But even these are far from being the prime merits of the Metropolis, at this season of its best Saturnalia. The little boys from school have again taken undisputed possession of all its pleasant places; and the loud laughter of unchecked joy once more explodes on spots from whence, with these exceptions, it has long since been exploded. In short, Christmas, which has been “coming” all the year (like a waiter at an inn), is at last actually come; and “merry England” is, for a little while, no longer a phrase of mockery and scorn.
The truth is, we English have fewer faults than any other people on earth; and even among those which we have, our worst enemies will not impute to us an idle and insane levity of deportment. We still for the most part, as we did five hundred years ago, nous amusons tristement, sêlon l’usage de notre pays. We do our pleasures, as we do our duties, with grave faces and solemn airs, and disport ourselves in a manner becoming our notions of the dignity of human nature. We feel at the theatre as if it were a church, and consequently at church as if it were a theatre. Our processions to a rout move at the same rate as those to a funeral, and there are, in proportion, as many sincere mourners at the former as the latter. We dance on the same principle as that on which our soldiers do the manual exercise; and there is as much (and as little) of impulse in the one as the other. And we fight on the same principle as we dance; namely, because circumstances require it of us.
All this is true of us under ordinary circumstances. But the arrival of Christmas-time is not an ordinary circumstance; and therefore now it is none of it true. We are merry-makers once more, and feel that we can now afford to play the fool for a week, since we have so religiously persisted in playing the philosopher during all the rest of the year. Be it expressly understood, however, by all those “surrounding nations” who may happen to meet with this candid confession of our weakness in the above particular, that we permit ourselves to fall into it in favour of our children alone. They (poor things!) being as yet at so pitiable a distance from “years of discretion,” cannot be supposed to have achieved the enviable discovery, that happiness is a thing utterly beneath the attention of a reasoning and reasonable being. Accordingly, they know no medium between happiness and misery; and when they are not enjoying the one, they are suffering the other.
But that English parents, generally speaking, love their children better than themselves, is another national merit which I must claim for them. The consequence of this is natural and necessary, and brings us safely round to the point from which we started: an English father and mother, rather than their offspring should not be happy at Christmas-time, will consent to be happy at that time themselves! It does not last long; and surely a week or so spent in a state of foolish felicity may hope to be expiated by a whole year of unimpeachable indifference! This, then, is the secret of the Christmas holiday-making, among the “better sort” of English families,—as they are pleased somewhat invidiously to call themselves.
Now, then (to resume our details), “the raven down” of metropolitan darkness is “smoothed” every midnight “till it smiles,” by that pleasant relic of past times, “the waits;” which wake us with their low wild music mingling with the ceaseless sealike sound of the streets; or (still better) lull us to sleep with the same; or (best of all) make us dream of music all night long, without waking us at all.
Now, too, the Bellman plies his more profitable but less pleasant parallel with the above; nightly urging his “masters and mistresses” to the practice of every virtue under heaven, and in his own mind prospectively including them all in the pious act of adding an extra sixpence to his accustomed stipend.
Now, during the first week, the Theatres having begun to prepare “the Grand Christmas Pantomime, which has been in active preparation all the Summer,” the Carpenter for the time being, among other ingenious changes which he contemplates, looks forward with the most lively satisfaction to that which is to metamorphose him (in the play-bills at least) into a “machinist;” while, pending the said preparations, even the “Stars” of the Company are “shorn of their beams” (at least in making their transit through that part of their hemisphere which is included behind the scenes), and all things give way before the march of that monstrous medley of “inexplicable dumb show and noise,” which is to delight the Galleries and Dress-circle, and horrify the more genteel portion of the audience, for the next nine weeks.
Finally, now occur, just before Christmas, those exhibitions which are peculiar to England in the nineteenth century; I mean the Prize-Cattle Shows. “Extremes meet;” and accordingly, one of the most unequivocal evidences we have to offer, of the surpassing refinement of the age in which we live, consists in these displays of the most surpassing grossness. The alleged beauty of these unhappy victims of their own appetites acting with a view to ours, consists in their being unable to perform a single function of their nature, or enjoy a single moment of their lives; and the value of the meat that they make is in exact proportion to the degree in which it is unfit to be eaten.
To describe the joys and jollifications attendant on Christmas, is what my confined limits would counsel me not to attempt, even if they were describable matters. But, in fact, there is nothing which affords such truly “lenten entertainment” as a feast at secondhand: the Barmecide’s dishes were fattening by comparison with it. In conclusion, therefore, let me say that I shall think it very hard, if the gentle readers of these pen and ink sketches of the Months have not been persuaded, during the perusal of each, that I have fulfilled my promise made at the commencement, of proving each, in its turn, to be better than all the rest. At any rate, if they are not so persuaded, they must, to be consistent, henceforth abandon all pretended admiration,—which is an affair of impulse, not of judgment,—and must proceed to compute the value of every thing that comes before them, according to its comparative value in regard to some other thing. In short, they must at once adopt Horace’s hateful worldly-minded maxim of “nil admirari” &c. as rendered still more hateful and worldly-minded by Bolingbroke and Pope’s version of it; and must “make up their minds,” as the mechanical phrase is, that not merely “not to wonder,” (which is what Horace meant, if he meant any thing) but
“Not to admire, is all the art they know,
To make men happy, and to keep them so.”