The Soul of Christmas

The Speaker, December 13, 1902


It is a distressing and amusing situation to be in entire agreement with the great majority of men upon the point that certain institutions or ideas are mingled of good and evil, but at the same time to disagree with them flatly and entirely about which part is evil and which good. Both behold a roughly similar picture of the scene, but ours is a photographic negative, all their blacks are white and all their whites black. I am in this unlucky condition especially with regard to two famous and not altogether dissimilar institutions, the Salvation Army and the philosophy of Comte. The usual verdict on the Salvation Army is expressed in a vague popular language among the polite somewhat thus: "I have no doubt they do a great deal of good; their aims are excellent; but I cannot approve of their methods, which are vulgar and desecrating." I fear I think exactly the opposite. I do not know whether the aims of the Salvation Army are excellent; to know that absolutely would be to know the secret of eternity; the thing of which I am quite certain is that their methods are glorious. They are sensational as religion itself is sensational, and they have succeeded in making men go up to their bedrooms and down to their countinghouses to the tune of an everlasting march. It is the same in the case of Comtism. The typical English Positivist, such as Mr. Frederic Harrison, commonly tells us that he offers Comtism as a general philosophic system, but does not mean to say, of course, that we should adopt the wild and theatrical schemes of the master with regard to ceremonies and hierarchies and festivals. He does not mean that we should keep the Comtist Calendar, or dress ourselves up as priests of humanity, or light bonfires because it is Darwin's Day. All this the English Positivist admits, with a certain rationalistic blush, is somewhat absurd. To me it appears the only real good part of Positivism. As a philosophy it is unsatisfactory: the mere project of concentrating all our worship on mankind, which is only one of the categories to which we belong and only one of the things we actually love, is as idle as to concentrate it on any other class; we might as well worship uncles or the mammalia. But the magnificent and genuine glory of Comte was precisely the thing which we all treat as tomfoolery, his realisation that if we are to begin the world over again we must begin with new ceremonies and new shrines and new festivals. If we cannot found these (and it seems that we cannot) the only inference is that we must be still sitting at the feet of the old. The last century has seen a furious onslaught upon Christianity, and upon no point was it more persistently or more brilliantly attacked than upon the point of its alleged enmity to human joy. Shelley and Swinburne and all their armies have passed again and again over the ground, but they have not altered it, they have not set up a single new trophy or ensign for the world's merriment to rally to; they have not given a name or a new occasion to human joy. Mr. Swinburne does not hang up his stocking on the eve of the birthday of Victor Hugo. Mr. William Archer does not sing carols descriptive of the early life of Ibsen outside his friends' front doors. There is no new festival- not even the possibility of one. The storm is over, and we look out into the changed and disordered and now quiet heavens, and there is no light there but the Star of Bethlehem. It is sufficiently discreditable that there should have been, as there unquestionably has been, a reaction against the festivities of Christmas, a disposition to pooh-pooh them and to tire of them. But it is even more discreditable that this tendency should have been chiefly remarkable among that very class, the hypercultivated and aesthetic class, which professes to desire above all things the beautifying of human life by symbol and ritual and the revival of legend. What is the use of their yearning after flowery pageantries and old-world dances when they have a solid ancient tradition still plying a roaring trade in the streets in the month of December, and they think it vulgar What is the use of their gathering fairy tales, like gold, from Scandinavia and the Ganges when they are in the heart of a fairy-tale, and to them it only smells of sausages? What is the use of Mr. George Moore digging in Irish cairns for lost gods if he does not hang up his stocking and cheer when the pudding is set alight. Of course I do not know that he does not. I hope, with trembling, that he does. But clearly it is an example of the very worst kind of worship of mere accidental remoteness that aesthetic culture does not realise the beauty and the glory of Christmas. It is the best distinction, perhaps, between the false mysticism and the true that the false has to travel far to find its mysteries. In one case the secret of all is hidden in the Temple of Isis; in the other it is hidden also in a Primitive Methodist chapel. In one case a spiritual wind blows in the deserts of Egypt and on the mountains of immemorial India. In the other the wind bloweth where it listeth, and on a night not far distant from this day may suddenly swing open all our doors and strike our bells into madness.