went a good deal into that kind of thing at one time; but I found it
would carry me too far--over the hedge, in fact." That, I imagine,
pretty well represents the attitude of the adult world towards the
feast which closes the year. We all loved it when we were young. Now,
it is all very well for once in a way; it might pall if frequently
repeated; even recurring only annually, it must be observed temperately
and enjoyed moderately. Anything resembling excess would carry one
too far--"over the hedge, in fact." But, within these recognized
and salutary limits, Christmas is an institution which I would not
willingly let die. In the days of my youth a Jewish lady caused me
not a little consternation by remarking that it seemed very odd for
Christians to celebrate the Feast of Redemption with gluttony and
drunkenness. She lived, I am bound to say, in a very unregenerate
village in a remarkably savage part of the country, and as, of course,
she did not go to church, I dare say that Gluttony and Drunkenness
were the forms of Christmas observance which most obtruded themselves
on her notice. Even Cardinal Newman seems to have remarked the same
phenomenon in his youth, though he satirized it more delicately.
"Beneficed clergymen used to go to rest as usual on Christmas-eve,
and leave to ringers, or sometimes to carollers, the observance which
was paid, _not without creature comforts_, to the sacred night."
Now all that is changed. Churches of all confessions vie with one
another in the frequency and heartiness and picturesque equipment
of their religious services. Even the _Daily Telegraph_ preaches
Christmas sermons; and I very much question whether the populace
gets more drunk at Christmas than at Easter. But, though we may have
learnt to celebrate the festival with rites more devout and less
bibulous, we have not yet escaped my Jewish friend's reproach of
gluttony. The Christmas Dinner of the British Home is still a thing
imagination boggles at. The dreadful pleasantries of the aged--their
sorry gibes about the doctor and the draught; hoary chestnuts about
little boys who stood up to eat more--remain among the most terrible
memories of the Christmas dinner. And they were quite in keeping
with the dinner itself. I say nothing against the Turkey, which (as
my medical friends well know) was found, by practical experiment in
the case of Alexis St. Martin, to be the most easily digested of all
animal foods, except venison; but surely, as a nation, we eat quite
beef enough in the course of the year without making Christmas an
annual orgy of carnivorous excess. I protest that the very sight of
the butchers' shops at this season of the year is enough to upset
a delicately balanced organization. Rightly said the Shah, in that
immortal Diary which he kept during his visit to England in 1873--"Meat
is good, but it should not be hung up in windows." Macaulay used to
say that Thackeray, in his famous description of the Clapham sect in
"The Newcomes," made one blunder--he represented them as Dissenters,
whereas, in fact, they were rather dogged Church-people. The only
exception to the rule was a Baptist lady, who, living on Clapham
Common, testified against the superstitions of the Established Church
by eating roast veal and apple-pie on Christmas-day instead of more
orthodox dainties. Churchman though I am, I protest that I think the
Baptist lady was right: and I believe that the Puritans were wiser than
they knew when they denounced Plum-Pudding and Mince Pies as inventions
of the Evil One. Yet the love of these vindictive viands is one of the
root-instincts of our English nature. Forty-eight years ago the British
Army was keeping its Christmas in the Crimea, amid all the horrors and
hardships of a peculiarly grim campaign. An English Sister of Mercy,
who was nursing under Miss Nightingale in the Hospital at Scutari,
thus described the melancholy festivity: "The 'Roast Beef of Old
England' was out of the question, but with the aid of a good deal of
imagination, it seemed possible at least to secure the Plum Pudding.
I think I might with safety affirm that as the doctor left the ward
every man drew from under his pillow a small portion of flour and fat,
with an egg and some plums, and began to concoct a Christmas pudding.
I assisted many to make the pudding, whom nothing short of a miracle
would enable to eat it; still they must have the thing. For some
days previously I had been asked for pieces of linen, which, without
dreaming of the use to which they were to be applied, I supplied. Thus
were the pudding cloths provided."
It can scarcely be conceived that these unhappy soldiers, maddened by
wounds and fever or perishing by frost-bite and gangrene, can have had
much physical enjoyment in Christmas puddings made of materials which
had been concealed under their sick pillows; in such circumstances
the value of the pudding is spiritual and symbolic. A few Christmases
ago I was assisting (in the literal sense) at a dinner for starving
"Dockers." A more broken, jaded, and dejected crew it would be
difficult to picture. They had scarcely enough energy to eat and drink,
but lumbered slowly through their meal of meat-pies and coffee without
a smile and almost without a word. All at once an unrehearsed feature
was introduced into the rather cheerless programme, and a huge Plum
Pudding, wreathed with holly and flaming blue with burnt brandy, was
borne into the hall. A deep gasp of joy burst from the assembled
guests, and the whole company rose as one man and greeted the joyous
vision with "Auld Lang Syne." The eating was yet to come, so the
exhilaration was purely moral. The Pudding spoke at once to Memory and
to Hope.
There are other adjuncts of Christmas which must by no means be
overlooked--Christmas presents, for instance, and Christmas amusements.
As to Christmas presents, I regard them as definite means of grace.
For weeks--sometimes months--before Christmas returns we concentrate
our thought on our friends instead of ourselves. We reflect on
people's likes and dislikes, habits, tastes, and occupations. We tax
our ingenuity to find gifts suitable for the recipients, and buy
objects which we think frankly hideous in the hope of gratifying our
unsophisticated friends. Happily the age of ormolu and malachite has
passed. We no longer buy blotting-books made unusable by little knobs
of enamel on the cover; nor gilt-paper weights which cost a hundred
times more than the overweighted letters of a lifetime could amount
to. Christmas gifts of this type belong to an unreturning past, and,
as Walter Pater said of the wedding-present which he was expected to
admire, "Very rich, very handsome, very expensive, I'm sure--but they
mustn't make any more of them." Nor will they. The standard of popular
taste in the matter of nick-nacks has improved as conspicuously as in
that of furniture; and the fancy shops, when spread for the Christmas
market, display a really large choice of presents which one can buy
without sacrificing self-respect, and give without the appearance of
insult.
But Christmas presents, even at a moderate rate of charge, may, if one
has a large circle of acquaintance, carry one over the hedge, as Mr.
Brooke said; and here is the scope and function of the Christmas Card.
Few people have bought more Christmas cards in a lifetime than the
present writer; and, out of a vast experience, he would offer one word
of friendly counsel to the card-sender. Do not accumulate the cards
which you receive this Christmas and distribute them among your friends
next Christmas, for, if you do, as sure as fate you will one day return
a card to the sender; and old friendships and profitable connexions
have been severed by such miscarriages.
Of Christmas amusements I can say little. My notion of them is chiefly
derived from "Happy Thoughts," where Byng suggests some "Christmassy
sort of thing" to amuse his guests, and fails to gratify even his
Half-Aunt. My infancy was spent in the country, remote from Dances and
Theatres, Pantomimes and Panoramas. "The Classic Walls of Old Drury"
never welcomed me on Boxing Night. Certainly a Christmas Tree and a
stocking full of presents appealed to that acquisitive instinct which
is fully as strong in infancy as in old age; but, though exceedingly
young in my time, I never was young enough to be amused by a Snow-Man
or dangerously excited by Blind Man's Buff. Looking back, like
Tennyson's "many-wintered crow," on these Christmases of infancy, I
have sometimes asked myself whether I lost much by my aloofness from
the normal merriment of youth. Mr. Anstey Guthrie knows the secret
heart of English boyhood more accurately than most of us, and when I
read his description of a Christmas party I am inclined to be thankful
that my lot was cast a good many miles beyond the cab-radius.
"Why couldn't you come to our party on Twelfth-night? We had great
larks. I wish you'd been there."
"I had to go to young Skidmore's instead," said a pale,
spiteful-looking boy with fair hair, carefully parted in the middle.
"It was like his cheek to ask me, but I thought I'd go, you know, just
to see what it was like."
"What was it like?" asked one or two near him, languidly.
"Oh, awfully slow! They've a poky little house in Brompton somewhere,
and there was no dancing, only boshy games and a conjuror, without any
presents. And, oh! I say, at supper there was a big cake on the table,
and no one was allowed to cut it, because it was hired. They're so
poor, you know. Skidmore's pater is only a clerk, and you should see
his sisters!"
All my sympathies are with Skidmore, and I think that the fair-haired
boy was an unmitigated beast, and cad, and snob. But there is an awful
verisimilitude about "Boshy Games and a Conjuror," and I bless the fate
which allowed me to grow up in ignorance of Christmas Parties.
XXXVII
NEW YEAR'S DAY
On the 1st of January 1882, Matthew Arnold wrote to his sister: "I
think the beginning of a New Year very animating--it is so visible an
occasion for breaking off bad habits and carrying into effect good
resolutions." This was splendid in a man who had just entered his
sixtieth year, and we all should like to share the sentiment; but it
is not always easy to feel "animated," even by the most significant
anniversaries. Sometimes they only depress; and the effect which they
produce depends so very largely on the physical condition in which
they find us. Suppose, for instance, that one is a fox-hunter, in the
prime of life and the pride of health, with a good string of horses
which have been eating their heads off during a prolonged frost. As
one wakes on New Year's morning, one hears a delicious dripping from
the roof, and one's servant, coming in with tea and letters, announces
a rapid thaw. Then "the beginning of a New Year" is "animating"
enough; and, while we wash and shave, we pledge ourselves, like
Matthew Arnold, to "break off bad habits and carry into effect good
resolutions." We remember with shame that we missed three capital days'
hunting last November because we let our friends seduce us to their
shooting-parties; and we resolve this year to make up for lost time, to
redeem wasted opportunities, and not willingly to lose a day between
this and Christmas. Such resolutions are truly "animating"; but we
cannot all be young or healthy or fox-hunters, and then the anniversary
takes a different colour. Perhaps one is cowering over one's
study-fire, with "an air of romance struggling through the commonplace
effect of a swelled face" (like Miss Hucklebuckle in "The Owlet"),
or mumbling the minced remains of our Christmas turkey as painfully
as Father Diggory in "Ivanhoe," who was "so severely afflicted by
toothache that he could only eat on one side of his face." Not for us,
in such circumstances, are "animating" visions of wide pastures, and
negotiable fences, and too-fresh hunters pulling one's arms off, and
the chime of the "dappled darlings down the roaring blast." Rather
does our New Year's fancy lightly turn to thoughts of dentistry and
doctoring. We ask ourselves whether the time has not come when art must
replace what nature has withdrawn; and, if we form a resolution, it is
nothing more heroic than that we will henceforward wear goloshes in
damp weather and a quilted overcoat in frost.
But, it may be urged, Matthew Arnold was not a fox-hunter (at least not
after his Oxford days), and yet he contrived to feel "animated" by New
Year's Day. In his case animation was connected with books.
"I am glad," he wrote, "to find that in the past year I have at least
accomplished more than usual in the way of reading the books which at
the beginning of the year I put down to be read. I always do this, and
I do not expect to read all I put down, but sometimes I fall much too
short of what I proposed, and this year things have been a good deal
better. The importance of reading, not slight stuff to get through the
time but the best that has been written, forces itself upon me more
and more every year I live. It is living in good company, the best
company, and people are generally quite keen enough, or too keen, about
doing that; yet they will not do it in the simplest and most innocent
manner by reading. If I live to be eighty, I shall probably be the only
person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific
publications."
We have not quite come to that yet, but we are not far off it, and I
should fear that the number of even educated people who occupy New
Year's Day in laying down a course of serious study for the next twelve
months is lamentably small. But Hunting and Health and Books are not
the only topics for New Year's meditation. There is also Money, which
not seldom obtrudes itself with a disagreeable urgency. We cast our eye
over that little parchment-bound volume which only "Fortune's favoured
sons, not we" can regard with any complacency; and we observe, not for
the first time, that we have been spending a good deal more than we
ought to spend, and are not far from the perilous edge of an overdrawn
account. This is "animating" indeed, but only as a sudden stab of
neuralgia is animating; and we immediately begin to consider methods of
relief. But where are our retrenchments to begin? That is always the
difficulty. I remember that after the Cattle Plague of 1865, by which
he had been a principal sufferer, the first Lord Tollemache was very
full of fiscal reforms. "I ought to get rid of half my servants; but
they are excellent people, and it would be very wrong to cause them
inconvenience. Horses, too--I really have no right to keep a stud.
But nothing would ever induce me to sell a horse, and it seems rather
heartless to kill old friends. Then, again, about houses--I ought
to leave St. James's Square, and take a house in Brompton. But the
Brompton houses are so small that they really would not accommodate
my family, and it would not be right to turn the boys into lodgings."
And so on and so forth, with a magnificent list of contemplated
reforms, which went unfulfilled till things had righted themselves
and retrenchment was no longer necessary. In the same spirit, though
on a very different scale, the inhabitants of Stuccovia contemplate
the financial future which lies ahead of New Year's Day. We must
economize--that is plain enough. But how are we to begin?
I must have a new frock-coat very soon, and shall want at least three
tweed suits before the autumn. Economy bids me desert Savile Row and
try Aaronson in New Oxford Street. "Budge," says the Fiend. "Budge
not," replies Self-Respect. Aaronson is remarkable for a fit "that
never was on sea or land," and, though his garments are undeniably
cheap, they are also nasty, and are worn out before they are paid
for. Or perhaps our conscience pricks us most severely in the matter
of wine. We will buy no more Pommery and Greno at 98s. a dozen, but
will slake our modest thirst with a dry Sillery at 31s. But, after
all, health is the first consideration in life, and, unfortunately,
these cheap wines never agree with us. The doctor holds them directly
responsible for our last attack of eczema or neuritis, and says
impressively, "Drink good wine, or none at all--bad wine is poison
to you." _Drink none at all._ That is very "animating," but somehow
our enfeebled will is unequal to the required resolve; we hold
spirit-drinking in detestation; and so, after all, we are driven back
to our Pommery. "Surely," as Lamb said, "there must be some other world
in which our unconquerable purpose" of retrenchment shall be realized.
Travel, again. Many people spend too much in travel. Can we curtail
in that direction? For my own part, I am a Londoner, and am content
with life as it is afforded by this wonderful world miscalled a city.
But the Family has claims. Some of them suffer from "Liver," and whoso
knows what it is to dwell with liverish patients will not lightly run
the risk of keeping them from Carlsbad. Others can only breathe on
high Alps, and others, again, require the sunshine of the Riviera or
the warmth of the Italian Lakes. So all the ways of retrenchment seem
barred. Clothes and wine and travel must cost as much as they cost
last year, and the only way of escape seems to lie in the steps of
the Prince Consort, who, when Parliament reduced his income from the
proposed fifty thousand a year to thirty, patiently observed that he
should have to give less in subscriptions.
To the Spendthrift, or even to the more modest practitioner who
merely lives up to his income, the New Year, as we have seen, offers
few opportunities for resolutions of reform; but I fancy that the
Skinflint, and his cousin the Screw, find it full of suggestive
possibilities. I remember a gentleman of "griping and penurious
tendencies" (the phrase is Mr. Gladstone's) telling me when I was a
schoolboy that he had resolved to spend nothing with his tailor in
the year then dawning. He announced it with the air befitting a great
self-surrender, but I thought, as I looked at his clothes, that he was
really only continuing the well-established practice of a lifetime. The
Screw, of course, is of no one place or age; and here is an excellent
citation from the Diary of a Screw--Mr. Thomas Turner--who flourished
in Sussex in the eighteenth century: "This being New Year's Day, myself
and wife at church in the morning. Collection. My wife gave 6d. But,
they not asking me, I gave nothing. Oh! may we increase in faith and
good works, and maintain the good intentions we have this day taken
up." Those who have tried it say that hoarding is the purest of human
pleasures; and I dare say that by the end of the year good Mr. Turner's
banking-book was a phantom of delight.
All these reflections, and others like unto them, came whirling on
my mind this New Year's Eve; and, just as I was beginning to reduce
them to form and figure, the shrill ting-ting of the church-bell
pierced the silence of the night. _Watch-Night._ Those who are not the
friends of the English Church denounce her as hidebound, immovable,
and unreceptive. Here is the--or an--answer to the charge. She has
borrowed, originally, from the Swedenborgians and more immediately
from the Wesleyans, a religious observance which, though unrecognized
in Prayer-book or Kalendar, now divides with the Harvest Festival the
honour of being the most popular service in the Church of England.
"Among the promptings of what may be called, in the truest sense of
the term, Natural Religion, none surely is more instructive than that
which leads men to observe with peculiar solemnity the entrance upon
a new year of life. It is, if nothing else, the making a step in the
dark. It is the entrance upon a new epoch in existence, of which the
manifold "changes and chances" prevent our forecasting the issue. True,
the line of demarcation is purely arbitrary; yet there are few, even of
the most thoughtless, who can set foot across the line which separates
one year from another without feeling in some degree the significance
of the act. It would seem that this passing season of thoughtfulness
was one of those opportunities which no form of religion could afford
to miss. And yet, for a long time, that which may perhaps without
offence be termed Ecclesiasticism sternly refused to recognize this
occasion. The line was rigidly drawn between the Civil New Year and the
Church's New Year. We were told that Advent was the beginning of our
Sacred Year, and that the evening before the First Sunday in Advent was
the time for those serious thoughts and good resolutions which rightly
accompany a New Year."
Yes-so we were taught; and there was a great deal to be said,
ecclesiastically, for the teaching. Only, unfortunately, no one
believed it. We went to bed quite unmoved on Saturday evening, December
1, 1906. No era seemed to have closed for us, no era to have opened:
there was nothing to remember, nothing to anticipate; nothing to
repent and nothing to resolve. It is otherwise to-night.[11] The
"church-going bell" does not tingle in vain. Old men and maidens, young
men and children are crowding in. I involve myself in an ulster and a
comforter, and join the pilgrim-throng.
[11] December 31, 1906.
XXXVIII
PETS
My suggestive friend has taken to postcards, and his style, never
diffuse, has become as curt as that of Mr. Alfred Jingle. "Why not
Pets?" he writes; and the suggestion gives pause.
When Mrs. Topham-Sawyer accepted the invitation to the Little Dinner at
Timmins's, she concluded her letter to Rosa Timmins: "With a hundred
kisses to your dear little _pet_." She said _pet_, we are told,
"because she did not know whether Rosa's child was a girl or a boy; and
Mrs. Timmins was very much pleased with the kind and gracious nature of
the reply to her invitation." My mind misgave me that my friend might
be using the word _pet_ in the same sense as Mrs. Topham-Sawyer, and
inviting me to a discussion of the Crêche or the Nursery. As my views
of childhood are formed on those of Herod and Solomon, I hastened to
decline so unsuitable a task, whereupon my friend, for all reply, sent
me the following excerpt from an evening paper:--
"The Westminster Cat Exhibition, which will be held in the Royal
Horticultural Society's Hall, Vincent Square, Westminster, on January
10 and 11, will afford an opportunity to all who love the domestic cat
to aid in improving its lot through the agency of Our Dumb Friends'
League, which it is desired to benefit, not only by their presence
on the occasion, but by contributing suitable specimens to the 'Gift
Class' which will form part of the show, and be offered for sale in aid
of the League during the time the exhibition is open. Children will
be invited, for the first time, to enter into the competition with
their pets for suitable prizes, and thus, it is hoped, increase their
interest in and affection for domestic pets."
Here I felt myself on more familiar ground. For I, too, have been
young. I have trafficked in squirrels and guinea-pigs, have invested
my all in an Angora rabbit, and have undergone discipline for bringing
a dormouse into school. These are, indeed, among the childish things
which I put away when I became a Fifth Form boy; but their memory
is sweet--sweeter, indeed, than was their actual presence. For the
Cat, with which my friend seems chiefly to concern himself, I have
never felt, or even professed, any warm regard. I leave her to Dick
Whittington and Shakespeare, who did so much to popularize her; to Gray
and Matthew Arnold and "C. S. C.," who have drawn her more sinister
traits. Gray remarks, with reference to "the pensive Selima" and her
hopeless struggles in the tub of goldfish, that "a favourite has no
friend." Archbishop Benson rendered the line
"Delicias dominæ cetera turba fugit."
I join the unfriendly throng, and pass to other themes.
The pet-keeping instinct, strong in infancy but suppressed by the iron
traditions of the Public School, not seldom reasserts itself in the
freedom of later life. "The Pets of History" would be a worthy theme
for a Romanes Lecture at Oxford; and, if the purview were expanded
so as to include the Pets of Literature, it would be a fit subject
for the brilliant pen of Mr. Frederic Harrison. We might conveniently
adopt a Wordsworthian classification, such as "Pets belonging to the
period of Childhood," "Juvenile Pets," "Pets and the Affections,"
"Pets of the Fancy," and "Pets of the Imagination." In the last-named
class a prominent place would be assigned to Heavenly Una's milk-white
lamb and to Mary's snowy-fleeced follower. "Pets of the Fancy" has, I
must confess, something of a pugilistic sound, but it might fairly be
held to include the tame eagle which Louis Napoleon, when resident in
Carlton Gardens, used to practise in the basement for the part which it
was to play in his descent on Boulogne. Under "Pets and the Affections"
we should recall Chaucer's "Prioresse"--
"Of smale houndes hadde sche, that sche fedde
With rostud fleissh, and mylk, and wastel bredde."