A Christmas Meditation

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Title:     A Christmas Meditation
Author: Richard Le Gallienne [More Titles by Le Gallienne]

Christmas already! However welcome its coming, Christmas always seems to take us by surprise. Is the year really so soon at the end of its journey? Why, it seems only yesterday that it needed a special effort of remembrance to date our letters with the new "_anno domini_." And have you noticed that one always does that reluctantly, with something almost of misgiving? The figures of the old year have a warm human look, but those of the new wear a chill, unfamiliar, almost menacing expression. Nineteen hundred and--we know. It is nearly "all in." It has done its best--and its worst. Between Christmas Day and New-Year it has hardly time to change its character. Good or bad, as it may have been, we feel at home with it, and we are fain to keep the old almanac a little longer on the wall. But the last leaves are falling, the days are shortening. There is a smell of coming snow in the air, and for weeks past it has already been Christmas in the shops.

Yes, however it strikes us, we are a year older. On the first of January last we had twelve brand-new months of a brand-new year to spend, and now the last of them is all but spent. We had a new spring to look out for, like the coming of one's sweetheart, a new summer bounteous in prospect with inexhaustible wealth of royal sunshine, a new autumn, with ruddy orchards and the glory of the tapestried woods; and now of the four new seasons that were to be ours but one remains:

And here is but December left and I,
To wonder if the hawthorn bloomed in May,
And if the wild rose with so fine a flush
Mantled the cheek of June, and if the way
The stream went singing foamed with meadow sweet,
And if the throstle sang in yonder bush,
And if the lark dizzied with song the sky.
I watched and listened--yet so sweet, so fleet,
The mad young year went by!

Strange, that feeling at the end of the year that somehow we have missed it, have failed to experience it all to the full, taken it too carelessly, not dwelt sufficiently on its rich, expressive hours. Each year we feel the same, and however intent we may have been, however we have watched and listened, sensitively eager to hold and exhaust each passing moment, when the year-end has come, we seem somehow to have been cheated after all. Who, at the beginning of each year, has not promised himself a stricter attentiveness to his experience? This year he will "load every rift with ore."

This year, I said, when first along the lane
With tiny nipples of the tender green
The winter-blackened hedge grew bright again,
This year I watch and listen; I have seen
So many springs steal profitless away,
This year I garner every sound and sweet.
And you, young year, make not such haste to bring
Hawthorn and rose; nor jumble, indiscreet,
Treasure on treasure of the precious spring;
But bring all softly forth upon the air,
Unhasting to be fair...

Yet, for all our watchfulness, the year seems to have escaped us. We know that the birds sang, that the flowers bloomed, that the grass was green, but it seems to us that we did not take our joy of them with sufficient keenness; our sweetheart came, but we did not look deep enough into her eyes. If only we live to see the wild rose again! But meanwhile here is the snow.

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.

And against all this marble and blood and bronze, what frail fantastic attack is this? What quaint expedition from fairy-land that comes so insignificantly against these battlements on which the Roman helmets catch the setting sun?

A Star in the Sky. Some Shepherds from Judea. Three Wise Men from the East. Some Frankincense and Myrrh. A Mother and Child.

Yes, a fairy-tale procession--but these are to conquer Rome, and that child at his mother's breast has but to speak three words, for all that marble and bronze to melt away: "Love One Another."

It may well have seemed an almost ludicrous weapon--three gentle words. So one might attack a fortress with a flower. But Rome fell before them, for all that, and cruel as the world still is, so cruel a world can never be again. The history of Christianity from Christ to Tolstoi is the history of a ghost-story; and as Rome fell before the men it martyred, so Russia has been compelled at last to open its prison doors by the passive imperative of the three gentle words. Stone and iron are terribly strong to the eye and even to the arm of man, but they are as vapour before the breath of the soul. Many enthroned and magisterial authorities seem so much more important and powerful than the simple human heart, but let the trial of strength come, and we see the might of the delicate invisible energy that wells up out of the infinite mystery to support the dreams of man.

Christmas is the friendly human announcement of this ghostly truth; its holly and boar's-head are but a rough-and-tumble emblazonment of that mystic gospel of--The Three Words; the Gospel of the Unseen Love.

And how well has the church chosen this particular season of the year for this most subtly spiritual of all its festivals, so subtle because its ghostly message is so ruddily disguised in human mirth, and thus the more unconsciously operative in human hearts!

Winter, itself so ghostly a thing, so spiritual in its beauty, was indeed the season to catch our ears with this ghost-story of the Invisible and Invincible Love. The other seasons are full of sensuous charm and seductiveness. With endless variety of form and colour and fragrance, they weave "a flowery band to bind us to the earth." They are running over with the pride of sap, the luxury of green leaves, and the intoxicating fulness of life. The summer earth is like some voluptuous enchantress, all ardour and perfume, and soft dazzle of moted sunshine. But the beauty of winter seems a spiritual, almost a supernatural, thing, austere and forbidding at first, but on a nearer approach found to be rich in exquisite exhilaration, in rare and lofty discoveries and satisfactions of the soul. Winter naturally has found less favour with the poets than the other seasons. Praise of it has usually a strained air, as though the poet were making the best of a barren theme, like a portrait-painter reluctantly flattering some unattractive sitter. But one poet has seen and seized the mysterious beauty of winter with unforced sympathy--Coventry Patmore, whose "Odes," in particular, containing as they do some of the most rarely spiritual meditation in English poetry, are all too little known. In one of these he has these beautiful lines, which I quote, I hope correctly, from memory:

I, singularly moved
To love the lovely that are not beloved,
Of all the seasons, most love winter, and to trace
The sense of the Trophonian pallor of her face.
It is not death, but plenitude of peace;
And this dim cloud which doth the earth enfold
Hath less the characters of dark and cold
Than light and warmth asleep,
And intermittent breathing still doth keep
With the infant harvest heaving soft below
Its eider coverlet of snow.

The beauty of winter is like the beauty of certain austere classics of literature and art, and as with them, also, it demands a certain almost moral strenuousness of application before it reveals itself. The loftiest masterpieces have something aloof and cheerless about them at our first approach, something of the cold breath of those starry spaces into which they soar, and to which they uplift our spirits. When we first open Dante or Milton, we miss the flowers and the birds and the human glow of the more sensuous and earth-dwelling poets. But after awhile, after our first rather bleak introduction to them, we grow aware that these apparently undecorated and unmusical masterpieces are radiant and resounding with a beauty and a music which "eye hath not seen nor ear heard." For flowers we are given stars, for the song of birds the music of the spheres, and for that human glow a spiritual ecstasy.

Similarly with winter. It has indeed a strange beauty peculiar to itself, but it is a beauty we must be at some pains to enjoy. The beauty of the other seasons comes to us, offers itself to us, without effort. To study the beauty of summer, it is enough to lie under green boughs with half-closed eyes, and listen to the running stream and the murmur of a million wings. But winter's is no such idle lesson. In summer we can hardly stay indoors, but in winter we can hardly be persuaded to go out. We must gird ourselves to overcome that first disinclination, else we shall know nothing of winter but its churlish wind and its ice-in-the-pail. But, the effort made, and once out of doors on a sunlit winter's morning, how soon are we finding out the mistake we were making, coddling ourselves in the steam-heat! Indoors, indeed, the prospect had its Christmas-card picturesqueness; snow-clad roofs, snow-laden boughs, silhouetted tracery of leafless trees; but we said that it was a soulless spectacular display, the beauty of death, and the abhorred coldness thereof. We have hardly walked a hundred yards, however, before impressions very different are crowding upon us, among which the impression of cold is forgotten, or only retained as pleasantly heightening the rest.

Far from the world's being dead, as it had seemed indoors, we are presently, in some strange indefinable way, made intensely conscious of a curious overwhelming sense of life in the air, as though the crystal atmosphere was, so to say, ecstatically charged with the invisible energy of spiritual forces. In the enchanted stillness of the snow, we seem to hear the very breathing of the spirit of life. The cessation of all the myriad little sounds that rise so merrily and so musically from the summer surface of the earth seems to allow us to hear the solemn beat of the very heart of earth itself. We seem very near to the sacred mystery of being, nearer than at any other season of the year, for in other seasons we are distracted by its pleasurable phenomena, but in winter we seem close to the very mystery itself; for the world seems to have put on robes of pure spirit and ascended into a diviner ether.

The very phenomena of winter have a spiritual air which those of summer lack, a phantom-like strangeness. How mysterious this ice, how ghostly this snow, and all the beautiful fantastic shapes taken by both; the dream-like foliage, and feathers and furs of the snow, the Gothic diablerie of icicled eaves, all the fairy fancies of the frost, the fretted crystal shapes that hang the brook-side with rarer than Venetian glass, the strange flowers that stealthily overlay the windows, even while we watch in vain for the unseen hand! No flowers of summer seem so strange as these, make us feel so weirdly conscious of the mystery of life. As the ghostly artist covers the pane, is it not as though a spirit passed?

As we walk on through the shining morning, we ourselves seem to grow rarefied as the air. Our senses seem to grow finer, purged to a keener sensitiveness. Our eyes and ears seem to become spiritual rather than physical organs, and an exquisite elation, as though we were walking on shining air, or winging through celestial space, fills all our being. The material earth and our material selves seem to grow joyously transparent, and while we are conscious of our earthly shoe-leather ringing out on the iron-bound highway, we seem, nevertheless, to be spirits moving without effort, in a world of spirit. Seldom, if ever, in summer are we thus made conscious of, so to say, our own ghosts, thus lifted up out of our material selves with a happy sense of disembodiment.

There would, indeed, seem to be some relation between temperature and the soul, and something literally purifying about cold. Certain it is that we return from our winter's walk with something sacred in our hearts and something shining in our faces, which we seldom, if ever, bring back with us in summer. Without understanding the process, we seem to have been brought nearer to the invisible mystery, and a solemn peace of happy insight seems for a little while at least to possess our souls. Our white walk in the snow-bright air has in some way quickened the half-torpid immortal within us, revived awhile our sluggish sense of our spiritual significance and destiny, made us once more, if only for a little, attractively mysterious to ourselves. Yes! there is what one might call a certain monastic discipline about winter which impels the least spiritual minded to meditation on his mortal lot and its immortal meanings; and thus, as I said, the Church has done wisely to choose winter for its most Christian festival. The heart of man, thus prepared by the very elements, is the more open to the message of the miraculous love, and the more ready to translate it into terms of human goodness. And thus, I hope, the ghostly significance of mince-pie is made clear.

But enough of ghostly, grown-up thoughts. Let us end with a song for the children:

O the big red sun,
And the wide white world,
And the nursery window
Mother-of-pearled;

And the houses all
In hoods of snow,
And the mince-pies,
And the mistletoe;

And Christmas pudding,
And berries red,
And stockings hung
At the foot of the bed;

And carol-singers,
And nothing but play--
O baby, this is
Christmas Day!

[The end]
Richard Le Gallienne's essay: Christmas Meditation

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