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.