NOVEMBER.

Will the reader forgive, this month, a somewhat more serious gossip?

In my childhood I used to spend long holidays with my grandparents in Devonshire, and afterwards lived with them for a while when the shades of the prison-house began to close and I attended my first 'real' school as a day-boy. I liked those earlier visits best, for they were holidays, and I had great times in the hayfields and apple orchards, and rode a horse, and used in winter-time to go shooting with my grandfather and carry the powder-flask and shot-flask for his gun—an old muzzle-loader. Though stern in his manner, he was (as I grew to learn) extraordinarily, even extravagantly, kind; and my grandmother lived for me, her eldest grandchild. Years afterwards I gathered that in the circle of her acquaintance she passed for a satirical, slightly imperious, lady: and I do seem to remember that she suffered fools with a private reserve of mirth. But she loved her own with a thoroughness which extended—good housewife that she was—down to the last small office.

In short, here were two of the best and most affectionate grandparents in the world, who did what they knew to make a child happy all the week. But in religion they were strict evangelicals, and on Sunday they took me to public worship and acquainted me with Hell. From my eighth to my twelfth year I lived on pretty close terms with Hell, and would wake up in the night and lie awake with the horror of it upon me. Oddly enough, I had no very vivid fear for myself—or if vivid it was but occasional and rare. Little pietistic humbug that I was, I fancied myself among the elect: but I had a desperate assurance that both my parents were damned, and I loved them too well to find the conviction bearable. To this day I wonder what kept me from tackling my father on the state of his soul. The result would have been extremely salutary for me: for he had an easy sense of humour, a depth of conviction of his own which he united with limitless tolerance, and a very warm affection for his mother-in-law. Let it suffice that I did not: but for two or three years at least my childhood was tormented with visions of Hell derived from the pulpit and mixed up with two terrible visions derived from my reading—the ghost of an evil old woman in red-heeled slippers from Sir Walter Scott's story,The Tapestried Room, and a jumble of devils from a chapter of Samuel Warren'sDiary of a Late Physician. I had happened on these horrors among the dull contents of my grandfather's book-case.

For three or four years these companions—the vision of Hell particularly and my parents in it—murdered my childish sleep. Then, for no reason that I can give any account of, it all faded, and boy or man I have never been troubled at all by Hell or the fear of it.

The strangest part of the whole affair is that no priest, from first to last, has ever spoken to me in private of any life but this present one, or indeed about religion at all. I suppose there must be some instinct in the sacerdotal mind which warns it off certain cases as hopeless from the first… and yet I have always been eager to discuss serious things with the serious.

There has been no great loss, though—apart from the missing of sociableness—if one may judge the arguments that satisfy my clerical friends from the analogies they use in the pulpit. The subject of a future life is one, to be sure, which can hardly be discussed without resort to analogy. But there are good and bad analogies, and of all bad ones that which grates worst upon the nerves of a man who will have clear thinking (to whatever it lead him) is the common one of the seed and the flower.

"The flowers that we behold each yearIn chequer'd meads their heads to rear,New rising from the tomb;The eglantines and honey daisies,And all those pretty smiling facesThat still in age grow young—Even those do cryThat though men die,Yet life from death may come,"

Wrote John Hagthorpe in verses which generations of British schoolboys have turned into Latin alcaics; and how often have we not 'sat under' this argument in church at Easter or when the preacher was improving a Harvest Festival? Examine it, and you see at once that the argument is notin pari materiâ; that all the true correspondence between man and the flower-seed begins and ends in this world. As the seed becomes a plant, blossoms and leaves the seeds of other flowers, so of seed man is begotten, flourishes and dies, leaving his seed behind him—all in this world. The 'seed' argument makes an illicit jump from one world to another after all its analogies have been met and satisfied on this side of the grave. If flowers went to heaven and blossomed there (which is possible indeed, but is not contended) it might be cogent. As things are, one might as validly reason from the man to prove that flowers go to heaven, as from the flower to prove that man goes thither. St. Paul (as I do not forget) uses the similitude of the seed: but his argument is a totally different one. St. Paul bids us not be troubled in what form the dead shall be raised; for as we sow "not the body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat or of some other grain," so God will raise the dead in what form it pleases Him: in other words, he tells us that since bare grain may turn into such wonderful and wonderfully different things as wheat, barley, oats, rye, in this world, we need not marvel that bare human bodies planted here should be raised in wonderful form hereafter. Objections may be urged against this illustration: I am only concerned to point out that it illustrates an argument entirely different from the common pulpit one, which (I suspect) we should have to endure far less frequently were it our custom to burn our dead, and did not interment dig a trap for facile rhetoric.

Further, St. Paul's particular warning, if it do not consciously contain, at least suggests, a general warning against interpreting the future life in terms of this one, whereas its delights and pains can have little or nothing in common with ours. We try to imagine them by expanding or exaggerating and perpetuating ours—or some of them; but the attempt is demonstrably foolish, and leads straight to its own defeat. It comes of man's incapacity to form a conception of Eternity, or at any rate to grasp and hold it long enough to reason about it; by reason of which incapacity he falls back upon the easier, misleading conception of 'Everlasting Life.' In Eternity time is not: a man dies into it to-day and awakes (say) yesterday, for in Eternity yesterday and to-day and to-morrow are one, and ten thousand years is as one day. This vacuum of time you may call 'Everlasting Life,' but it clearly differs from what men ordinarily and almost inevitably understand by 'Everlasting Life,' which to them is an endless prolongation of time. Therefore, when they imagine heaven as consisting of an endless prolongation and exaggeration or rarefication of such pleasures as we know, they invite the retort, "And pray what would become of any one of our known pleasures, or even of our conceivable pleasures, if it were made everlasting?" As Jowett asked, with his usual dry sagacity, in his Introduction to thePhædo—

"What is the pain that does not become deadened after a thousand years? or what is the nature of that pleasure or happiness which never wearies by monotony? Earthly pleasures and pains are short in proportion as they are keen, of any others which are both intense and lasting we have no experience and can form no idea.… To beings constituted as we are the monotony of singing psalms would be as great an affliction as the pains of hell, and might even be pleasantly interrupted by them."

This is trenchant enough, and yet we perceive that the critic is setting up his rest upon the very fallacy he attacks—the fallacy of using 'Eternity' and 'Everlasting Life' as convertible terms. He neatly enough reduces to absurdity the prolongation, through endless time, of pleasures which delight us because they are transitory: he does not see, or for the moment forgets, that Eternity is not a prolongation of time at all, but an absolute negation of it.

There seems to be no end to the confusion of men's thought on this subject. Take, for example, this extract from our late Queen's private journal (1883):—

"After luncheon saw the great poet Tennyson in dearest Albert's room for nearly an hour; and most interesting it was. He is grown very old, his eyesight much impaired. But he was very kind. Asked him to sit down. He talked of many friends he had lost, and what it would be if he did not feel and know that there was another world where there would be no partings: and then he spoke with horror of the unbelievers and philosophers who would make you believe that there was no other world, no immortality, who tried to explain all away in a miserable manner. We agreed that, were such a thing possible, God, who is Love, would be far more cruel than any human being."

It was, no doubt, a touching and memorable interview—these two, aged and great, meeting at a point of life when grandeur and genius alike feel themselves to be lonely, daily more lonely, and exchanging beliefs upon that unseen world where neither grandeur nor genius can plead more than that they have used their gifts for good. And yet was not Tennyson yielding to the old temptation to interpret the future life in terms of this one? Speculation will not carry us far upon this road; yet, so far as we can, let us carry clear thinking with us. Cruelty implies the infliction of pain: and there can be no pain without feeling. What cruelty, then, can be inflicted on the dead, if they have done with feeling? Or what on the living, if they live in a happy delusion and pass into nothingness without discovering the cheat? Let us hold most firmly that there has been no cheat; but let us also be reasonable and admit that, if cheat there be, it cannot also be cruel, since everything that would make it a cheat would also blot out completely all chance of discovery, and therefore all pain of discovering.

This is a question on which, beyond pleading that what little we say ought to be (but seldom is) the result of clear thinking, I propose to say little, not only because here is not the place for metaphysics, but because—to quote Jowett again—"considering the 'feebleness of the human faculties and the uncertainty of the subject,' we are inclined to believe that the fewer our words the better. At the approach of death there is not much said: good men are too honest to go out of the world professing more than they know. There is perhaps no important subject about which, at any time, even religious people speak so little to one another."

I would add that, in my opinion, many men fall into this reticence because as they grow older the question seems to settle itself without argument, and they cease by degrees to worry themselves about it. It dies in sensible men almost insensibly with the death of egoism. At twenty we are all furious egoists; at forty or thereabouts—and especially if we have children, as at forty every man ought—our centre of gravity has completely shifted. We care a great deal about what happens to the next generation, we care something about our work, but about ourselves and what becomes of us in the end I really think we care very little. By this time, if we have taken account of ourselves, ourselves are by no means so splendidly interesting as they used to be, but subjects rather of humorous and charitable comprehension.

Of all the opening passages in Plato—master of beautiful openings—I like best that of theLaws. The scene is Crete; the season, midsummer; and on the long dusty road between Cnosus and the cave and temple of Zeus the three persons of the dialogue—strangers to one another, but bound on a common pilgrimage—join company and fall into converse together. One is an Athenian, one a Cretan, the third a Lacedæmonian, and all are elderly. Characteristically, the invitation to talk comes from the Athenian.

"It will pass the time pleasantly," he suggests; "for I am told that the distance from Cnosus to the cave and temple of Zeus is considerable, and doubtless there are shady places under the lofty trees which will protect us from the scorching sun. Being no longer young, we may often stop to rest beneath them, and get over the whole journey without difficulty, beguiling the time by conversation.""Yes, Stranger," answers Cleinias the Cretan, "and if we proceed onward we shall come to groves of cypresses, which are of rare height and beauty, and there are green meadows in which we may repose and converse.""Very good.""Very good indeed; and still better when we see them. Let us move on cheerily."

So, now walking, anon pausing in the shade to rest, the three strangers beguile their journey, which (as the Athenian was made, by one of Plato's cunning touches, to foresee) is a long one; and the dialogue, moving with their deliberate progress, extends to a length which no doubt in the course of some 2,300 years has frightened away many thousands of general readers. Yet its slow amplitude, when you come to think of it, is appropriate; for these elderly men are in no hurry, although they have plenty to talk about, especially on the subjects of youth and religion. "They have," says Jowett, "the feelings of old age about youth, about the state, about human things in general. Nothing in life seems to be of much importance to them: they are spectators rather than actors, and men in general appear to the Athenian speaker to be the playthings of the gods and of circumstances. Still they have a fatherly care of the young, and are deeply impressed by sentiments of religion.…"

"Human affairs," says the Athenian, "are hardly worth considering in earnest, and yet we must be in earnest about them—a sad necessity constrains us.… And so I say that about serious matters a man should be serious, and about a matter which is not serious he should not be serious; and that God is the natural and worthy object of our most serious and blessed endeavours. For man, as I said before, is made to be the plaything of God, and this, truly considered, is the best of him; wherefore also every man and woman should walk seriously and pass life in the noblest of pastimes, and be of another mind from what they are at present."

But on the subject of youth, too, our Athenian is anxiously, albeit calmly, serious: and especially on the right education of youth, "for," says he, "many a victory has been and will be suicidal to the victors; but education is never suicidal." By education he explains himself to mean—

"That education in virtue from youth upwards which makes a man eagerly pursue the ideal perfection of citizenship, and teaches him how rightly to rule and how to obey. This is the only education which, upon our view, deserves the name; and that other sort of training which aims at the acquisition of wealth or bodily strength, or mere cleverness apart from intelligence and justice is mean and illiberal, and is not worthy to be called education at all."

Plato wrote this dialogue when over seventy, an age which for many years (if I live) I shall be able to contemplate as respectable. Yet, though speaking at a guess, I say pretty confidently that the talk of these three imaginary interlocutors of his upon youth, and the feeling that colours it, convey more of the truth about old age than does Cicero's admired treatise on that subject or any of its descendants. For these treatises start with the false postulate that age is concerned about itself, whereas it is the mark of age to be indifferent about itself, and this mark of indifference deepens with the years. Nor did Cicero once in hisDe Senectuteget hold of so fine or so true a thought as Plato's Athenian lets fall almost casually—that a man should honour an aged parent as he would the image of a God treasured up and dwelling in his house.

The outlook of Plato's three elderly men, in fact, differs little, if at all, from Mr Meredith's as you may see for yourself by turning back to the September chapter and reading the part from "Not long ago an interviewer called on Mr. Meredith," through to the excerpt from 'Lucifer in Starlight'. Speaking as a parent, I say that this outlook is—I won't say the right one, though this too I believe—the outlook a mannaturallytakes as he grows older: naturally, because it is natural for a man to have children, and he who has none may find alleviations, but must miss the course of nature. As I write there comes back to me the cry of my old schoolmaster, T. E. Brown, protesting from the grave—

"But when I think if we must partAnd all this personal dream be fled—O, then my heart! O, then my useless heart!Would God that thou wert dead—A clod insensible to joys or ills—A stone remote in some bleak gully of the hills!"

I hear the note of anguish: but the appeal itself passes me by. 'All this personal dream' must flee: it is better that it should flee; nay, much of our present bliss rests upon its transitoriness. But we can continue in the children.

I think that perhaps the worst of having no children of their own is that it makes, or tends to make, men and women indifferent to children in general. I know, to be sure, that thousands of childless men and women reach out (as it were) wistfully, almost passionately towards the young. Still, I know numbers who care nothing for children, regard them as nuisances, and yet regard themselves as patriots—though of a state which presumably is to disappear in a few years, and with their acquiescence. I own that a patriotism which sets up no hope upon its country's continuous renewal and improvement, or even upon its survival beyond the next few years, seems to me as melancholy as it is sterile.

Some of these good folk, for example, play the piano more sedulously than that instrument, in my opinion, deserves; yet are mightily indignant, in talk with me, at what they call the wickedness of teaching multitudes of poor children to play upon pianos provided by the rates. As a historical fact, very few poor children play or have ever played on pianos provided by the rates. But I prefer, passing this correction over, to point out to my indignant friends that the upper and middle classes in England are ceasing to breed, and that therefore, unless the Anglo-Saxon race is to lose one of its most cherished accomplishments—unless we are content to live and see our national music ultimately confined to the jews' harp and penny whistle—we must endow the children of the poor with pianos—or perhaps as 'labour certificates' abbreviate the years at our disposal for instruction, with pianolas, and so realise the American sculptor's grand allegorical conception of 'Freedom presenting a Pianola to Fisheries and the Fine Arts.'

To drop irony—and indeed I would expel it, if I could, once and for all from these pages—I like recreation as much as most men, and have grown to find it in the dull but deeply absorbing business of sitting on Education Committees. Some fifteen years ago, in the first story in my first book of short stories, I confessed to being haunted by a dreadful sound: 'the footfall of a multitude more terrible than an army with banners, the ceaseless pelting feet of children—of Whittingtons turning and turning again.' Well, I still hear that footfall: but it has become less terrible to me, though not one whit less insistent: and it began to grow less terrible from the hour I picked up and read a certain little book,The Invisible Playmate, to the author of which (Mr. William Canton) I desire here to tender my thanks. In a little chapter of that little book Mr. Canton tells of an imaginary poem written by an imaginary Arm. (Arminius?), Altegans, an elderly German cobbler of 'the village of Wieheisstes, in the pleasant crag-and-fir region of Schlaraffenland.' Its name is the 'Erster Schulgang,' and I will own, and gratefully, that few real poems by real 'classics' have so sung themselves into my ears, or so shamed the dulness out of drudgery, as have the passages which I here set down for the mere pleasure of transcribing them:—

"The poem opens with a wonderful vision of children; delightful as it is unexpected; as romantic in presentment as it is commonplace in fact. All over the world—and all under it, too, when their time comes—the children are trooping to school. The great globe swings round out of the dark into the sun; there is always morning somewhere; and for ever in this shifting region of the morning-light the good Altegans sees the little ones afoot—shining companies and groups, couples, and bright solitary figures; for they all seem to have a soft heavenly light about them!"He sees them in country lanes and rustic villages; on lonely moorlands, where narrow, brown foot-tracks thread the expanse of green waste, and occasionally a hawk hovers overhead, or the mountain ash hangs its scarlet berries above the huge fallen stones set up by the Druids in the old days; he sees them on the hill-sides, in the woods, on the stepping-stones that cross the brook in the glen, along the sea-cliffs and on the wet ribbed sands; trespassing on the railway lines, making short cuts through the corn, sitting in ferry-boats: he sees them in the crowded streets of smoky cities, in small rocky islands, in places far inland where the sea is known only as a strange tradition."The morning-side of the planet is alive with them; one hears their pattering footsteps everywhere. And as the vast continents sweep 'eastering out of the high shadow which reaches beyond the moon,' and as new nations withtheircities and villages, their fields, woods, mountains, and sea-shores, rise up into the morning-side, lo! Fresh troops, and still fresh troops, and yet again fresh troops of 'these small school-going children of the dawn.'…"What are weather and season to this incessant panorama of childhood? The pigmy people trudge through the snow on moor and hill-side; wade down flooded roads; are not to be daunted by wind or rain, frost or the white smother of 'millers and bakers at fisticuffs.' Most beautiful of all, he sees them travelling schoolward by that late moonlight which now and again in the winter months precedes the tardy dawn."

My birthday falls in November month. Here, behind this Cornish window, we are careful in our keeping of birthdays; we observe them solemnly, stringent in our cheerful ritual;—and this has been my birthday sermon!

Hard by the edge of the sand-hills, and close beside the high road on the last rise before it dips to the coast, stands a turfed embankment surrounded by a shallow fosse. This is none of our ancient camps ('castles' we call them in Cornwall), as you perceive upon stepping within the enclosure, which rises in a complete circle save for two entrances cut through the bank and facing one another. You are standing in a perfectly level area a hundred and thirty feet in diameter; the surrounding rampart rises to a height of eight or nine feet, narrowing towards the top, where it is seven feet wide; and around its inner side you may trace seven or eight rows of seats cut in the turf, but now almost obliterated by the grass.

This Round (as we call it) was once an open-air theatre or planguary (plain-an-guaré, place of the play). It has possibly a still older history, and may have been used by the old Cornish for their councils and rustic sports; but we know that it was used as a theatre, perhaps as early as the fourteenth century, certainly as late as the late sixteenth: and, what is more, we have preserved for us some of the plays performed in it.

They are sacred or miracle plays, of course. If you draw a line from entrance to entrance, then at right angles to it there runs from the circumference towards the centre of the area a straight shallow trench, terminating in a spoon-shaped pit. The trench is now a mere depression not more than a foot deep, the pit three feet: but doubtless time has levelled them up, and there is every reason to suppose that the pit served to represent Hell (or, in the drama of The Resurrection, the Grave), and the trench allowed the performers, after being thrust down into perdition, to regain the green-room unobserved—either actually unobserved, the trench being covered, or by a polite fiction, the audience pretending not to see. My private belief is that, the stage being erected above and along the trench, they were actually hidden while they made their exit. Where the trench meets the rampart a semi-circular hollow, about ten feet in diameter, makes a breach in the rows of seats. Here, no doubt, stood the green-room.

The first notice of the performance of these plays occurs in Carew'sSurvey of Cornwall, published in 1602:—

"Pastimes to delight the mind, the Cornishmen have guary miracles and three-men's songs: and for exercise of the body hunting, hawking, shooting, wrestling, hurling, and such other games."The guary miracle, in English a miracle play, is a kind of Interlude compiled in Cornish out of some scripture history with that grossness which accompanied the Romans'vetus comedia. For representing it they raise an earthen amphitheatre in some open field, having the diameter of this inclosed plain some forty or fifty foot. The country people flock from all sides, many miles off, to hear and see it; for they have therein devils and devices to delight as well the eye as the ear; the players con not their parts without book, but are prompted by one called the Ordinary, who followeth at their back with the book in his hand and telleth them softly what they must pronounce aloud."

Our Round, you observe, greatly exceeds the dimensions given by Carew. But there were several in the west: one for instance, traceable fifty years ago, at the northern end of the town of Redruth, which still keeps the name of Planguary; and another magnificent one, of stone, near the church-town of St. Just by the Land's End. Carew may have seen only the smaller specimens.

As for the plays—well, they are by no means masterpieces of literature, yet they reveal here and there perceptions of beauty such as go with sincerity even though it be artless. Beautiful for instance is the idea, if primitive the writing, of a scene in one,Origo Mundi, where Adam, bowed with years, sends his son Seth to the gate of Paradise to beg his release from the weariness of living (I quote from Norris's translation):—

"O dear God, I am weary,Gladly would I see onceThe time to depart.Strong are the roots of the briars,That my arms are brokenTearing up many of them."Seth my son I will sendTo the gate of Paradise forthwith,To the Cherub, the guardian.Ask him if there will be for meOil of mercy at the lastFrom the Father, the God of Grace."

Seth answers that he does not know the road to Paradise. "Follow," says Adam—

"Follow the prints of my feet, burnt;No grass or flower in the world growsIn that same road where I went—I and thy Mother surely also—Thou wilt see the tokens."

Fine too is the story, in thePassio Domini Nostri, of the blind soldier Longius, who is led forward and given a lance, to pierce Christ's body on the Cross. He thrusts and the holy blood heals him of his blindness. Local colour is sparingly imported. One of the executioners, as he bores the Cross, says boastfully:—

"I will bore a hole for the one hand,There is not a fellow west of HayleWho can bore better."

—And in theResurrectioPilate rewards the gaoler for his trustiness with the Cornish manors of 'Fekenal, Carvenow and Merthyn,' and promises the soldiers by the Sepulchre 'the plain of Dansotha and Barrow Heath.' A simplicity scarcely less refreshing is exhibited inThe Life of St. Meriasec(a play recently recovered) by a scholar whom a pompous pedagogue is showing off. He says:—

"God help A, B, and C!The end of the song is D:No more is known to me,"

But promises to learn more after dinner.

Enthusiasts beg us to make the experiment of 'reviving' these old plays in their old surroundings. But here I pause, while admitting the temptation. One would like to give life again, if only for a day, to the picture which Mr. Norris conjures up:—

"The bare granite plain of St. Just, in view of Cape Cornwall and of the transparent sea which beats against that magnificent headland.… The mighty gathering of people from many miles around hardly showing like a crowd in that extended region, where nothing ever grows to limit the view on any side, with their booths and tents, absolutely necessary where so many people had to remain three days on the spot, would give a character to the assembly probably more like what we hear of the so-called religious revivals in America than of anything witnessed in more sober Europe."

But alas! I foresee the terrible unreality which would infect the whole business. Very pretty, no doubt, and suggestive would be the picture of the audience arrayed around the turf benches—

"In gradibus sedit populus de cespite factis—"

But one does not want an audience to be acting; and this audience would be making-believe even more heroically than the actors—that is, if it took the trouble to be in earnest at all. For the success of the experiment would depend on our reconstructing the whole scene—the ring of entranced spectators as well as the primitive show; and the country-people would probably, and not entirely without reason, regard the business as 'a stupid old May game.' The only spectators properly impressed would be a handful of visitors and solemn antiquarians. I can see those visitors. If it has ever been your lot to witness the performance of a 'literary' play in London and cast an eye over the audience it attracts, you too will know them and their stigmata—their ineffable attire, their strange hirsuteness, their air of combining instruction with amusement, their soft felt hats indented along the crown. No! We may, perhaps, produce new religious dramas in these ancient Rounds: decidedly we cannot revive the old ones.

While I ponder these things, standing in the deserted Round, there comes to me—across the sky where the plovers wheel and flash in the wintry sunshine—the sound of men's voices carolling at an unseen farm. They are singingThe First Nowell; but the fourth Nowell—the fourth of the refrain—is theclouof that most common, most excellent carol, and gloriously the tenors and basses rise to it. No, we cannot revive the old Miracle Plays: but here in the Christmas Carols we have something as artlessly beautiful which we can still preserve, for with them we have not to revive, but merely to preserve, the conditions.

In a preface to a little book of carols chosen (and with good judgment) some years ago by the Rev. H. R. Bramley, of Magdalen College, Oxford, and well edited in the matter of music by Sir John Stainer, I read that—

"The time-honoured and delightful custom of thus celebrating the Birthday of the Holy Child seems, with some change of form, to be steadily and rapidly gaining ground. Instead of the itinerant ballad-singer, or the little bands of wandering children, the practice of singing carols in Divine Service, or by a full choir at some fixed meeting, is becoming prevalent."

Since Mr. Bramley wrote these words the practice has grown more prevalent, and the shepherds of Bethlehem are in process of becoming thoroughly sophisticated and self-conscious. For that is what it means. You may (as harassed bishops will admit) do a number of irrelevant things in church, but you cannot sing the best carols there. You cannot toll in your congregation, seat your organist at the organ, array your full choir in surplices, and tune up to sing, for example—

"Rise up, rise up, brother Dives,And come along with me;There's a place in Hell prepared for youTo sit on the serpent's knee."

Or this—

"In a manger laid and wrapped I was—So very poor, this was my chance—Between an ox and a silly poor ass,To call my true love to the dance."

Or this—

"Joseph did whistle and Mary did sing,And all the bells on earth did ringOn Christmas Day in the morning."

These are verses from carols, and from excellent carols: but I protest that with 'choirs and places where they sing' they will be found incongruous. Indeed, Mr. Bramley admits it. Of his collection "some," he says, "from their legendary, festive or otherwise less serious character, are unfit for use within the church."

Now since, as we know, these old carols were written to be sung in the open air, or in the halls and kitchens of private houses, I prefer to put Mr. Bramley's proposition conversely, and say that the church is an unsuitable place for carol singing. If the clergy persist in so confining it, they will no doubt in process of time evolve a number of new compositions which differ from ordinary hymns sufficiently to be called carols, but from which the peculiar charm of the carol has evaporated. This charm (let me add) by no means consists in mere primitiveness or mere archaism. Genuine carols (if we could only get rid of affectation and be honest authors in our own century without straining to age ourselves back into the fifteenth) might be written to-day as appropriately as ever. 'Joseph did whistle,' &c., was no less unsuited at the date of its composition to performance by a full choir in a chancel than it is to-day. But whatever the precise nature of the charm may be, you can prove by a very simple experiment that such a performance tends to impair it. Assemble a number of carollers about your doorstep or within your hall, and listen to their rendering of 'The first good joy,' or 'The angel Gabriel;' then take them off to church and let them sing these same ditties to an organ accompaniment. You will find that, strive against it as they may, the tune drags slower and slower; the poem has become a spiritless jingle, at once dismal and trivial. Take the poor thing out into the fresh air again and revive it with a fife and drum; stay it with flagons and comfort it with apples, for it is sick of improper feeding.

No, no: such a carol as 'God rest you, merry gentlemen,' has a note which neither is suited by, nor can be suited to, what people call 'the sacred edifice': while 'Joseph was an old man,' 'I saw three ships' and 'The first good joy' are plainly impossible. Associate them with organ and surpliced choir, and you are mixing up things that differ. Omit them, at the same time banning the house-to-house caroller, and you tyrannically limit men's devotional impulses. I am told that the clergy frown upon house-to-house carolling, because they believe it encourages drunkenness. Why then, let them take the business in hand and see that too much drink is neither taken nor offered. This ought not to be very difficult. But, as with the old plays, so with carol-singing, it is easier and more consonant with the Puritan temper to abolish a practice than to elevate it and clear away abuses: and the half-instructed mind is taught with fatal facility to condemn use and abuse in a lump, to believe carol-singing a wile of the Evil One because Bill once went around carol-singing and came home drunk.

In parishes where a more tolerant spirit prevails I am glad to note that the old custom, and even a taste for the finer ditties, seem to be reviving. Certainly the carollers visit us in greater numbers and sing with more evidence of careful practice than they did eight or ten years ago: and friends in various parts of England have a like story to tell. In this corner the rigour of winter does not usually begin before January, and it is no unusual thing to be able to sit out of doors in sunshine for an hour or so in the afternoon of Christmas Day. The vessels in sight fly their flags and carry bunches of holly at their topmast-heads: and I confess the day is made cheerfuller for us if they are answered by the voices of carollers on the waterside, or if, walking inland, I hear the note of the clarionet in some 'town-place' or meet a singing-party tramping between farm and farm.

That the fresh bloom of the carol was evanescent and all too easily destroyed I always knew; but never realised its extreme fugacity until, some five years ago, it fell to me to prepare an anthology, which, under the title ofThe Oxford Book of English Verse, has since achieved some popularity. I believed that previous English anthologists had unjustly, even unaccountably, neglected our English carols, and promised myself to redress the balance. I hunted through many collections, and brought together a score or so of pieces which, considered merely as carols, were gems of the first water. But no sooner did I set them among our finer lyrics than, to my dismay, their colours vanished; the juxtaposition became an opposition which killed them, and all but half a dozen had to be withdrawn. There are few gems more beautiful than the amethyst: but an amethyst will not live in the company of rubies. A few held their own— the exquisite 'I sing of a Maiden' for instance—

"I sing of a MaidenThat is makeles;[1]King of all kingsTo her son she ches.[2]"He came al so stillThere his mother was,As dew in AprilThat falleth on the grass."He came al so stillTo his mother's bour,As dew in AprilThat falleth on the flour."He came al so stillThere his mother layAs dew in AprilThat falleth on the spray."Mother and maidenWas never none but she;Well may such a ladyGoddes mother be."[1] Without a mate.[2] Chose.

Or 'Lestenyt, lordings,' or 'Of one that is so fair and bright;' and my favourite, 'The Seven Virgins,' set among the ballads lost none of its lovely candour. But on the whole, and sorely against my will, it had to be allowed that our most typical carols will not bear an ordeal through which many of the rudest ballads pass safely enough. So it will be found, I suspect, with the carols of other nations. I take a typical English one, exhumed not long ago by Professor Flügel from a sixteenth century MS. at Balliol College, Oxford, and pounced upon as a gem by two such excellent judges of poetry as Mr. Alfred W. Pollard and Mr. F. Sidgwick:—

"Can I not sing but Hoy!The jolly shepherd made so much joy!The shepherd upon a hill he sat,He had on him his tabard[1] and his hat,His tar-box, his pipe and his flagat;[2]And his name was callèd jolly, jolly Wat,For he was a good herd's-boy,Ut hoy!For in his pipe he made so much joy."The shepherd upon a hill was laidHis dog to his girdle was tayd,He had not slept but a little braidButGloria in excelsiswas to him saidUt hoy!For in his pipe he made so much joy."The shepherd on a hill he stood,Round about him his sheep they yode,[3]He put his hand under his hood,He saw a star as red as blood.Ut hoy!For in his pipe he made so much joy."

The shepherd of course follows the star, and it guides him to the inn and the Holy Family, whom he worships:—

"'Now farewell, mine own herdsman Wat!''Yea, 'fore God, Lady, even so I hat:[4]Lull well Jesu in thy lap,And farewell Joseph, with thy round cap!'Ut hoy!For in his pipe he made so much joy."[1] Short coat.[2] Flagon.[3] Went.[4] Am hight, called.

Set beside this the following Burgundian carol (of which, by the way, you will find a charming translation in Lady Lindsay'sA Christmas Posy):—

"Giullô, pran ton tamborin;Toi, pran tai fleùte, Robin.Au son de cés instruman—Turelurelu, patapatapan—Au son de cés instrumanJe diron Noel gaiman."C'étó lai môde autrefoiDe loüé le Roi dé Roi;Au son de cés instruman—Turelurelu, patapatapan—Au son de cés instrumanAi nos an fau faire autan."Ce jor le Diale at ai cu,Randons an graice ai Jésu;Au son de cés instruman—Turelurelu, patapatapar—Au son de cés instrumanFezon lai nique ai Satan."L'homme et Dei son pu d'aicorQue lai fleùte et le tambor.Au son de cés instruman—Turelurelu, patapatapan—Au son de cés instrumanChanton, danson, santons-an!"

To set either of these delightful ditties alongside of the richly-jewelled lyrics of Keats or of Swinburne, of Victor Hugo or of Gautier would be to sin against congruity, even as to sing them in church would be to sin against congruity.

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