Bottom the Weaver wore a smock-frock, if Hermia and Helena were
dressed as two modern English schoolgirls, we should not be departing
from Shakespeare, but rather returning to him. The cold, classical
draperies (of which he probably never dreamed, but with which we drape
Ægisthus or Hippolyta) are not only a nuisance, but a falsehood. They
misrepresent the whole meaning of the play. For the meaning of the
play is that the little things of life as well as the great things
stray on the borderland of the unknown. That as a man may fall among
devils for a morbid crime, or fall among angels for a small piece of
piety or pity, so also he may fall among fairies through an amiable
flirtation or a fanciful jealousy. The fact that a back door opens into
elfland is all the more reason for keeping the foreground familiar, and
even prosaic. For even the fairies are very neighbourly and firelight
fairies; therefore the human beings ought to be very human in order
to effect the fantastic contrast. And in Shakespeare they are very
human. Hermia the vixen and Helena the maypole are obviously only two
excitable and quite modern girls. Hippolyta has never been an Amazon;
she may perhaps have once been a Suffragette. Theseus is a gentleman, a
thing entirely different from a Greek oligarch. That golden good-nature
which employs culture itself to excuse the clumsiness of the uncultured
is a thing quite peculiar to those lazier Christian countries where
the Christian gentleman has been evolved:
For nothing in this world can be amiss
When simpleness and duty tender it.
Or, again, in that noble scrap of sceptical magnanimity which was
unaccountably cut out in the last performance:
The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse if
imagination amend them.
These are obviously the easy and reconciling comments of some kindly
but cultivated squire, who will not pretend to his guests that the
play is good, but who will not let the actors see that he thinks it
bad. But this is certainly not the way in which an Athenian Tory like
Aristophanes would have talked about a bad play.
But as the play is dressed and acted at present, the whole idea is
inverted. We do not seem to creep out of a human house into a natural
wood and there find the superhuman and supernatural. The mortals, in
their tunics and togas, seem more distant from us than the fairies
in their hoods and peaked caps. It is an anticlimax to meet the
English elves when we have already encountered the Greek gods. The
same mistake, oddly enough, was made in the only modern play worth
mentioning in the same street with _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, _Peter
Pan_. Sir James Barrie ought to have left out the fairy dog who puts
the children to bed. If children had such dogs as that they would never
wish to go to fairyland.
This fault or falsity in _Peter Pan_ is, of course, repeated in the
strange and ungainly incident of the father being chained up in the
dog’s kennel. Here, indeed, it is much worse: for the manlike dog was
pretty and touching: the doglike man was ignominious and repulsive. But
the fallacy is the same; it is the fallacy that weakens the otherwise
triumphant poetry and wit of Sir James Barrie’s play; and weakens
all our treatment of fairy plays at present. Fairyland is a place of
positive realities, plain laws, and a decisive story. The actors of _A
Midsummer Night’s Dream_ seemed to think that the play was meant to
be chaotic. The clowns thought they must be always clowning. But in
reality it is the solemnity--nay, the conscientiousness--of the yokels
that is akin to the mystery of the landscape and the tale.
The Yule Log and the Democrat
A blasting sneer has stricken me from time to time, to the effect
that I believe in the Fireside Woman. For that matter, in the present
season, I believe very much in the Fireside Man. But the very word
selected for this withering insinuation shows the shallowness of the
philosophy which prompts it. Surely there could not be a more stunted
stupidity than the suggestion that a thing must be mild and monotonous
because it has to do with fire. Why should the woman be tame because
she is nearest to the wildest thing in the world? It is much more
absurd to say it is prosaic to live by the fireside, than to say it
is prosaic to live upon the edge of a precipice. It is tenable that
some people would be prosaic anywhere; but it is not the fault of the
precipice. It would sound paradoxical even in a fairy-tale to say that
a princess was always yawning with ennui because she was introduced to
a golden griffin or a crimson dragon; and in the round of daily fact,
fire is about the nearest thing to a dragon that we know. Those who
cannot get a fairy-tale out of the fire will not get it out of anything
else. It may be affirmed, with fair certainty, that the people who talk
most scornfully about the Fireside Woman do not get it at all, and do
not wish her to get it at all. Herein lies all the absurdity of the
alternatives to domesticity paraded by our progressive friends.
I am not speaking, of course, of work that must be done, especially
in abnormal times; I am speaking of the psychology of tedium and of
the romance of life. It is apparently demanded that the fire should be
concealed in the entrails of an engine; that it should work through a
labyrinth of bolts and bars; that it should litter around it numberless
dreary offices, and leave behind it a train of indirect and mechanical
servants, each further than the last from the least faint vibration
of the original energy. Then, if in some outlying shed a woman has to
stand counting tickets, or tying up parcels from morning till night,
that woman is supposed to be free. She has Burst the Fetters. She is
Living Her Own Life. But there is supposed to be nothing but dullness
for the woman who is face to face with that elemental fury which drives
and fashions the whole. There is nothing poetical (as compared with the
tickets and labels) in the woman who repeats the primordial adventure
of Prometheus. And there is nothing artistic (as compared with the
shed) about the terrestrial light which turns the greyest room to gold;
which reclothes the woman’s raggedest children round the hearth with
the colours of a company of Fra Angelico, so that the mere reflections
of the flame can conquer the solid hues of drab and dust, and all her
household is clothed with scarlet.
The fire is in this, perhaps, the finest and simplest symbol of a
truth persistently misunderstood. These elementary things, the land,
the roof, the family, may seem mean and miserable; and in a cynical
civilization very probably will seem mean and miserable. But the
things themselves are not mean or miserable; and any reformer who
says they are is not only taking hold of the stick by the wrong end,
he is cutting off the branch by which he is hanging. The stamp of
social failure is not that men have these simple things, but, rather,
that they do not have them; or even when they do, do not know that
they have them. If the Fireside Woman is dull, it is because she
never looks at the fire. It is because she is not, in the wise and
philosophical sense, enough of a fire-worshipper. And she lacks this
faculty because the whole drift of the modern world discourages that
creative concentration, that intensive cultivation of the fancy, which
filled the lives of our fathers with crowds of little household gods,
and which created all the lesser and lighter sanctities that surround
Christmas.
Amid the wild and wandering adventures of the fireside are some which
made possible the very scientific progress which is prone to carp at
it. The engine, of which I spoke recently, was (we have all been told)
suggested because James Watt looked at the kettle. I will not conceal a
suspicion that our society might have evolved better if he had looked
at the fire. I mean, of course, if he had not only looked at it, but
seen it, which is not always the same thing. If he had seen what there
is to be seen, he might possibly have done many things. He might, for
instance, have revived the Trade Guilds of Glasgow, which failed to
grasp his discovery; he might have taught them to take hold of the
new energy and turn it towards democracy, instead of going off and
handing over his invention to the Capitalists. For the defect which
betrayed all Watt’s school and generation, full as it was of a virile
and thrifty Radicalism, was precisely that it did not draw from these
primal sources of piety and poetry. It was not sufficiently religious,
and, therefore, not sufficiently domestic; and the rich rode it down
at last. For the hearth is the only possible altar of insurrection,
as even the pagans knew; from that fire alone are taken the flaming
brands which can really lay waste the wicked cities. The truth can
be told well enough by saying that James Watt would not really have
comprehended the word Christmas; and would have been much annoyed
if told to consider the Yule log instead of the kettle. He was the
Fireside Man; but he was not domestic enough to be dangerous. For it
is the domestic man and not the wild man, just as it is the domestic
dog and not the wild dog, who really fights with thieves and dies at
his post. There has not been a genuine popular war in England since the
war of Wat Tyler, and the origin of that, it will be remembered, was
strictly domestic. It was so domestic that it would not happen at all
in the modern world: Wat Tyler would simply be automatically shot into
prison for resisting a rational and necessary scientific inspection. It
was the growth of an unhuman and unhomelike philosophy that made all
the difference between the Wat of the fourteenth century and the Watt
of the nineteenth. And the spirit of real democracy will not re-emerge
until it rises from the fireside and comes forth in the red reality of
fire; the giant of Christmas brandishing the Yule log for a club.
But there is another feature in the flaming hearth which illustrates
its natural kinship with Christmas. It is a _place_, as Christmas is a
time; and these vivid limitations are vital to man as a mystic. It is
not merely that the idea of everything being in its right place makes
all the difference between a fire in a house and a house on fire. It
is that the fireplace is a frame; and it is the frame that creates the
picture. By being tied to a special spot the sacred dragon becomes
more powerful and, in the high imaginative sense, more free. This is
that link between hearths and altars which the heathen felt, and of
which I have already spoken. If the household be the heart of politics,
the fire is the heart of the household; and the vital organ is spread
equally everywhere only in the very low organisms. The universe of the
mere universalist is one of the very low organisms. The theosophic
generalizations about Nirvana and the All may be compared to the
American fashion of abolishing the fireplace altogether and heating
the whole house artificially to the same temperature--a depressing
habit. I can imagine that a system of hot-water pipes might satisfy a
Pantheist; the notion suggests a rather dreary parody of Pan and his
pipes. I can imagine that a Buddhist might want his whole house warmed
like the palm-house at Kew; but, I think, a limited and localized fire
will always be as much associated with Christians as it has always been
associated with Christmas.
Shakespeare, himself like a large and liberal fire round which winter
tales are told, has hit the mark in this matter exactly, as it concerns
the poet or maker of fictive things. Shakespeare does not say that the
poet loses himself in the All, that he dissipates concrete things into
a cloudy twilight, that he turns this home of ours into a vista or any
vaguer thing. He says the exact opposite. It is “a local habitation
and a name” that the poet gives to what would otherwise be nothing.
This seeming narrowness which men complain of in the altar and the
hearth is as broad as Shakespeare and the whole human imagination,
and should command the respect even of those who think the cult of
Christmas really is all imagination. Even those who can only regard
the great story of Bethlehem as a fairy-tale told by the fire will
yet agree that such narrowness is the first artistic necessity even
of a good fairy-tale. But there are others who think, at least, that
their thought strikes deeper and pierces to a more subtle truth in the
mind. There are others for whom all our fairy-tales, and even all our
appetite for fairy-tales, draw their fire from one central fairy-tale,
as all forgeries draw their significance from a signature. They believe
that this fable is a fact, and that the other fables cannot really
be appreciated even as fables until we know it is a fact. For them,
personality is a step beyond universality; one might almost call it an
escape from universality. And what they follow is as much something
more than Pantheism as a flame is something more than a temperature.
For them, God is not bound down and limited by being merely everything;
He is also at liberty to be something. And for them Christmas will
always deal with a reality exactly as Shakespeare’s poetry deals with
an unreality; it will give, not to airy nothing, but to the enormous
and overwhelming everything, a local habitation and a Name.
More Thoughts on Christmas
Most sensible people say that adults cannot be expected to appreciate
Christmas as much as children appreciate it. At least, Mr. G. S. Street
said so, who is the most sensible man now writing in the English
language. But I am not sure that even sensible people are always right;
and this has been my principal reason for deciding to be silly--a
decision that is now irrevocable. It may be only because I am silly,
but I rather think that, relatively to the rest of the year, I enjoy
Christmas more than I did when I was a child. Of course, children do
enjoy Christmas--they enjoy almost everything except actually being
smacked: from which truth the custom no doubt arose. But the real point
is not whether a schoolboy would enjoy Christmas. The point is that
he would also enjoy No Christmas. Now I say most emphatically that I
should denounce, detest, abominate, and abjure the insolent institution
of No Christmas. The child is glad to find a new ball, let us say,
which Uncle William (dressed as St. Nicholas in everything except the
halo) has put in his stocking. But if he had no new ball, he would make
a hundred new balls out of the snow. And for them he would be indebted
not to Christmas, but to winter. I suppose snowballing is being put
down by the police, like every other Christian custom. No more will
a prosperous and serious City man have a large silver star splashed
suddenly on his waistcoat, veritably investing him with the Order of
the Star of Bethlehem. For it is the star of innocence and novelty,
and should remind him that a child can still be born. But indeed, in
one sense, we may truly say the children enjoy no seasons, because
they enjoy all. I myself am of the physical type that greatly prefers
cold weather to hot; and I could more easily believe that Eden was
at the North Pole than anywhere in the Tropics. It is hard to define
the effect of weather: I can only say that all the rest of the year
I am untidy, but in summer I feel untidy. Yet although (according to
the modern biologists) my hereditary human body must have been of the
same essential type in my boyhood as in my present decrepitude, I
can distinctly remember hailing the idea of freedom and even energy
on days that were quite horribly hot. It was the excellent custom at
my school to give the boys a half-holiday when it seemed too hot for
working. And I can well remember the gigantic joy with which I left off
reading Virgil and began to run round and round a field. My tastes in
this matter have changed. Nay, they have been reversed. If I now found
myself (by some process I cannot easily conjecture) on a burning summer
day running round and round a field, I hope I shall not appear pedantic
if I say I should prefer to be reading Virgil.
And thus it is really possible, from one point of view, for elderly
gentlemen to frolic at Christmas more than children can. They may
really come to find Christmas more entertaining, as they have come
to find Virgil more entertaining. And, in spite of all the talk about
the coldness of classicism, the poet who wrote about the man who in
his own country home fears neither King nor crowd was not by any
means incapable of understanding Mr. Wardle. And it is exactly those
sentiments, and similar ones, that the adult does appreciate better
than the child. The adult, for instance, appreciates domesticity
better than the child. And one of the pillars and first principles of
domesticity, as Mr. Belloc has rightly pointed out, is the institution
of private property. The Christmas pudding represents the mature
mystery of property; and the proof of it is in the eating.
I have always held that Peter Pan was wrong. He was a charming boy,
and sincere in his adventurousness; but though he was brave like a
boy, he was also a coward--like a boy. He admitted it would be a great
adventure to die; but it did not seem to occur to him that it would
be a great adventure to live. If he had consented to march with the
fraternity of his fellow-creatures, he would have found that there
were solid experiences and important revelations even in growing up.
They are realities which could not possibly have been made real to him
without wrecking the real good in his own juvenile point of view. But
that is exactly why he ought to have done as he was told. That is the
only argument for parental authority. In dealing with childhood, we
have a right to command it--because we should kill the childhood if we
convinced it.
Now the mistake of Peter Pan is the mistake of the new theory of life.
I might call it Peter Pantheism. It is the notion that there is _no_
advantage in striking root. Yet, if you talk intelligently to the
nearest tree, the tree will tell you that you are an unobservant ass.
There is an advantage in root; and the name of it is fruit. It is not
true that the nomad is even freer than the peasant. The Bedouin may
rush past on his camel, leaving a whirl of dust; but dust is not free
because it flies. Neither is the nomad free because he flies. You
cannot grow cabbages on a camel, any more than in a condemned cell.
Moreover, I believe camels commonly walk in a comparatively leisurely
manner. Anyhow, most merely nomadic creatures do, for it is a great
nuisance to “carry one’s house with one.” Gipsies do it; so do snails;
but neither of them travel very fast. I inhabit one of the smallest
houses that can be conceived by the cultivated classes; but I frankly
confess I should be sorry to carry it with me whenever I went out for a
walk. It is true that some motorists almost live in their motor-cars.
But it gratifies me to state that these motorists generally die in
their motor-cars too. They perish, I am pleased to say, in a startling
and horrible manner, as a judgment on them for trying to outstrip
creatures higher than themselves--such as the gipsy and the snail. But,
broadly speaking, a house is a thing that stands still. And a thing
that stands still is a thing that strikes root. One of the things that
strike root is Christmas: and another is middle-age. The other great
pillar of private life besides property is marriage; but I will not
deal with it here. Suppose a man has neither wife nor child: suppose he
has only a good servant, or only a small garden, or only a small house,
or only a small dog. He will still find he has struck unintentional
root. He realizes there is something in his own garden that was not
even in the Garden of Eden; and therefore is not (I kiss my hand to
the Socialists) in Kew Gardens or in Kensington Gardens. He realizes,
what Peter Pan could not be made to realize, that a plain human house
of one’s own, standing in one’s own backyard, is really quite as
romantic as a rather cloudy house at the top of a tree or a highly
conspiratorial house underneath the roots of it. But this is because
he has explored his own house, which Peter Pan and such discontented
children seldom do. All the same, the children ought to think of the
Never-Never Land--the world that is outside. But we ought to think of
the Ever-Ever Land--the world which is inside, and the world which will
last. And that is why, wicked as we are, we know most about Christmas.
Dickens Again
I am sorry that the comic costume festival which was organized for
Christmas by one of the chief Dickensian societies has unavoidably
fallen through. It is not for me to reproach those traitors who found
it impossible to turn up: for I was one of those traitors myself.
Whatever character it was that I was expected to appear in--Jingle, I
suppose, or possibly Uriah Heep--was, under a final press of business,
refused by me. These Dickensian enthusiasts were going to have a
Christmas party at Rochester, where they would brew punch and drink
punch, and drive coaches and fall off coaches, and do all the proper
Pickwickian things. How many of them were ready to make a hole in the
ice, to be wheeled about in a wheelbarrow, or to wait all night outside
a ladies’ school, the official documents have not informed me. But
I would gladly take a moderate part. I could not brew punch for the
Pickwick Club; but I could drink it. I could not drive the coach for
the Pickwick Club--or, indeed, for any club except the Suicide Club;
but I could fall off the coach amid repeated applause and enthusiastic
encores. I should be only too proud if it could be said of me, as of
Sam’s hyperbolical old gentleman who was tipped into the hyperbolical
canal, that “'is 'at was found, but I can’t be certain 'is 'ead was in
it.” It seems to me like a euthanasia: more beautiful than the passing
of Arthur.
But though the failure of this particular festivity was merely
accidental (like my own unfortunate fall off the coach), it is not
without its parallel in the present position of Dickensians and
Christmas. For the truth is that we simply cannot recreate the Pickwick
Club--unless we have a moral basis as sturdy as that of Dickens, and
even a religious basis as sturdy as that of Christmas. Men at such a
time turn their backs to the solemn thing they are celebrating, as
the horses turn their backs to the coach. But they are pulling the
coach. And the best of it is this: that so long as the Christmas feast
had some kind of assumed and admitted meaning, it was praised, and
praised sympathetically, by the great men whom we should call most
unsympathetic with it. That Shakespeare and Dickens and Walter Scott
should write of it seems quite natural. They were people who would be
as welcome at Christmas as Santa Claus. But I do not think many people
have ever wished they could ask Milton to eat the Christmas pudding.
Nevertheless, it is quite certain that his Christmas ode is not only
one of the richest but one of the most human of his masterpieces.
I do not think that anyone specially wanting a rollicking article
on Christmas would desire, by mere instinct, the literary style of
Addison. Yet it is quite certain that the somewhat difficult task of
really liking Addison is rendered easier by his account of the Coverley
Christmas than by anything else he wrote. I even go so far as to
doubt whether one of the little Cratchits (who stuffed their spoons in
their mouths lest they should scream for goose) would have removed the
spoon to say, “Oh, that Tennyson were here!” Yet certainly Tennyson’s
spirits do seem to revive in a more or less real way at the ringing
of the Christmas bells in the most melancholy part of _In Memoriam_.
These great men were not trying to be merry: some of them, indeed, were
trying to be miserable. But the day itself was too strong for them; the
time was more than their temperaments; the tradition was alive. The
festival was roaring in the streets, so that prigs and even prophets
(who are sometimes worse still) were honestly carried off their feet.