DICKENS AND CHRISTMAS
In the July of 1844 Dickens went on an Italian tour, which he
afterwards summarized in the book called “Pictures from Italy.” They
are, of course, very vivacious, but there is no great need to insist
on them, considered as Italian sketches; there is no need whatever to
worry about them as a phase of the mind of Dickens when he travelled
out of England. He never travelled out of England. There is no trace
in all these amusing pages that he really felt the great foreign
things which lie in wait for us in the south of Europe, the Latin
civilization, the Catholic Church, the art of the centre, the endless
end of Rome. His travels are not travels in Italy, but travels in
Dickensland. He sees amusing things; he describes them amusingly. But
he would have seen things just as good in a street in Pimlico, and
described them just as well. Few things were racier even in his raciest
novel, than his description of the marionette play of the death of
Napoleon. Nothing could be more perfect than the figure of the doctor,
which had something wrong with its wires, and hence “hovered about
the couch and delivered medical opinions in the air.” Nothing could
be better as a catching of the spirit of all popular drama than the
colossal depravity of the wooden image of “Sir Udson Low.” But there
is nothing Italian about it. Dickens would have made just as good fun,
indeed just the same fun, of a Punch and Judy show performing in Long
Acre or Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Dickens uttered just and sincere satire on Plornish and Podsnap;
but Dickens was as English as any Podsnap or any Plornish. He had a
hearty humanitarianism, and a hearty sense of justice to all nations,
so far as he understood it. But that very kind of humanitarianism,
that very kind of justice, were English. He was the Englishman of the
type that made Free Trade, the most English of all things, since it
was at once calculating and optimistic. He respected catacombs and
gondolas, but that very respect was English. He wondered at brigands
and volcanoes, but that very wonder was English. The very conception
that Italy consists of these things was an English conception. The root
things he never understood, the Roman legend, the ancient life of the
Mediterranean, the world-old civilization of the vine and olive, the
mystery of the immutable Church. He never understood these things,
and I am glad he never understood them: he could only have understood
them by ceasing to be the inspired cockney that he was, the rousing
English Radical of the great Radical age in England. That spirit of
his was one of the things that we have had which were truly national.
All other forces we have borrowed, especially those which flatter us
most. Imperialism is foreign, socialism is foreign, militarism is
foreign, education is foreign, strictly even Liberalism is foreign. But
Radicalism was our own; as English as the hedge-rows.
Dickens abroad, then, was for all serious purposes simply the
Englishman abroad; the Englishman abroad is for all serious purposes,
simply the Englishman at home. Of this generalization one modification
must be made. Dickens did feel a direct pleasure in the bright and
busy exterior of the French life, the clean caps, the coloured
uniforms, the skies like blue enamel, the little green trees, the
little white houses, the scene picked out in primary colours, like
a child’s picture-book. This he felt, and this he put (by a stroke
of genius) into the mouth of Mrs. Lirriper, a London landlady on a
holiday: for Dickens always knew that it is the simple and not the
subtle who feel differences; and he saw all his colours through the
clear eyes of the poor. And in thus taking to his heart the streets
as it were, rather than the spires of the Continent, he showed beyond
question that combination of which we have spoken--of common sense
with uncommon sensibility. For it is for the sake of the streets and
shops and the coats and hats, that we should go abroad; they are far
better worth going to see than the castles and cathedrals and Roman
camps. For the wonders of the world are the same all over the world,
at least all over the European world. Castles that throw valleys in
shadow, minsters that strike the sky, roads so old that they seem to
have been made by the gods, these are in all Christian countries. The
marvels of man are at all our doors. A labourer hoeing turnips in
Sussex has no need to be ignorant that the bones of Europe are the
Roman roads. A clerk living in Lambeth has no need not to know that
there was a Christian art exuberant in the thirteenth century; for only
across the river he can see the live stones of the Middle Ages surging
together towards the stars. But exactly the things that do strike the
traveller as extraordinary are the ordinary things, the food, the
clothes, the vehicles; the strange things are cosmopolitan, the common
things are national and peculiar. Cologne spire is lifted on the same
arches as Canterbury; but the thing you cannot see out of Germany is a
German beer-garden. There is no need for a Frenchman to go to look at
Westminster Abbey as a piece of English architecture; it is not, in the
special sense, a piece of English architecture. But a hansom cab is a
piece of English architecture; a thing produced by the peculiar poetry
of our cities, a symbol of a certain reckless comfort which is really
English; a thing to draw a pilgrimage of the nations. The imaginative
Englishman will be found all day in a _café_; the imaginative Frenchman
in a hansom cab.
This sort of pleasure Dickens took in the Latin life; but no deeper
kind. And the strongest of all possible indications of his fundamental
detachment from it can be found in one fact. A great part of the time
that he was in Italy he was engaged in writing “The Chimes,” and such
Christmas tales, tales of Christmas in the English towns, tales full of
fog and snow and hail and happiness.
Dickens could find in any street divergences between man and man deeper
than the divisions of nations. His fault was to exaggerate differences.
He could find types almost as distinct as separate tribes of animals in
his own brain and his own city, those two homes of a magnificent chaos.
The only two southerners introduced prominently into his novels,
the two in “Little Dorrit,” are popular English foreigners, I had
almost said stage foreigners. Villainy is, in English eyes, a southern
trait, therefore one of the foreigners is villainous. Vivacity is, in
English eyes, another southern trait, therefore the other foreigner is
vivacious. But we can see from the outlines of both that Dickens did
not have to go to Italy to get them. While poor panting millionaires,
poor tired earls and poor God-forsaken American men of culture are
plodding about Italy for literary inspiration, Charles Dickens made
up the whole of that Italian romance (as I strongly suspect) from the
faces of two London organ-grinders.
In the sunlight of the southern world, he was still dreaming of the
firelight of the north. Among the palaces and the white campanile,
he shut his eyes to see Marylebone and dreamed a lovely dream of
chimney-pots. He was not happy he said, without streets. The very
foulness and smoke of London were lovable in his eyes and fill his
Christmas tales with a vivid vapour. In the clear skies of the south he
saw afar off the fog of London like a sunset cloud and longed to be in
the core of it.
This Christmas tone of Dickens, in connection with his travels is a
matter that can only be expressed by a parallel with one of his other
works. Much the same that has here been said of his “Pictures from
Italy” may be said about his “Child’s History of England;” with the
difference that while the “Pictures from Italy,” do in a sense add to
his fame, the “History of England” in almost every sense detracts from
it. But the nature of the limitation is the same. What Dickens was
travelling in distant lands, that he was travelling in distant ages;
a sturdy, sentimental English Radical with a large heart and a narrow
mind. He could not help falling into that besetting sin or weakness
of the modern progressive, the habit of regarding the contemporary
questions as the eternal questions and the latest word as the last.
He could not get out of his head the instinctive conception that the
real problem before St. Dunstan was whether he should support Lord John
Russell or Sir Robert Peel. He could not help seeing the remotest peaks
lit up by the raging bonfire of his own passionate political crisis. He
lived for the instant and its urgency; that is, he did what St. Dunstan
did. He lived in an eternal present like all simple men. It is indeed
“A Child’s History of England;” but the child is the writer and not the
reader.
But Dickens in his cheapest cockney utilitarianism, was not only
English, but unconsciously historic. Upon him descended the real
tradition of “Merry England,” and not upon the pallid mediævalists who
thought they were reviving it. The Pre-Raphaelites, the Gothicists,
the admirers of the Middle Ages, had in their subtlety and sadness the
spirit of the present day. Dickens had in his buffoonery and bravery
the spirit of the Middle Ages. He was much more mediæval in his attacks
on mediævalism than they were in their defences of it. It was he who
had the things of Chaucer, the love of large jokes and long stories and
brown ale and all the white roads of England. Like Chaucer he loved
story within story, every man telling a tale. Like Chaucer he saw
something openly comic in men’s motley trades. Sam Weller would have
been a great gain to the Canterbury Pilgrimage and told an admirable
story. Rossetti’s Damozel would have been a great bore, regarded as
too fast by the Prioress and too priggish by the Wife of Bath. It is
said that in the somewhat sickly Victorian revival of feudalism which
was called “Young England,” a nobleman hired a hermit to live in his
grounds. It is also said that the hermit struck for more beer. Whether
this anecdote be true or not, it is always told as showing a collapse
from the ideal of the Middle Ages to the level of the present day. But
in the mere act of striking for beer the holy man was very much more
“mediæval” than the fool who employed him.
It would be hard to find a better example of this than Dickens’s great
defence of Christmas. In fighting for Christmas he was fighting for
the old European festival, Pagan and Christian, for that trinity of
eating, drinking and praying which to moderns appears irreverent, for
the holy day which is really a holiday. He had himself the most babyish
ideas about the past. He supposed the Middle Ages to have consisted
of tournaments and torture-chambers, he supposed himself to be a
brisk man of the manufacturing age, almost a Utilitarian. But for all
that he defended the mediæval feast which was going out against the
Utilitarianism which was coming in. He could only see all that was bad
in mediævalism. But he fought for all that was good in it. And he was
all the more really in sympathy with the old strength and simplicity
because he only knew that it was good and did not know that it was old.
He cared as little for mediævalism as the mediævals did. He cared as
much as they did for lustiness and virile laughter and sad tales of
good lovers and pleasant tales of good livers. He would have been very
much bored by Ruskin and Walter Pater if they had explained to him the
strange sunset tints of Lippi and Botticelli. He had no pleasure in
looking on the dying Middle Ages. But he looked on the living Middle
Ages, on a piece of the old uproarious superstition still unbroken; and
he hailed it like a new religion. The Dickens character ate pudding to
an extent at which the modern mediævalists turned pale. They would do
every kind of honour to an old observance, except observing it. They
would pay to a Church feast every sort of compliment except feasting.
And (as I have said) as were his unconscious relations to our European
past, so were his unconscious relations to England. He imagined
himself to be, if anything, a sort of cosmopolitan; at any rate to be
a champion of the charms and merits of continental lands against the
arrogance of our island. But he was in truth very much more a champion
of the old and genuine England against that comparatively cosmopolitan
England which we have all lived to see. And here again the supreme
example is Christmas. Christmas is, as I have said, one of numberless
old European feasts of which the essence is the combination of religion
with merry-making. But among those feasts it is also especially and
distinctively English in the style of its merry-making and even in the
style of its religion. For the character of Christmas (as distinct,
for instance, from the continental Easter) lies chiefly in two things:
first on the terrestrial side the note of comfort rather than the note
of brightness; and on the spiritual side, Christian charity rather
than Christian ecstasy. And comfort is, like charity, a very English
instinct. Nay, comfort is, like charity, an English merit; though our
comfort may and does degenerate into materialism, just as our charity
may (and does) degenerate into laxity and make-believe.
This ideal of comfort belongs peculiarly to England; it belongs
peculiarly to Christmas; above all it belongs pre-eminently to Dickens.
And it is astonishingly misunderstood. It is misunderstood by the
continent of Europe, it is, if possible, still more misunderstood by
the English of to-day. On the Continent the restaurateurs provide us
with raw beef, as if we were savages; yet old English cooking takes as
much care as French. And in England has arisen a parvenu patriotism
which represents the English as everything but English; as a blend of
Chinese stoicism, Latin militarism, Prussian rigidity, and American
bad taste. And so England, whose fault is gentility and whose virtue
is geniality, England with her tradition of the great gay gentlemen
of Elizabeth, is represented to the four quarters of the world (as in
Mr. Kipling’s religious poems) in the enormous image of a solemn cad.
And because it is very difficult to be comfortable in the suburbs,
the suburbs have voted that comfort is a gross and material thing.
Comfort, especially this vision of Christmas comfort, is the reverse of
a gross or material thing. It is far more poetical, properly speaking,
than the Garden of Epicurus. It is far more artistic than the Palace
of Art. It is more artistic because it is based upon a contrast, a
contrast between the fire and wine within the house and the winter and
the roaring rains without. It is far more poetical, because there is
in it a note of defence, almost of war; a note of being besieged by
the snow and hail; of making merry in the belly of a fort. The man who
said that an Englishman’s house is his castle said much more than he
meant. The Englishman thinks of his house as something fortified, and
provisioned, and his very surliness is at root romantic. And this sense
would naturally be strongest in wild winter nights, when the lowered
portcullis and the lifted drawbridge do not merely bar people out, but
bar people in. The Englishman’s house is most sacred, not merely when
the King cannot enter it, but when the Englishman cannot get out of it.
This comfort, then, is an abstract thing, a principle. The English
poor shut all their doors and windows till their rooms reek like the
Black Hole. They are suffering for an idea. Mere animal hedonism would
not dream, as we English do, of winter feasts and little rooms, but of
eating fruit in large and idle gardens. Mere sensuality would desire to
please all its senses. But to our good dreams this dark and dangerous
background is essential; the highest pleasure we can imagine is a
defiant pleasure, a happiness that stands at bay. The word “comfort” is
not indeed the right word, it conveys too much of the slander of mere
sense; the true word is “cosiness,” a word not translatable. One, at
least, of the essentials of it is smallness, smallness in preference
to largeness, smallness for smallness’s sake. The merry-maker wants a
pleasant parlour, he would not give twopence for a pleasant continent.
In our difficult time, of course, a fight for mere space has become
necessary. Instead of being greedy for ale and Christmas pudding we
are greedy for mere air, an equally sensual appetite. In abnormal
conditions this is wise; and the illimitable veldt is an excellent
thing for nervous people. But our fathers were large and healthy
enough to make a thing humane, and not worry about whether it was
hygienic. They were big enough to get into small rooms.
Of this quite deliberate and artistic quality in the close Christmas
chamber, the standing evidence is Dickens in Italy. He created these
dim firelit tales like little dim red jewels, as an artistic necessity,
in the centre of an endless summer. Amid the white cities of Tuscany
he hungered for something romantic, and wrote about a rainy Christmas.
Amid the pictures of the Uffizi he starved for something beautiful, and
fed his memory on London fog. His feeling for the fog was especially
poignant and typical. In the first of his Christmas tales, the popular
“Christmas Carol,” he suggested the very soul of it in one simile,
when he spoke of the dense air, suggesting that “Nature was brewing
on a large scale.” This sense of the thick atmosphere as something
to eat or drink, something not only solid but satisfactory, may seem
almost insane, but it is no exaggeration of Dickens’s emotion. We speak
of a fog “that you could cut with a knife.” Dickens would have liked
the phrase as suggesting that the fog was a colossal cake. He liked
even more his own phrase of the Titanic brewery, and no dream would
have given him a wilder pleasure than to grope his way to some such
tremendous vats and drink the ale of the giants.
There is a current prejudice against fogs, and Dickens, perhaps, is
their only poet. Considered hygienically no doubt this may be more or
less excusable. But, considered poetically, fog is not undeserving,
it has a real significance. We have in our great cities abolished the
clean and sane darkness of the country. We have outlawed night and sent
her wandering in wild meadows; we have lit eternal watch-fires against
her return. We have made a new cosmos, and as a consequence our own sun
and stars. And, as a consequence also, and most justly, we have made
our own darkness. Just as every lamp is a warm human moon, so every fog
is a rich human nightfall. If it were not for this mystic accident we
should never see darkness, and he who has never seen darkness has never
seen the sun. Fog for us is the chief form of that outward pressure
which compresses mere luxury into real comfort. It makes the world
small, in the same spirit as in that common and happy cry that the
world is small, meaning that it is full of friends. The first man that
emerges out of the mist with a light, is for us Prometheus, a saviour
bringing fire to men. He is that greatest and best of all men, greater
than the heroes, better than the saints, Man Friday. Every rumble of a
cart, every cry in the distance, marks the heart of humanity beating
undaunted in the darkness. It is wholly human; man toiling in his own
cloud. If real darkness is like the embrace of God, this is the dark
embrace of man.
In such a sacred cloud the tale called “The Christmas Carol” begins,
the first and most typical of all his Christmas tales. It is not
irrelevant to dilate upon the geniality of this darkness, because it is
characteristic of Dickens that his atmospheres are more important than
his stories. The Christmas atmosphere is more important than Scrooge,
or the ghosts either; in a sense, the background is more important
than the figures. The same thing may be noticed in his dealings with
that other atmosphere (besides that of good humour) which he excelled
in creating, an atmosphere of mystery and wrong, such as that which
gathers round Mrs. Clennam, rigid in her chair, or old Miss Havisham,
ironically robed as a bride. Here again the atmosphere altogether
eclipses the story, which often seems disappointing in comparison. The
secrecy is sensational; the secret is tame. The surface of the thing
seems more awful than the core of it. It seems almost as if these
grisly figures, Mrs. Chadband and Mrs. Clennam, Miss Havisham and Miss
Flite, Nemo and Sally Brass, were keeping something back from the
author as well as from the reader. When the book closes we do not know
their real secret. They soothed the optimistic Dickens with something
less terrible than the truth. The dark house of Arthur Clennam’s
childhood really depresses us; it is a true glimpse into that quiet
street in hell, where live the children of that unique dispensation
which theologians call Calvinism and Christians devil-worship. But
some stranger crime had really been done there, some more monstrous
blasphemy or human sacrifice than the suppression of some silly
document advantageous to the silly Dorrits. Something worse than a
common tale of jilting lay behind the masquerade and madness of the
awful Miss Havisham. Something worse was whispered by the misshapen
Quilp to the sinister Sally in that wild, wet summer-house by the
river, something worse than the clumsy plot against the clumsy Kit.
These dark pictures seem almost as if they were literally visions;
things, that is, that Dickens saw but did not understand.
And as with his backgrounds of gloom, so with his backgrounds of
good-will, in such tales as “The Christmas Carol.” The tone of the tale
is kept throughout in a happy monotony, though the tale is everywhere
irregular and in some places weak. It has the same kind of artistic
unity that belongs to a dream. A dream may begin with the end of the
world and end with a tea-party; but either the end of the world will
seem as trivial as a tea-party or that tea-party will be as terrible
as the day of doom. The incidents change wildly; the story scarcely
changes at all. “The Christmas Carol” is a kind of philanthropic dream,
an enjoyable nightmare, in which the scenes shift bewilderingly and
seem as miscellaneous as the pictures in a scrap-book, but in which
there is one constant state of the soul, a state of rowdy benediction
and a hunger for human faces. The beginning is about a winter day and a
miser; yet the beginning is in no way bleak. The author starts with a
kind of happy howl; he bangs on our door like a drunken carol singer;
his style is festive and popular; he compares the snow and hail to
philanthropists who “come down handsomely”; he compares the fog to
unlimited beer. Scrooge is not really inhuman at the beginning any
more than he is at the end. There is a heartiness in his inhospitable
sentiments that is akin to humour and therefore to humanity; he is only
a crusty old bachelor, and had (I strongly suspect) given away turkeys
secretly all his life. The beauty and the real blessing of the story
do not lie in the mechanical plot of it, the repentance of Scrooge,
probable or improbable; they lie in the great furnace of real happiness
that glows through Scrooge and everything round him; that great
furnace, the heart of Dickens. Whether the Christmas visions would or
would not convert Scrooge, they convert us. Whether or no the visions
were evoked by real Spirits of the Past, Present, and Future, they
were evoked by that truly exalted order of angels who are correctly
called High Spirits. They are impelled and sustained by a quality
which our contemporary artists ignore or almost deny, but which in a
life decently lived is as normal and attainable as sleep, positive,
passionate, conscious joy. The story sings from end to end like a happy
man going home; and, like a happy and good man, when it cannot sing it
yells. It is lyric and exclamatory, from the first exclamatory words of
it. It is strictly a Christmas Carol.
Dickens, as has been said, went to Italy with this kindly cloud still
about him, still meditating on Yule mysteries. Among the olives and
the orange-trees he wrote his second great Christmas tale, “The
Chimes” (at Genoa in 1844), a Christmas tale only differing from “The
Christmas Carol” in being fuller of the grey rains of winter and
the north. “The Chimes” is, like the “Carol,” an appeal for charity
and mirth, but it is a stern and fighting appeal: if the other is a
Christmas carol, this is a Christmas war-song. In it Dickens hurled
himself with even more than his usual militant joy and scorn into an
attack upon a cant, which he said made his blood boil. This cant was
nothing more nor less than the whole tone taken by three-quarters of
the political and economic world towards the poor. It was a vague and
vulgar Benthamism with a rollicking Tory touch in it. It explained to
the poor their duties with a cold and coarse philanthropy unendurable
by any free man. It had also at its command a kind of brutal banter, a
loud good-humour which Dickens sketches savagely in Alderman Cute. He
fell furiously on all their ideas: the cheap advice to live cheaply,
the base advice to live basely, above all, the preposterous primary
assumption that the rich are to advise the poor and not the poor the
rich. There were and are hundreds of these benevolent bullies. Some say
that the poor should give up having children, which means that they
should give up their great virtue of sexual sanity. Some say that they
should give up “treating” each other, which means that they should give
up all that remains to them of the virtue of hospitality. Against all
of this Dickens thundered very thoroughly in “The Chimes.” It may be
remarked in passing that this affords another instance of a confusion
already referred to, the confusion whereby Dickens supposed himself to
be exalting the present over the past, whereas he was really dealing
deadly blows at things strictly peculiar to the present. Embedded in
this very book is a somewhat useless interview between Trotty Veck and
the church bells, in which the latter lectures the former for having
supposed (why I don’t know) that they were expressing regret for the
disappearance of the Middle Ages. There is no reason why Trotty Veck or
any one else should idealize the Middle Ages, but certainly he was the
last man in the world to be asked to idealize the nineteenth century,
seeing that the smug and stingy philosophy, which poisons his life
through the book, was an exclusive creation of that century. But, as
I have said before, the fieriest mediævalist may forgive Dickens for
disliking the good things the Middle Ages took away, considering how he
loved whatever good things the Middle Ages left behind. It matters very
little that he hated old feudal castles when they were already old. It
matters very much that he hated the New Poor Law while it was still
new.
The moral of this matter in “The Chimes” is essential. Dickens had
sympathy with the poor in the Greek and literal sense; he suffered
with them mentally; for the things that irritated them were the things
that irritated him. He did not pity the people, or even champion the
people, or even merely love the people; in this matter he was the
people. He alone in our literature is the voice not merely of the
social substratum, but even of the subconsciousness of the substratum.
He utters the secret anger of the humble. He says what the uneducated
only think, or even only feel, about the educated. And in nothing is he
so genuinely such a voice as in this fact of his fiercest mood being
reserved for methods that are counted scientific and progressive.
Pure and exalted atheists talk themselves into believing that the
working-classes are turning with indignant scorn from the churches.
The working-classes are not indignant against the churches in the
least. The things the working-classes really are indignant against are
the hospitals. The people has no definite disbelief in the temples
of theology. The people has a very fiery and practical disbelief in
the temples of physical science. The things the poor hate are the
modern things, the rationalistic things--doctors, inspectors, poor
law guardians, professional philanthropy. They never showed any
reluctance to be helped by the old and corrupt monasteries. They will
often die rather than be helped by the modern and efficient workhouse.
Of all this anger, good or bad, Dickens is the voice of an accusing
energy. When, in “The Christmas Carol,” Scrooge refers to the surplus
population, the Spirit tells him, very justly, not to speak till he
knows what the surplus is and where it is. The implication is severe
but sound. When a group of superciliously benevolent economists look
down into the abyss for the surplus population, assuredly there is only
one answer that should be given to them; and that is to say, “If there
is a surplus, you are a surplus.” And if any one were ever cut off,
they would be. If the barricades went up in our streets and the poor
became masters, I think the priests would escape, I fear the gentlemen
would; but I believe the gutters would be simply running with the blood
of philanthropists.
Lastly, he was at one with the poor in this chief matter of Christmas,
in the matter, that is, of special festivity. There is nothing on which
the poor are more criticized than on the point of spending large sums
on small feasts; and though there are material difficulties, there
is nothing in which they are more right. It is said that a Boston
paradox-monger said, “Give us the luxuries of life and we will dispense
with the necessities.” But it is the whole human race that says it,
from the first savage wearing feathers instead of clothes to the last
costermonger having a treat instead of three meals.
The third of his Christmas stories, “The Cricket on the Hearth,”
calls for no extensive comment, though it is very characteristic. It
has all the qualities which we have called dominant qualities in his
Christmas sentiment. It has cosiness, that is the comfort that depends
upon a discomfort surrounding it. It has a sympathy with the poor, and
especially with the extravagance of the poor; with what may be called
the temporary wealth of the poor. It has the sentiment of the hearth,
that is, the sentiment of the open fire being the red heart of the
room. That open fire is the veritable flame of England, still kept
burning in the midst of a mean civilization of stoves. But everything
that is valuable in “The Cricket on the Hearth” is perhaps as well
expressed in the title as it is in the story. The tale itself, in spite
of some of those inimitable things that Dickens never failed to say,
is a little too comfortable to be quite convincing. “The Christmas
Carol” is the conversion of an anti-Christmas character. “The Chimes”
is a slaughter of anti-Christmas characters. “The Cricket,” perhaps,
fails for lack of this crusading note. For everything has its weak
side, and when full justice has been done to this neglected note of
poetic comfort, we must remember that it has its very real weak side.
The defect of it in the work of Dickens was that he tended sometimes
to pile up the cushions until none of the characters could move. He is
so much interested in effecting his state of static happiness that he
forgets to make a story at all. His princes at the start of the story
begin to live happily ever afterwards. We feel this strongly in “Master
Humphrey’s Clock,” and we feel it sometimes in these Christmas stories.
He makes his characters so comfortable that his characters begin to
dream and drivel. And he makes his reader so comfortable that his
reader goes to sleep.
The actual tale of the carrier and his wife sounds somewhat sleepily
in our ears; we cannot keep our attention fixed on it, though we are
conscious of a kind of warmth from it as from a great wood fire. We
know so well that everything will soon be all right that we do not
suspect when the carrier suspects, and are not frightened when the
gruff Tackleton growls. The sound of the Christmas festivities at the
end comes fainter on our ears than did the shout of the Cratchits or
the bells of Trotty Veck. All the good figures that followed Scrooge
when he came growling out of the fog fade into the fog again.