The mystery of Christmas is in a manner identical with the mystery of
Dickens. If ever we adequately explain the one we may adequately explain
the other. And indeed, in the treatment of the two, the chronological or
historical order must in some degree be remembered. Before we come to
the question of what Dickens did for Christmas we must consider the
question of what Christmas did for Dickens. How did it happen that this
bustling, nineteenth-century man, full of the almost cock-sure
common-sense of the utilitarian and liberal epoch, came to associate his
name chiefly in literary history with the perpetuation of a half pagan
and half Catholic festival which he would certainly have called an
antiquity and might easily have called a superstition? Christmas has
indeed been celebrated before in English literature; but it had, in the
most noticeable cases, been celebrated in connection with that kind of
feudalism with which Dickens would have severed his connection with an
ignorant and even excessive scorn. Sir Roger de Coverley kept Christmas;
but it was a feudal Christmas. Sir Walter Scott sang in praise of
Christmas; but it was a feudal Christmas. And Dickens was not only
indifferent to the dignity of the old country gentleman or to the genial
archaeology of Scott; he was even harshly and insolently hostile to it.
If Dickens had lived in the neighbourhood of Sir Roger de Coverley he
would undoubtedly, like Tom Touchy, have been always "having the law of
him." If Dickens had stumbled in among the old armour and quaint folios
of Scott's study he would certainly have read his brother novelist a
lesson in no measured terms about the futility of thus fumbling in the
dust-bins of old oppression and error. So far from Dickens being one of
those who like a thing because it is old, he was one of those cruder
kind of reformers, in theory at least, who actually dislike a thing
because it is old. He was not merely the more righteous kind of Radical
who tries to uproot abuses; he was partly also that more suicidal kind
of Radical who tries to uproot himself. In theory at any rate, he had no
adequate conception of the importance of human tradition; in his time it
had been twisted and falsified into the form of an opposition to
democracy. In truth, of course, tradition is the most democratic of all
things, for tradition is merely a democracy of the dead as well as the
living. But Dickens and his special group or generation had no grasp of
this permanent position; they had been called to a special war for the
righting of special wrongs. In so far as such an institution as
Christmas was old, Dickens would even have tended to despise it. He
could never have put the matter to himself in the correct way--that
while there are some things whose antiquity does prove that they are
dying, there are some other things whose antiquity only proves that they
cannot die. If some Radical contemporary and friend of Dickens had
happened to say to him that in defending the mince-pies and the
mummeries of Christmas he was defending a piece of barbaric and brutal
ritualism, doomed to disappear in the light of reason along with the
Boy-Bishop and the Lord of Misrule, I am not sure that Dickens (though
he was one of the readiest and most rapid masters of reply in history)
would have found it very easy upon his own principles to answer. It was
by a great ancestral instinct that he defended Christmas; by that sacred
sub-consciousness which is called tradition, which some have called a
dead thing, but which is really a thing far more living than the
intellect. There is a dark kinship and brotherhood of all mankind which
is much too deep to be called heredity or to be in any way explained in
scientific formulae; blood is thicker than water and is especially very
much thicker than water on the brain. But this unconscious and even
automatic quality in Dickens's defence of the Christmas feast, this fact
that his defence might almost be called animal rather than mental,
though in proper language it should be called merely virile; all this
brings us back to the fact that we must begin with the atmosphere of the
subject itself. We must not ask Dickens what Christmas is, for with all
his heat and eloquence he does not know. Rather we must ask Christmas
what Dickens is--ask how this strange child of Christmas came to be born
out of due time.
Dickens devoted his genius in a somewhat special sense to the
description of happiness. No other literary man of his eminence has made
this central human aim so specially his subject matter. Happiness is a
mystery--generally a momentary mystery--which seldom stops long enough
to submit itself to artistic observation, and which, even when it is
habitual, has something about it which renders artistic description
almost impossible. There are twenty tiny minor poets who can describe
fairly impressively an eternity of agony; there are very few even of the
eternal poets who can describe ten minutes of satisfaction.
Nevertheless, mankind being half divine is always in love with the
impossible, and numberless attempts have been made from the beginning of
human literature to describe a real state of felicity. Upon the whole, I
think, the most successful have been the most frankly physical and
symbolic; the flowers of Eden or the jewels of the New Jerusalem. Many
writers, for instance, have called the gold and chrysolite of the Holy
City a vulgar lump of jewellery. But when these critics themselves
attempt to describe their conceptions of future happiness, it is always
some priggish nonsense about "planes," about "cycles of fulfilment," or
"spirals of spiritual evolution." Now a cycle is just as much a physical
metaphor as a flower of Eden; a spiral is just as much a physical
metaphor as a precious stone. But, after all, a garden is a beautiful
thing; whereas this is by no means necessarily true of a cycle, as can
be seen in the case of a bicycle. A jewel, after all, is a beautiful
thing; but this is not necessarily so of a spiral, as can be seen in the
case of a corkscrew. Nothing is gained by dropping the old material
metaphors, which did hint at heavenly beauty, and adopting other
material metaphors which do not even give a hint of earthly beauty. This
modern or spiral method of describing indescribable happiness may, I
think, be dismissed. Then there has been another method which has been
adopted by many men of a very real poetical genius. It was the method of
the old pastoral poets like Theocritus. It was in another way that
adopted by the elegance and piety of Spenser. It was certainly expressed
in the pictures of Watteau; and it had a very sympathetic and even manly
expression in modern England in the decorative poetry of William Morris.
These men of genius, from Theocritus to Morris, occupied themselves in
endeavouring to describe happiness as a state of certain human beings,
the atmosphere of a commonwealth, the enduring climate of certain cities
or islands. They poured forth treasures of the truest kind of
imagination upon describing the happy lives and landscapes of Utopia or
Atlantis or the Earthly Paradise. They traced with the most tender
accuracy the tracery of its fruit-trees or the glimmering garments of
its women; they used every ingenuity of colour or intricate shape to
suggest its infinite delight. And what they succeeded in suggesting was
always its infinite melancholy. William Morris described the Earthly
Paradise in such a way that the only strong emotional note left on the
mind was the feeling of how homeless his travellers felt in that alien
Elysium; and the reader sympathised with them, feeling that he would
prefer not only Elizabethan England but even twentieth-century
Camberwell to such a land of shining shadows. Thus literature has almost
always failed in endeavouring to describe happiness as a state. Human
tradition, human custom and folk-lore (though far more true and reliable
than literature as a rule) have not often succeeded in giving quite the
correct symbols for a real atmosphere of _camaraderie_ and joy. But
here and there the note has been struck with the sudden vibration of the
_vox humana_. In human tradition it has been struck chiefly in the old
celebrations of Christmas. In literature it has been struck chiefly in
Dickens's Christmas tales.
In the historic celebration of Christmas as it remains from Catholic
times in certain northern countries (and it is to be remembered that in
Catholic times the northern countries were, if possible, more Catholic
than anybody else), there are three qualities which explain, I think,
its hold upon the human sense of happiness, especially in such men as
Dickens. There are three notes of Christmas, so to speak, which are also
notes of happiness, and which the pagans and the Utopians forget. If we
state what they are in the case of Christmas, it will be quite
sufficiently obvious how important they are in the case of Dickens.
The first quality is what may be called the dramatic quality. The
happiness is not a state; it is a crisis. All the old customs
surrounding the celebration of the birth of Christ are made by human
instinct so as to insist and re-insist upon this crucial quality.
Everything is so arranged that the whole household may feel, if
possible, as a household does when a child is actually being born in it.
The thing is a vigil and a vigil with a definite limit. People sit up at
night until they hear the bells ring. Or they try to sleep at night in
order to see their presents the next morning. Everywhere there is a
limitation, a restraint; at one moment the door is shut, at the moment
after it is opened. The hour has come or it has not come; the parcels
are undone or they are not undone; there is no evolution of Christmas
presents. This sharp and theatrical quality in pleasure, which human
instinct and the mother wit of the world has wisely put into the popular
celebrations of Christmas, is also a quality which is essential in such
romantic literature as Dickens wrote. In romantic literature the hero
and heroine must indeed be happy, but they must also be unexpectedly
happy. This is the first connecting link between literature and the old
religious feast; this is the first connecting link between Dickens and
Christmas.
The second element to be found in all such festivity and all such
romance is the element which is represented as well as it could be
represented by the mere fact that Christmas occurs in the winter. It is
the element not merely of contrast, but actually of antagonism. It
preserves everything that was best in the merely primitive or pagan view
of such ceremonies or such banquets. If we are carousing, at least we
are warriors carousing. We hang above us, as it were, the shields and
battle-axes with which we must do battle with the giants of the snow and
hail. All comfort must be based on discomfort. Man chooses when he
wishes to be most joyful the very moment when the whole material
universe is most sad. It is this contradiction and mystical defiance
which gives a quality of manliness and reality to the old winter feasts
which is not characteristic of the sunny felicities of the Earthly
Paradise. And this curious element has been carried out even in all the
trivial jokes and tasks that have always surrounded such occasions as
these. The object of the jovial customs was not to make everything
artificially easy: on the contrary, it was rather to make everything
artificially difficult. Idealism is not only expressed by shooting an
arrow at the stars; the fundamental principle of idealism is also
expressed by putting a leg of mutton at the top of a greasy pole. There
is in all such observances a quality which can be called only the
quality of divine obstruction. For instance, in the game of snapdragon
(that admirable occupation) the conception is that raisins taste much
nicer if they are brands saved from the burning. About all Christmas
things there is something a little nobler, if only nobler in form and
theory, than mere comfort; even holly is prickly. It is not hard to see
the connection of this kind of historic instinct with a romantic writer
like Dickens. The healthy novelist must always play snapdragon with his
principal characters; he must always be snatching the hero and heroine
like raisins out of the fire.
The third great Christmas element is the element of the grotesque. The
grotesque is the natural expression of joy; and all the Utopias and new
Edens of the poets fail to give a real impression of enjoyment, very
largely because they leave out the grotesque. A man in most modern
Utopias cannot really be happy; he is too dignified. A man in Morris's
Earthly Paradise cannot really be enjoying himself; he is too
decorative. When real human beings have real delights they tend to
express them entirely in grotesques--I might almost say entirely in
goblins. On Christmas Eve one may talk about ghosts so long as they are
turnip ghosts. But one would not be allowed (I hope, in any decent
family) to talk on Christmas Eve about astral bodies. The boar's head of
old Yule-time was as grotesque as the donkey's head of Bottom the
Weaver. But there is only one set of goblins quite wild enough to
express the wild goodwill of Christmas. Those goblins are the characters
of Dickens.
Arcadian poets and Arcadian painters have striven to express happiness
by means of beautiful figures. Dickens understood that happiness is best
expressed by ugly figures. In beauty, perhaps, there is something allied
to sadness; certainly there is something akin to joy in the grotesque,
nay, in the uncouth. There is something mysteriously associated with
happiness not only in the corpulence of Falstaff and the corpulence of
Tony Weller, but even in the red nose of Bardolph or the red nose of Mr.
Stiggins. A thing of beauty is an inspiration for ever--a matter of
meditation for ever. It is rather a thing of ugliness that is strictly a
joy for ever.
All Dickens's books are Christmas books. But this is still truest of his
two or three famous Yuletide tales--The _Christmas Carol_ and _The
Chimes_ and _The Cricket on the Hearth_. Of these _The Christmas Carol_
is beyond comparison the best as well as the most popular. Indeed,
Dickens is in so profound and spiritual a sense a popular author that in
his case, unlike most others, it can generally be said that the best
work is the most popular. It is for _Pickwick_ that he is best known;
and upon the whole it is for Pickwick that he is best worth knowing. In
any case this superiority of _The Christmas Carol_ makes it convenient
for us to take it as an example of the generalisations already made. If
we study the very real atmosphere of rejoicing and of riotous charity in
_The Christmas Carol_ we shall find that all the three marks I have
mentioned are unmistakably visible. _The Christmas Carol_ is a happy
story first, because it describes an abrupt and dramatic change. It is
not only the story of a conversion, but of a sudden conversion; as
sudden as the conversion of a man at a Salvation Army meeting. Popular
religion is quite right in insisting on the fact of a crisis in most
things. It is true that the man at the Salvation Army meeting would
probably be converted from the punch bowl; whereas Scrooge was converted
to it. That only means that Scrooge and Dickens represented a higher and
more historic Christianity.
Again, _The Christmas Carol_ owes much of its hilarity to our second
source--the fact of its being a tale of winter and of a very wintry
winter. There is much about comfort in the story; yet the comfort is
never enervating: it is saved from that by a tingle of something bitter
and bracing in the weather. Lastly, the story exemplifies throughout the
power of the third principle--the kinship between gaiety and the
grotesque. Everybody is happy because nobody is dignified. We have a
feeling somehow that Scrooge looked even uglier when he was kind than he
had looked when he was cruel. The turkey that Scrooge bought was so fat,
says Dickens, that it could never have stood upright. That top-heavy and
monstrous bird is a good symbol of the top-heavy happiness of the
stories.
It is less profitable to criticise the other two tales in detail because
they represent variations on the theme in two directions; and variations
that were not, upon the whole, improvements. _The Chimes_ is a monument
of Dickens's honourable quality of pugnacity. He could not admire
anything, even peace, without wanting to be warlike about it. That was
all as it should be.