VII

The same grand consciousness seems to me to have been the true inspiration of his “Christmas Books.” For a private confession, I dislike them: I find them—A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, The Haunted Man—grossly sentimental and as grossly overcharged with violent conversions to the “Christmas Spirit.” For a further confession I greatly prefer several of his later Christmas Stories in Household Words and All the Year Round—The Wreck of the “Golden Mary” for instance, or Dr. Marigold’s Prescriptions or The Holly-Tree Inn—to this classic five which are still separated in the collected editions under the title of “Christmas Books.” He himself confessed, in a general preface of less than a dozen lines, his inability to work out character in the limits he assigned himself—a hundred pages or so. “My chief purpose,” he says of A Christmas Carol, “was, in a whimsical kind of masque which the good humour of the season justified, to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land.” But he took it as a mission, and quite seriously. Christmas to England had always meant, and should mean, a festival of neighbourly goodwill and robust hospitality. Listen to the old Carols:

Now thrice welcome, Christmas,

Which brings us good cheer,

Minced pies and plum porridge,

Good ale and strong beer;

With pig, goose and capon,

The best that may be,

So well doth the weather

And our stomachs agree.

Now that the time is come wherein

Our Saviour Christ was born,

The larders full of beef and pork,

The garners fill’d with corn....

Bring us in good ale, and bring us in good ale;

For our blessed Lady’s sake, bring us in good ale.

These out of a score or more verses I might quote from Poor Robin’s Almanack and the like. But take Campion’s more aristocratic Muse:

Now winter nights enlarge

The number of their hours,

And clouds their storms discharge

Upon the airy towers.

Let now the chimneys blaze

And cups o’erflow with wine;

Let well-attuned words amaze

With harmony divine.

Now yellow waxen lights

Shall wait on honey love,

While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights

Sleep’s leaden spell remove.

Carry this again down to Frederick Tennyson’s The Holy Tide:

The days are sad, it is the Holy tide;

The Winter morn is short, the Night is long;

So let the lifeless Hours be glorified

With deathless thoughts and echo’d in sweet song:

And through the sunset of this purple cup

They will resume the roses of their prime,

And the old Dead will hear us and wake up,

Pass with dim smiles and make our hearts sublime.

“An Englishman’s house is his Castle,” said an immortal farmer at a Fat Stock Dinner. “The storms may assail it and the winds whistle round it, but the King himself cannot do so.” Dickens saw always the Englishman’s house as his castle, fortified and provisioned against the discharge of snow and sleet: always most amply provisioned! Witness his picture of Christmas at Manor Farm, Dingley Dell—Old Wardle with his friends, neighbours, poor relations, and his farm-labourers too, all sitting down together to a colossal supper “and a mighty bowl of wassail something smaller than an ordinary washhouse copper, in which the hot apples were hissing and bubbling with a rich look and jolly sound that were perfectly irresistible.”

Old Wardle, in fact, is in the direct line of succession to Chaucer’s Frankeleyne—

Withoute bake mete was never his hous,

Of fish and flesh, and that so plenteous,

It snewed in his hous of mete and drink.

Dickens, I repeat to you, was always, in the straight line of Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Fielding, a preacher of man’s dignity in his full appetite; and quite consciously, as a national genius, he preached the doctrine of Christmas to his nation.