Unless we are still numbered among those happy people for whom Christmas-trees are laden and lit, this annual prematurity of Christmas cannot but make us a little meditative amid our mirth, and if, while Santa Claus is dispensing his glittering treasures, our thoughts grow a little wistful, they will not necessarily be mournful thoughts, or on that account less seasonable in character; for Christmas is essentially a retrospective feast, and we may, with fitness, with indeed a proper piety of unforgetfulness, bring even our sad memories, as it were to cheer themselves, within the glow of its festivity. Ghosts have always been invited to Christmas parties, and whether they are seen or not, they always come; nor is any form of story so popular by the Christmas fire as the ghost-story—which, when one thinks of it, is rather odd, considering the mirthful character of the time. Yet, after all, what are our memories but ghost-stories? Ah! the beautiful ghosts that come to the Christmas fire!
Christmas too is pre-eminently the Feast of the Absent, the Festival of the Far-Away, for the most prosperous ingathering of beloved faces about the Christmas fire can but include a small number of those we would fain have there; and have you ever realized that the absent are ghosts? That is, they live with us sheerly as spiritual presences, dependent upon our faithful remembrance for their embodiment. We may not, with our physical eyes, see them once a year; we may not even have so seen them for twenty years; it may be decreed that we shall never see them again; we seldom, perhaps never, write to each other; all we know of each other is that we are alive and love each other across space and time. Alive—but how? Scarce otherwise, surely, than the unforgotten dead are alive—alive in unforgetting love.
It is rather strange, if you will give it a thought, how much of our real life is thus literally a ghost-story. Probably it happens with the majority of us that those who mean most to us, by the necessities of existence, must be far away, met but now and then in brief flashes of meeting that often seem to say so much less than absence; our intercourse is an intercourse of the imagination—yet how real! They belong to the unseen in our lives, and have all its power over us. The intercourse of a mother and a son—is it not often like that in a world which sends its men on the four winds, to build and fight, while the mother must stay in the old nest? Seldom at Christmas can a mother gather all her children beneath the wing of her smile. Her big boys are seven seas away, and even her girls have Christmas-trees of their own. But motherhood is in its very nature a ghostly, a spiritual, thing, and the big boys and the old mother are not really divided. They meet unseen by the Christmas fire, as they meet all the year round in that mysterious ether of the soul, where space and time are not.
Yes, it is strange to think how small a proportion of our lives we spend with those we love; even when we say that we spend all our time with them. Husband and wife even—how much of the nearness of the closest of human relations is, and must be, what Rossetti has called "parted presence!" The man must go forth to his labour until the evening. How few of the twenty-four hours can these two beings who have given their whole lives to each other really give! Husband and wife even must be content to be ghosts to each other for the greater part of each day. As Rossetti says in his poem, eyes, hands, voice, lips, can meet so strangely seldom in the happiest marriage; only in the invisible home of the heart can the most fortunate husband and wife be always together:
Your heart is never away,
But ever with mine, forever,
Forever without endeavour,
Tomorrow, love, as today;
Two blent hearts never astray,
Two souls no power may sever,
Together, O my love, forever!
When I said that the absent were ghosts, I don't think you quite liked the saying. It gave you a little shiver. It seemed rather grimly fantastic. But do you not begin to see what I meant? Begin to see the comfort in the thought? begin to see the inner connection between Christmas and the ghost-story? Yes, the real lesson of Christmas is the ever presence of the absent through love; the ghostly, that is to say the spiritual, nature of all human intercourse. Our realities can exist only in and through our imaginations, and the most important part of our lives is lived in a dream with dream-faces, the faces of the absent and the dead—who, in the consolation of this thought, are alike brought near.
I have a friend who is dead—but I say to myself that he is in New Zealand; for, if he were really in New Zealand, we should hardly seem less distant, or be in more frequent communication. We should say that we were both busy men, that the mails were infrequent, but that between us there was no need of words, that we both "understood." That is what I say now. It is just as appropriate. Perhaps he says it too. And—we shall meet by the Christmas fire.
I have a friend who is alive. He is alive in England. We have not met for twelve years. He never writes, and I never write. Perhaps we shall never meet, never even write to each other, again. It is our way, the way of many a friendship, none the less real for its silence—friendship by faith, one might say, rather than by correspondence. My dead friend is not more dumb, not more invisible. When these two friends meet me by the Christmas fire, will they not both alike be ghosts—both, in a sense, dead, but both, in a truer sense, alive?
It is so that, without our thinking of it, our simple human feelings one for another at Christmas-time corroborate the mystical message which it is the church's meaning to convey by this festival of "peace and good-will to men"—the power of the Invisible Love; from the mystical love of God for His world, to the no less, mystical love of mother and child, of lover and lover, of friend and friend.
And, when you think of it, is not this festival founded upon what, without irreverence, we may call the Divine Ghost-Story of Christmas? Was there ever another ghost-story so strange, so full of marvels, a story with so thrilling a message from the unseen? Taken just as a story, is there anything in the Arabian Nights so marvellous as this ghost-story of Christmas? The world was all marble and blood and bronze, against a pitiless sky of pitiless gods. The world was Rome. No rule ever stood builded so impregnably from earth to stars—a merciless wall of power. Strength never planted upon the earth so stern a foot. Never was tyranny so invincibly bastioned to the cowed and conquered eye.