VIIChristmas
IT is always possible to divine something of the state of Professor Maturin’s mind from the order or the congestion of his books and papers. When, therefore, the other day, I found him behind a perfect rampart of volumes bristling with paper-markers, I knew that he was loading with some new knowledge or other, and meditated how I might draw his fire. But he anticipated my efforts by sallying from his fortification, dishevelled but beaming, with the salvo:
“God rest you, merry gentleman;Let nothing you dismay!—
“God rest you, merry gentleman;Let nothing you dismay!—
“God rest you, merry gentleman;
Let nothing you dismay!—
“What will you give for the Christmas spirit?” he continued. “I have been seeking it, seasonably, and believe that I have found it.”
I capitulated immediately, and we sat down by the fire for a parley, which he began promptly.
“The Christmas spirit appears to be inherent in human nature, in the climatic change from summer seed-time, through autumn harvest, to hearty winter relaxation and cheer over the garnered fruits of husbandry or art. In the South it began as the winter feast of Saturn, celebrated withmasking and gifts. In the North it was Odin’s, with log fires and feasting. Then the early Christian fathers chose it for celebrating their Founder’s new teaching of peace and good-will.
“Gradually all of this blended into the most interesting mingling of the material and the spiritual that we have in all our manners and customs. The traditions of the shepherds and the star, the nativity, and the wise men of the East became the centre of the celebration. But the mediaeval popularity of Macrobius’s book on the Saturnalia perpetuated its carnival and games, its candles and garlands, and its giving of gifts, especially to children. The descending Teutons brought their wassail and their tree ceremonials. Germany added Saint Nicholas, Santa Claus, and the filling of stockings. France seems to have furnished the carols. England elaborated the season’s food and drink, and America contributed the turkey.
“With the growth of church and state the day became one of pomp and circumstance. Westminster Abbey was consecrated on Christmas in 1065, and William was crowned there the next Christmas. Other episcopal and royal functions followed, until more was spent on this season than in all the year beside. There were specialbuildings, elaborate pageants elaborately set, and feasts of five hundred dishes with sixty oxen for one course and eight-hundred-pound plum puddings. There were jousts at which three hundred spears were broken, and the presentation of as many as thirty plays. Earlier, the plays were religious; later, Shakespeare provided the court play for Christmas, 1601, and Ben Jonson for 1616. Milton’s ‘Comus’ was presented at Ludlow Castle during the Christmas season of 1634.
“The universities and the inns of court were likewise keen for plays and for ‘the boar’s head served with minstrelsy.’ The aristocracy and gentry kept open house, for sometimes as many as three hundred persons. Sir Roger de Coverley sent a string of puddings and a pack of cards to every poor family in the parish; and rich decedents left Christmas dinners and gifts to the poor. The peasantry entered heartily into seasonable mummery and games, dances and songs, so industriously thumbing the many early printed books of carols that almost none of them remain.
“Everywhere indoor leisure and the seasonable mood gave rise to all sorts and conditions of legendary lore—of spirits, of trees that flowerand animals that speak on Christmas eve, and of weather wisdom, like:
If Christmasse day on fryday be,The frost of wynter harde shal be.
If Christmasse day on fryday be,The frost of wynter harde shal be.
If Christmasse day on fryday be,
The frost of wynter harde shal be.
“From the beginning, the spirit of the celebration had to wage war with the flesh. The fathers of the church never ceased to remonstrate that festivity endangered the solemnity of the season. There were constant failures to remember the peaceful character of the feast. The Danes fell on King Alfred while he was celebrating Christmas in 878, and William the Conqueror got into York on Christmas in 1069 by sending in spies with good-will gifts of food. The mediaeval Lords of Misrule, originally established to control festivity, became themselves uncontrolled, and had to be abolished.”
“Even though they made some very good laws,” I interrupted, “against eating two dinners in one day, and kissing without leave.”
“The Pilgrim fathers at Plymouth frowned on current excesses by working on Christmas day in 1620 and by later prohibiting its celebration. Cromwell’s Parliament sat every Christmas day from 1644 to 1656, and sermonized and legislated against the celebration as a carnal feast, ordering churches shut, shops open, and decorationsdown. But this was too extreme, and the people smashed the shop windows and put up more evergreens than the Lord Mayor’s men could burn; and Evelyn delighted in being arrested for going to church on Christmas in 1657. In five years all was so changed that Pepys could for once combine preaching and practice, by hearing a Christmas sermon on joyousness and having plum pudding and mince pie for dinner.
“From the beginning, too, the spirit of benevolence has had its difficulties. Watchmen left verses at doors, wanderers sang carols, and children chanted, ‘I’ve got a little pocket to put a penny in,’ until such suggestion to benevolence became a little too definite, and it was legislated against. In 1668 Pepys says tipping ‘cost me much money this Christmas already, and will do more.’ Half a century later Swift writes: ‘By the Lord Harry, I shall be done with Christmas boxes. The rogues at the coffee house have raised their tax, every one giving a crown, and I gave mine for shame; besides a great many half-crowns, to great men’s porters, etc.’
“Of other giving Swift writes: ‘Making agreeable presents ... [is] an affair as delicate as most in the course of life,’ and he never fails to caution Stella against a new danger, that of losingher money in Christmas gaming. Concerning this custom Walpole wrote on twelfth-day in 1752: ‘His Majesty, according to annual custom, offered myrrh, frankincense, and a small bit of gold; and, at night, in commemoration of the three kings or wise men, the King and royal family played at hazard ... his most sacred Majesty won three guineas, and his R. H. the duke, three thousand four hundred pounds.’
“Concerning gifts, Walpole instances the charming presents devised for a little girl of ten by the Duchess of Suffolk and Lord Chetwynd, aged seventy-six and eighty, respectively; and he prescribes the theory, ‘Pray remember not to ruin yourself in presents. A very slight gift of a guinea or two obliges as much, is more fashionable, and not a moment sooner forgotten than a magnificent one; and then you may cheaply oblige the more persons.’”
“Such being the earlier history and tradition of the festival, what should be its modern spirit?” I inquired.
“For that, too,” continued Professor Maturin, “there is no lack of leading. Charles Lamb is frankly for ‘the good old munching system ...ingens gloria apple-pasty-orum,’ and does not hesitate to prescribe for Christmas, 1800, ‘snipes exactlyat nine, punch at ten, with argument; difference of opinion expected about eleven, perfect unanimity, with some haziness and dimness, before twelve.’
“Thomas Love Peacock makes his Rev. Dr. Opimian say, about 1860: ‘I think much of Christmas and all its associations. I like the idea of the yule-log. I like the festoons of holly on the walls and windows; the dance under the mistletoe; the gigantic sausage; the baron of beef; the vast globe of plum pudding; the tapping of the old October; the inexhaustible bowl of punch.... I like the idea of what has gone, and I can still enjoy the reality of what remains.’
“Dr. Opimian further prescribes for the season such merry tales as his contemporary ‘Ingoldsby Legends’ provide in the distinguished career, but inglorious end, of ‘The Spectre of Tappington,’ which nightly made away with the trousers of the guest who occupied the haunted room at Christmas. All of these same hearty traditions are perpetuated by Fenimore Cooper in his description of Christmas festivity in ‘The Pioneers.’”
“Does not Washington Irving,” I asked, “have an important place in the tradition?”
“Precisely so,” continued Professor Maturin;“it was reserved for him, from his knowledge of Dutch and English customs, to make a new selection and recombination of Christmas ideals so appealing as to have set the standard ever since. His half-dozen Christmas papers dwell, with his characteristic love of the past, on the superior honesty, kindliness, and joy of the old holiday customs. No refinement of elegance can replace, he maintains, the family gatherings, the perfecting of sympathies, the realization of mutual dependence, and the increase of mutual affection, instinct in the ancient hospitality. To his own question as to the worth of Christmas observances, he gives the most characteristic answer in his philosophy—there is plenty of wisdom in the world, but we need more sound pleasure to beguile care and increase benevolence and good humor.
“It was this ethical intention to reëstablish the old tradition of kindliness that Dickens followed, with the result of again endearing the season, as Mr. Howells has said, ‘to the whole English-speaking world, with a wider and deeper hold than it had ever had before ... the chief agency in universalizing the great Christmas holiday as we now have it.’
“There is no need to remind any one howthe whole baker’s dozen of Dickens’s ‘Christmas Stories’ delightfully champion hard work and good cheer, sympathy and benevolence, affection and self-sacrifice, and even the softening effects of suffering and sorrow—sometimes by directly illustrating these blessings, again by picturing the misery of their opposites. His satires at pretended benevolence and commercial greed, and his championship of the common man, answer in advance all later criticisms concerning the burden and the cost of Christmas and current complaints over popular ingratitude.
“‘I have great faith in the poor,’ Dickens once wrote. ‘To the best of my ability I always endeavour to present them in a favourable light to the rich; and I shall never cease, I hope, until I die, to advocate their being made as happy and as wise as the circumstances of their condition, in its utmost improvement, will admit.’
“Thackeray called Dickens’s ‘Christmas Stories’ a national benefit, and to any man or woman who reads them a personal kindness; and Thackeray, too, served the season with Christmas pieces of sympathy, humor, and pantomime, and with his famous onslaught on pretentious misanthropy. You recall how theTimesslated one of his Christmas stories as worthless on thevery day that the publishers asked for a second edition; and how Thackeray, in the preface to the second edition,—‘An Essay on Thunder and Small Beer,’—made such delightful fun of the review’s futility, its absurd superciliousness, its inflated language, and its false figures of speech, that snarling criticism learned at least a temporary lesson.
“Thackeray waged his war differently from Dickens, but, on the whole, I have found nothing more compactly adequate on the Christmas spirit than Thackeray’s
I wish you health, and love, and mirth,As fits the solemn Christmas-tide,
I wish you health, and love, and mirth,As fits the solemn Christmas-tide,
I wish you health, and love, and mirth,
As fits the solemn Christmas-tide,
unless it be the conclusion to old Nicholas Breton’s ‘Fantasticks,’ written in 1626: ‘In brief I thus conclude it: I hold it a memory of Heaven’s love and the world’s peace, the mirth of the honest and the meeting of the friendly. Farewell.’”