “How
Victorian!” I think I hear you remark. You compel me, madam, to digress.
It is, I know, a little unfashionable to make New Year's resolutions
nowadays. That sort of thing belonged to the Victorian world in which we
elderly people were born, and for which we are expected to apologise. No
one is quite in the fashion who does not heave half a brick at Victorian
England. Mr Wells has just heaved a book of 760 pages at it. This
querulous superiority to past ages seems a little childish. It is like
the scorn of youth for its elders.
I cannot get my indignation up to the boil about Victorian England. I
should find it as difficult to draw up an indictment of a century as
it is to draw up an indictment of a nation. I seem to remember that the
Nineteenth Century used to speak as disrespectfully of the Eighteenth as
we now speak of the Nineteenth, and I fancy that our grandchildren
will be as scornful of our world of to-day as we are of the world of
yesterday. The fact that we have learned to fly, and have discovered
poison gas, and have invented submarines and guns that will kill a
churchful of people seventy miles away does not justify us in regarding
the Nineteenth Century as a sort of absurd guy. There were very good
things as well as very bad things about our old Victorian England. It
did not go to the Ritz to dance in the New Year, it is true. The Ritz
did not exist, and the modern hotel life had not been invented. It used
to go instead to the watch-night service, and it was not above making
good resolutions, which for the most part, no doubt, it promptly
proceeded to break.
Why should we apologise for these habits? Why should we be ashamed of
watch-night services and good resolutions? I am all for gaiety. If I
had my way I would be as “merry” as Pepys, if in a different fashion.
“Merry” is a good word and implies a good thing. It may be admitted that
merriment is an inferior quality to cheerfulness. It is an emotion, a
mere spasm, whereas cheerfulness is a habit of mind, a whole philosophy
of life. But the one quality does not necessarily exclude the other,
and an occasional burst of sheer irresponsible merriment is good for
anybody--even for an Archbishop--especially for an Archbishop. The
trouble with an Archbishop is that his office tends to make him take
himself too seriously. He forgets that he is one of us, and that is bad
for him. He needs to give himself a violent reminder occasionally
that his virtue is not an alien thing; but is rooted in very ordinary
humanity. At least once a year he should indulge in a certain
liveliness, wear the cap and bells, dance a cake-walk or a horn-pipe,
not too publicly, but just publicly enough so that there should be
nothing furtive about it. If not done on the village green it might
at least be done in the episcopal kitchen, and chronicled in the
local newspapers. “Last evening His Grace the Archbishop attended the
servants' ball at the Palace, and danced a cake-walk with the chief
scullery-maid.”
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And I do not forget that, together with its watch-night services and its
good resolutions, Victorian England used to wish you “A Merry Christmas
and a Happy New Year.” Nowadays the formula is “A Happy Christmas and a
Prosperous New Year.” It is a priggish, sophisticated change--a sort of
shamefaced implication that there is something vulgar in being “merry.”
There isn't. For my part, I do not want a Happy Christmas: I want a
Merry Christmas. And I do not want a fat, prosperous New Year. I want a
Happy New Year, which is a much better and more spiritual thing.
If, therefore, I do not pour contempt on the Victorian habit of making
good resolutions, it is not because I share Malvolio's view that
virtue is a matter of avoiding cakes and ale. And if I refuse to deride
Victorian England because it went to watch-night services it is not
because I think there is anything wrong in a dance at the Ritz. It is
because, in the words of the old song, I think “It is good to be
merry _and_ wise.” I like a festival of foolishness and I like good
resolutions, too. Why shouldn't I? Lewis Carrol's gift for mathematics
was not less admirable because he made Humpty-Dumpty such a poor hand at
doing sums in his head.
From this digression, madam, permit me to return to my good resolution.
The thing that is the matter with you, I said, addressing myself on New
Year's morning as I applied the lather before the shaving glass, is
that you have a devil of impatience in you. I shouldn't call you an
intolerant fellow, but I rather fear that you are an impulsive fellow.
Perhaps to put the thing agreeably, I might say that your nervous
reaction to events is a little too immediate. I don't want to be
unpleasant, but I think you see what I mean. Do not suppose that I am
asking you to be a cold-blooded, calculating person. God forbid. But it
would do you no harm to wear a snaffle bar and a tightish rein--or, as
we used to say in our Victorian England, to “count ten.” I accepted
the criticism with approval. For though we do not like to hear of our
failings from other people, that does not mean that we are unconscious
of them. The more conscious we are of them, the less we like to hear of
them from others and the more we hear of them from ourselves. So I said
“Agreed. We will adopt 'Second thoughts' as our New Year policy and
begin the campaign at once.”
And then came my letters--nice letters and nasty letters and indifferent
letters, and among them one that, as Lancelot Gobbo would say, “raised
the waters.” No, it was not one of those foolish, venomous letters which
anonymous correspondents write to newspapers. They leave you cold. I
might almost say that they cheer you up. They give you the comforting
assurance that you cannot be very far wrong when persons capable of
writing these letters disapprove of you. But this letter was different.
As I read it I felt a flame of indignation surging up and demanding
expression. And I seized a pen, and expressed it, and having done so, I
said “Second thoughts,” and tore it up, and put the fragments aside, as
the memorial of the first skirmish in the campaign. I do not expect
to dwell on this giddy moral altitude long; perhaps in a week the old
imperious impulse will have resumed full dominion. But it is good to
have a periodical brush with one's habits, even if one knows one is
pretty sure to go down in the second round. It serves at least as a
reminder that we are conscious of our own imperfections as well as of
the imperfections of others. And that, I think, is the case for our old
Victorian habit of New Year's Day commandments.
I wrote another reply in the evening. It was quite _pianissimo_ and
nice.
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