[75]One more German Christmas hymn must be mentioned, Gerhard Tersteegen's “Jauchzet, ihr Himmel, frohlocket, ihr englischen Chöre.” Tersteegen represents one phase of the mystical and emotional reaction against the religious formalism and indifference of the eighteenth century. In the Lutheran Church the Pietists, though they never seceded, somewhat resembled the English Methodists; the Moravians formed a separate community, while from the “Reformed” or Calvinistic Church certain circles of spiritually-minded people, who drew inspiration from the mediaeval mystics and later writers like Böhme and Madame Guyon, gathered into more or less independent groups for religious intercourse. Of these last Tersteegen is a representative singer. Here are three verses from his best known Christmas hymn:—
“Jauchzet, ihr Himmel, frohlocket, ihr englischen Chöre,
Singet dem Herrn, dem Heiland der Menschen, zur Ehre:
Sehet doch da!
Gott will so freundlich und nah
Zu den Verlornen sich kehren.[76]
König der Ehren, aus Liebe geworden zum Kinde,
Dem ich auch wieder mein Herz in der Liebe verbinde;
Du sollst es sein,
Den ich erwähle allein,
Ewig entsag’ ich der Sünde.
Treuer Immanuel, werd’ auch in mir neu geboren;
Komm doch, mein Heiland, und lass mich nicht länger verloren;
Wohne in mir,
Mach mich ganz eines mit dir,
Den du zum Leben erkoren.”[32][{35}]
The note of personal religion, as distinguished from theological doctrine, is stronger in German Christmas poetry than in that of any other nation—the birth of Christ in the individual soul, not merely the redemption of man in general, is a central idea.
We come back at last to England. The great carol period is, as has already been said, the fifteenth, and the first half of the sixteenth, century; after the Reformation the English domestic Christmas largely loses its religious colouring, and the best carols of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries are songs of [77]feasting and pagan ceremonies rather than of the Holy Child and His Mother. There is no lack of fine Christmas verse in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, but for the most part it belongs to the oratory and the chamber rather than the hall. The Nativity has become a subject for private contemplation, for individual devotion, instead of, as in the later Middle Ages, a matter for common jubilation, a wonder-story that really happened, in which, all alike and all together, the serious and the frivolous could rejoice, something that, with all its marvel, could be taken as a matter of course, like the return of the seasons or the rising of the sun on the just and on the unjust.
English Christmas poetry after the mid-sixteenth century is, then, individual rather than communal in its spirit; it is also a thing less of the people, more of the refined and cultivated few. The Puritanism which so deeply affected English religion was abstract rather than dramatic in its conception of Christianity, it was concerned less with the events of the Saviour's life than with Redemption as a transaction between God and man; St. Paul and the Old Testament rather than the gospels were its inspiration. Moreover, the material was viewed not as penetrated by and revealing the spiritual, but as sheer impediment blocking out the vision of spiritual things. Hence the extremer Puritans were completely out of touch with the sensuous poetry of Christmas, a festival which, as we shall see, they actually suppressed when they came into power.
The singing of sacred carols by country people continued, indeed, but the creative artistic impulse was lost. True carols after the Reformation tend to be doggerel, and no doubt many of the traditional pieces printed in such collections as Bramley and Stainer's[33][{37}] are debased survivals from the Middle Ages, or perhaps new words written for old tunes. Such carols as “God rest you merry, gentlemen,” have unspeakably delightful airs, and the words charm us moderns by their quaintness and rusticity, but they are far from the exquisite loveliness of the mediaeval [78]things. Gleams of great beauty are, however, sometimes found amid matter that in the process of transmission has almost ceased to be poetry. Here, for instance, are five stanzas from the traditional “Cherry-tree Carol”:—
“As Joseph was a-walking,
He heard an angel sing:
‘This night shall be born
Our heavenly King.
‘He neither shall be born
In housen nor in hall,
Nor in the place of Paradise,
But in an ox's stall.