THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND

A CHRISTMAS BOOK

BY

ARNOLD BENNETT

Author of The Old Wives' Tale, Buried Alive, etc., etc.

New York
George H. Doran Company

1911

CONTENTS:

ONE

THE FACT

Something has happened to Christmas, or to our hearts; or to both. In order to be convinced of this it is only necessary to compare the present with the past. In the old days of not so long ago the festival began to excite us in November. For weeks the house rustled with charming and thrilling secrets, and with the furtive noises of paper parcels being wrapped and unwrapped; the house was a whispering gallery. The tension of expectancy increased to such a point that there was a positive danger of the cord snapping before it ought to snap. On the Eve we went to bed with no hope of settled sleep. We knew that we should be wakened and kept awake by the waits singing in the cold; and we were glad to be kept awake so. On the supreme day we came downstairs hiding delicious yawns, and cordially pretending that we had never been more fit. The day was different from other days; it had a unique romantic quality, tonic, curative of all ills. On that day even the tooth-ache vanished, retiring far into the wilderness with the spiteful word, the venomous thought, and the unlovely gesture. We sang with gusto "Christians awake, salute the happy morn." We did salute the happy morn. And when all the parcels were definitely unpacked, and the secrets of all hearts disclosed, we spent the rest of the happy morn in waiting, candidly greedy, for the first of the great meals. And then we ate, and we drank, and we ate again; with no thought of nutrition, nor of reasonableness, nor of the morrow, nor of dyspepsia. We ate and drank without fear and without shame, in the sheer, abandoned ecstasy of celebration. And by means of motley paper headgear, fit only for a carnival, we disguised ourselves in the most absurd fashions, and yet did not make ourselves seriously ridiculous; for ridicule is in the vision, not in what is seen. And we danced and sang and larked, until we could no more. And finally we chanted a song of ceremony, and separated; ending the day as we had commenced it, with salvoes of good wishes. And the next morning we were indisposed and enfeebled; and we did not care; we suffered gladly; we had our pain's worth, and more. This was the past.

Even today the spirit and rites of ancient Christmas are kept up, more or less in their full rigour and splendour, by a race of beings that is scattered over the whole earth. This race, mysterious, masterful, conservative, imaginative, passionately sincere, arriving from we know not where, dissolving before our eyes we know not how, has its way in spite of us. I mean the children. By virtue of the children's faith, the reindeer are still tramping the sky, and Christmas Day is still something above and beyond a day of the week; it is a day out of the week. We have to sit and pretend; and with disillusion in our souls we do pretend. At Christmas, it is not the children who make-believe; it is ourselves. Who does not remember the first inkling of a suspicion that Christmas Day was after all a day rather like any other day? In the house of my memories, it was the immemorial duty of my brother on Christmas morning, before anything else whatever happened, to sit down to the organ and perform "Christians Awake" with all possible stops drawn. He had to do it. Tradition, and the will that emanated from the best bedroom, combined to force him to do it. One Christmas morning, as he was preparing the stops, he glanced aside at me with a supercilious curl of the lips, and the curl of my lips silently answered. It was as if he had said: "I condescend to this," and as if I had said: "So do I."

Such a moment comes to most of us of this generation. And thenceforward the change in us is extraordinarily rapid. The next thing we know is that the institution of waits is a rather annoying survival which at once deprives us of sleep and takes money out of our pockets. And then Christmas is gluttony and indigestion and expensiveness and quarter-day, and Christmas cards are a tax and a nuisance, and present-giving is a heavier tax and a nuisance. And we feel self-conscious and foolish as we sing "Auld Lang Syne." And what a blessing it will be when the "festivities" (as they are misleadingly called) are over, and we can settle down into commonsense again!

I do not mean that our hearts are black with despair on Christmas Day. I do not mean that we do not enjoy ourselves on Christmas Day. There is no doubt that, with the inspiriting help of the mysterious race, and by the force of tradition, and by our own gift of pretending, we do still very much enjoy ourselves on Christmas Day. What I mean to insinuate, and to assert, is that beneath this enjoyment is the disconcerting and distressing conviction of unreality, of non-significance, of exaggerated and even false sentiment. What I mean is that we have to brace and force ourselves up to the enjoyment of Christmas. We have to induce deliberately the "Christmas feeling." We have to remind ourselves that "it will never do" to let the heartiness of Christmas be impaired. The peculiarity of our attitude towards Christmas, which at worst is a vacation, may be clearly seen by contrasting it with our attitude towards another vacation—the summer holiday. We do not have to brace and force ourselves up to the