On Christmas

Christmas unvaryingly brings round the idea of something that is at once special and universal j if only in the form of the ancient human habit of having a universal sentiment at a special time. This ancient human habit, like all ancient human habits, has been the subject of a highly modern fussj the fuss of men who ask themselves indignantly why they do even the things that they want to do, and even the things that they go on doing. Reformers in recent centuries, having very conspicuously refused to make all men equal, or even all citizens equal, have sometimes raised a rather dismal revolt in favour of making all days equal j as if they were three hundred and sixty-five citizens standing all in a row. The Puritans tried to do it by making all the days as dark as nights 5 though in a rather different sense from that of making a night of it. The Utilitarians and the industrial civilization they created did literally and not metaphorically, materially and not only morally, make days as dark as nights. They went forward without a single backward glance j driving straight on into the fogj having in the most literal sense no headlights. In the days of their power, they really wanted to sacrifice everything to their routine of rapidity 5 and if they had found their own transit stopped by their own fog, they would not really have known how to reconsider their whole intellectual position 5 and they could only have comforted themselves with the thought that, if all days were dull, it showed that all days were equal, and there was less danger of any nonsense about Christmas Day.

But generally the normal people enjoy special occasions without knowing why, just as the learned, lofty, cultivated, enlightened people despise them without knowing why. I do not mean that it is easy for anybody to define exactly why men tend to concentrate pleasure at particular places or times. In a sense it is too practical a piece of psychology to be defined. It is like asking the philosopher to explain, in a mathematical manner, why he feels hungry at breakfast-time and dinner-time, those two great red-letter feasts in the diurnal calendar. A cow goes on eating grass more or less steadily all dayj a cow does spread out her meals till they are universal and deal with all hours of the day as if they were equal. Perhaps a cow is more philosophical than a philosopher. Cows drink water, and philosophers, at least real philosophers, drink wine. The very word still used in our magazines for a debate among intellectuals about some interesting topic is simply the name of the drinking-bout or wine-party of the old Greek philosophers. When an editor asks me to take part in a Symposium, I suppose I am really entitled to assume that he has offered me a drink. He has merely addressed to me in Greek (for all editors are learned men) a request equivalent to those mysterious ritual utterances I have heard in the form of "What's yours?" and "Say when." The editor would perhaps be a little surprised if I answered his request with effusive gratitude, naming my particular vanity, like Mr. Stiggins. But the ancient Greek symbol of philosophy is a very philosophical symbol. The wine drunk by the philosopher, as distinct from the water drunk by the cow, does stand for certain ideas of concentration or intensification that are among the sacred marks of man. So the wine is concentrated in the cup, while the water wanders at large through the meadows. And so even the most pagan of pagan philosophers seldom goes on drinking wine all day exactly as the cow goes on eating grass all day. His mind, however exalted, will tend naturally to measure and definition. It will tend also to this idea of concentration in time and place.

Prohibition, like every other form of persecution of the poor by the rich, is comparatively easy to engineer in the plutocratic modern State. For this reason there will soon be, in all probability, a Prohibition issue in this country j and all who have any objection to their country making a fool of herself before all civilization may be asked for their support. But I do not now deal with the matter in the more special and direct fashion, in the ordinary political problem of the pub. For the moment I will only remark that this strange movement certainly will not stop at such trifles as abolishing the wine that gave its name to the symposium of Plato or stultifying Shakespeare by saying that there shall be no more cakes and ale. Prohibition exists to prohibit; and when it is once started it will never stop prohibiting. In a Prohibitionist paper I have just received from the district of Boston, published under the very shadow of the University of Harvard, there is a long list of the things that are to be prohibited next. Smokers will be interested to learn that "wild fear and panic often seizes tobacco-users," and that this weed "gathers earth spirits round those enslaved to it." But this is only the beginning. To say that such things seem to the writer as bad as alcohol is an understatement. "Talk about the drug evil," he cries scornfully, "talk about opium, heroin, and morphine... the dope that is sending all America to defeat and destruction is nicotine, caffeine, and theine." I am sure all my American friends will be interested to know exactly what it is that is sending all America (all America, it will be noted) to defeat and destruction. Many must have wondered what it was that had defeated and destroyed them 3 some may even, in their bewilderment, have doubted whether they were really defeated and destroyed. But it is always interesting to know that rout and ruin on that scale can be let loose upon the land by drinking a cup of tea. Personally, I cannot believe that anybody was ever destroyed by an American cup of tea. I have known some travellers who were defeated in endeavouring to get an English one. One of them, a lady I know very well, said on first tasting the beverage in its modified American form, "Well, if that's the sort of tea we sent you, I don't wonder you threw it into Boston Harbour."

But even in the case of tea, it will be noted that where there is tea, there is tea-time. Where it really exists as a beverage that can be drunk, it also exists as an institution that must be observed 3 and the name of it is not merely tea, but afternoon tea. This element of concentration in time as well as space reappears, as everywhere else in the human story. A certain stage in the slow descent of the sun, a certain line in the mathematical map of heaven that is traced in stars, a certain fine shade between afternoon and evening, is made and marked by the ancient human instinct even for the modern institution of tea. Tea is a libation to the sun in that quarter of heaven, to the gods of that condition of earth and sky, fully as much as Easter eggs are proper to Easter or Christmas puddings to Christmas. It is true that by the necessities of the case it has to vary somewhat with the seasons 5 and it will be found that the institution takes on a slightly different tone in consequence. In that respect it resembles rather Easter than Christmas, and marks what is, in this merely light and local sense, the practical advantage of Christmas over Easter. Christmas is, quite apart from all its really important elements, the central and supreme example of this idea of concentration and fixity j because it is not a movable feast. Many excessive schools of lunatics have tried in vain to move it, and even to move it away. In spite of all sorts of intellectual irritations and pedantic explaining away, human beings will almost certainly go on observing this winter feast in some fashion. If it is for them only a winter feast, they will be found celebrating it with winter sports. If it is for them only a heathen feast, they will keep it as the heathens do. But the great majority of them will go on observing forms that cannot be so explained 5 they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly they will wake up and discover why.