The Book of Christmas;

m.m'rn?,^^^'^"^" LIBRARIES 3 3433 07994657 4 '-' to' V'A":-' iV'ry mm THE HOLY NIGHT. Corrcggio. 459998 ASrO«, LEMOK AW© Copyright, 1909, By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electro typed. Published October, 1909 J. 8. Cushlng Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. INTRODUCTION /ÂROLS are still sung in almost numberless churches, ^— ' lights glow on altars bound and wreathed with spruce and holly, trees are set up in innumerable homes, and mobs of merry children sing and dance around them, stockings take on grotesque shapes and hang gaping with treasures for early marauders on Christmas morning, and hosts of men and women keep the day in their hearts in all peace and piety. 'jThe festival, dear to the heart of sixty generations, has survived the commercial uses which it has been com- pelled to serve; the weariness of buying and selling in the vast bazaar of nations, stocked with all manner of things which stimulate the offerings of friendship; the wide- spread sense of irony which success without happiness breeds; the indifference of feeling and satiety of emotion fostered by great prosperity without that grace of culture which subdues wealth to the finer uses of life. It has survived! the cynical spirit that distrusts sentiment and sneers at emotion as weaknesses which have no place in a scientific age and among men and women who know life. It has survived that preoccupation with affairs which leaves little time for feelings, and that resolute determination to make men good which leaves scant room for efforts to make them happy. vl Introduction But even in this age of hard-headed practical sagacity and hard-minded goodness ruthlessly bent on doing the Lord's work by the methods of a police magistrate, Christ- mas carols are still sung; and the organization of virtue in numberless societies with presidents and secretaries, and, above all, with treasurers, has not dimmed the glow of the love which bears fruit in a forest of Christmas trees, with mobs of merry children shouting around them. The plain truth is that the world is not half so heartless as it pretends to be'. In its desire to wear that air of weary omniscience which is supposed to bear witness to a wide experience of life it often pooh-poohs appeals which make its well-regulated heart beat with painful irregularity. (' There is as much hypocrisy in the scornful as in the senti- mental ; and the worldly-wise man often sniffles behind the handkerchief with which he pretends to stifle a sneeze. We pretend to have become too wise to be moved by lighted can- dles or stirred by children's voices singing of angels and shepherds; but in our heart of hearts the old story is dear to us, and we are eager eavesdroppers when the ancient mys- teries of love and sympathy and friendship are talked about by the poets or novelists. We speak patronizingly of those old-fashioned Christmas essays in the ''Sketch Book," and we pretend to be amused by the recollection that "The Christmas Carol" once filled us with an almost insane desire to make somebody happy. But it is noticeable that the old text-books of Christmas sentiment reappear year after year in an almost endless variety of forms ; and that in an age when the strong man boasts of his distrust of emotion, and the strong woman holds sentiment in the contempt one feels for out-grown toys, books that have to do with Christmas are read with Introduction vii surreptitious pleasure. We apologize publicly for our interest in them and deprecate the attempt to revive a faded interest and recall a decayed tradition; but in private vê read vîth avidity these survivals of archaic feeling and prehistoric emotion. When "The Birds' Christmas Carol" appeared, we laughed over it so as to hide our tears. Mr. Janvier's charming account of Christmas vâys in Provence capti- vated us, and we found excuse for its tender regard for old habits and observances in the fact that Mr. Janvier has been in the habit of spending a good deal of time with a group of unworldly old poets who still dream of joy and beauty as the precious things of life, and hold to the fellowship of artists instead of forming a labor union. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, Mr, F, Marion Crawford, and Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith have written undisguised Christmas stories with as little sense of detachment from modern life as if they were telling detective tales; and, what is more astonishing to the worldly-wise man, these stories have a glow of life, a vitality of charm and sweetness in them, that make scorn and cynicism seem cheap and vulgar. And here comes Dr. Crothers and stirs the smouldering Christmas fire into a blaze and sits down before it as if it were real logs in combustion and not a trick with gas, and makes gentle sport of the wisdom of the sceptic. These recent revivals of Christmas literature show a surprising vitality, and have met with a surprising response from a generation popularly believed to be given over to the making of money and the extirpation of human feeling. It is even said that there are men and women of such insistent hopefulness that they an- ticipate a time when the aged in feeling, the worn-out in sentiment, the infirm in imagination, and the crippled in heart will be brought again within sound of Christmas bells. viii Introduction There is little hope of bringing in the reign of good feeling by lighting a single Christmas fire, but a long line of such fires touching the receding horizon of the past with a happy glow is like a revival of a fading memory; it makes us suddenly aware of half-forgotten associations with the days that were once full of life and rippling with merriment like a mountain stream suffused with sunlight. We surrender ourselves so completely to the noisy activities of our own age that we forget how infinitesimal a portion of time it is and how misleading its emphasis often is. It is only a point on the face of the dial ; but we accept it as if it were a present eternity, a final stage in the evolution of men. That many of its sacred texts are the maxims of a short-sighted prudence, many of its major interests as short-lived as the passions of children, many of its ideas of life the cheapest parvenus in the world of thought, does not occur to us; its cynicisms are often reflections of its spiritual shallowness, and its scepticisms mere records of its meanness or corruption. Like all the times that have gone before it, it is a fragment of a fragment, and the only way to See life whole is to get away from it and look down on it as it takes its little place in the larger order of history. In this greater order of time the long line of Christmas fires glows like a great truth binding the fleeting generations into a unity of faith and feeling. When we light our fire, we are one with our ancestors of a thousand years ago; we evade the isolation of our time and escape its provincial narrowness; we rejoin the race from whose growth we have unconsciously separated ourselves; we open long-unused rooms and are amazed to find how large the house of life is and how hospitable. It has hearth room for all experience and for every kind of emotion ; for the thoughts that move Introduction ix in the order of logic; for the emotions that rise and fall like great tides that flow in from the infinite ; for the vigor _ that is born of will, and for the power evoked by discipline. It is when the different ages, with their diversities of interest and growth, send their children to sit together before the Christ- mas fire that we realize how wide life is, and how impossible it is for any age to compass it. The faith against which one age shuts the door stands serene and smiling in the centre of the next age ; the joy which one generation denies itself lies radiant on the face of a later generation ; the imagination which the reign of logic in one epoch sends into the wilder- ness returns with full hands to be the master of a wiser period. Before the Christmas fire that for two thousand years has sunk into embers to blaze again into a great light at the end of the twelfth month, men are not only reunited in the un- broken continuity of their fortunes, but in the wholeness of their life; in their power of vision as well as of sight, in their power of feeling as well as of thought, in their power of love as well as of action. This large hospitality of the Christmas fire, before which kings and beggars sit at ease and every human faculty finds its place, makes room for every gift and grace; for reason, with severe and wrinkled face; for sentiment, tender and reverent of all sweet and beautiful things; for the imagination, seeing heavenly visions, and the fancy catching glimpses of quaint or grotesque or fairy-like images, in the flame; for poetry, singing full-throated with Milton, or homely, familiar and domestic with the makers of the carols; for the story-tellers, spinning their fascinating tales within the circle of the" embracing glow ; for humor, full of smiles or filling the room with Homeric laughter; for X Introduction the players, whose mimic art shows the manger, the shepherds and the kings to successive generations crowding the playhouse with the eager joy of children or with the sacred memories of age; for the preachers, to whom the season brings a text apart from the disputes and antagonisms of the schools and churches; for companies of children, im- patiently waiting for the mysterious noise in the chimney; and for graybeards recalling old days and ways, — yule logs, country dances, waits singing under the frosty sky, stage coaches bearing guests and hampers filled with dain- aes to country houses standing with open doors and broad hearths for the fun and frolic, the tenderness and sentiment, the poetry and piety, of Christmas-tide, \^ At the end of nearly two thousand years Christmas shows no signs of decrepitude or weariness ; its danger lies not in forgetfulness but in perverted uses and overstimulated activities.

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