IN THE most peaceful spot known to American life—a railroad train—we had several hours of that pleasure which offices are devised to prevent, viz., meditation; or even (if we may dare so high) thought. Our thoughts, or whatever they are that go round inside you when you are sitting passively in a train, were tinged by the approach of Christmas.
There was evidently something in the bright air and pre-Christmas feeling of that December afternoon that even softened the heart of the news butcher, for we noticed as the train hastened along the Connecticut shore his manner became more and more fond. He began, at Grand Central, in a mood of formality, even austerity. “Lots of nice reading matter here, gentlemen,” he cried. “Get a nice short story book” (by “book” he meant, of course, magazine) “to kill time for a coupla hours.” We thought, perhaps a little sadly, of the irony of begging men to annul Time when they had happily reached almost the only place in America where it can be enjoyed, examined, taken apart, and looked at. But, perhaps due to a niggardly spirit among his congregation in the smoker, the agent gradually became more fraternal. His manner was almost bedside by the time we had got to New Rochelle. “Choclut pepmints, figs, and lemon drops, fellas!” And at Stamford he was beginning to despair. “Peanuts: they’re delicious, boys.” We made up our mind, by the way, as to the correct answer to our old question, Where does New England begin? The frontier is at South Norwalk, for there we saw a sign The New England Cereal Company. And just about there, also, begin the billboards urging Codfish, surely the authentic image and superscription of New England.
Of course there is a great deal to think about in the signs you see along the track. There is that notice:
DANGEROUS
LIVE WIRES
KEEP AWAY
which is a good advice socially as well as electrically. But we thought that these warnings were a bit unfair to New England, where there are fewer human Live Wires than there are south of the Harlem Strait. We remembered a certain club in Philadelphia of which the bitter-minded used to say it was the only organization in the world whose membership was 100 per cent. Live Wires, Regular Fellows, and Go-Getters.
As we went through Greenwich, Riverside, Westport, we admired the blue shore of Long Island lying so placidly across the Sound. And it struck us almost with a sense of shock that there are a great many people to whom Long Island is only a dim, unreal haze on the horizon. Yes, foreign travel is a brisk aperient to the mind. We remembered, as we always do when travelling on the New Haven, Robert Louis Stevenson’s delight when he first went that way. In one of his letters he speaks of the succession of beautiful rocky coves that saluted his eye. “Why,” he wrote, “have Americans been so unfair to their own country?”
It would be impossible to tell you all the things we thought about: they have already faded. We did not forget our duty, as a travelling mandarin, to be a little magisterial when occasion seemed to require it. In the station at New Haven, for instance, there is a young woman, most remarkably coifed, who presides at the tobacco counter. She seemed of a notably cheerful and lenient disposition, and we ventured a remark upon the weather. She said she wished it would snow, so that she could have some real fun, by which she meant, we dare say, a little bobsledding with the youths of Yale College. We thought that this showed a dangerous inappreciation of her general opulent good fortune in being young, comely, and attached to a tobacco traffic. We looked at her quite sternly and said, “Young women can always have a good time, no matter what the weather.” To our regret, as we hastened on toward the Springfield train, we heard her squeaking with mirth.
But the starting point of our meditation was an attempt to describe and dissect this curious pre-Christmas feeling, which is one of the most subtle and genuine adventures of the whole year. When we try to examine it in its components we see that the whole thing is too delicate and pervasive for analysis. What are its ingredients? we said to ourself. We thought of the little shrill tingling bells of the Salvation Army; we thought of the warm juicy smell of roasting chicken that out-gushes from a certain rotisserie in Jamaica, Long Island. We thought of the bright colours and toys in the windows of that glorious main street in Jamaica, which is where we do our Christmas shopping. We thought of all the sparkle, the chill, clear air, the general bustle of the streets, that one associates with the Christmas season; and of the undercurrent of dumb and troubled realization of human misery and stupidity and frustration that comes to some more clearly now than at any other time. And we thought also of the mockers and the cheerful skeptics, to whom any candid expression of a simple human emotion is cause for nipping laughter. Never mind, we said to ourself, there is at least one time of year when they can all afford to put away their shining paradoxes and their gingerbread cynicisms—like the gilded circus wagons we saw shut up in winter quarters at Bridgeport.
Probably the most sensitive and complex of human sensations is the pre-Christmas feeling: because it is not merely personal but communal; not merely communal but national; not merely national but even international. We know then that for a few weeks a great part of the world is busily thinking of the same things: how it can surprise its friends, how it can encourage the miserable, how it can amuse the harmless. Even the dingiest street has its pathetic badges of colour. It is a great thing to have such a widespread community of sentiment, which, however varying in expression, is identical in essence. One may be amused when he sees the Christmas Annuals published by Australian magazines and finds under the title A Happy Christmas in New South Wales a photograph of girls in muslin enjoying themselves by picnicking along shady streams with canoes and mosquito nettings. That kind of Christmas, we think, would seem very grotesque for us, but our friends the New South Welsh evidently find it exhilarating.
But it is that mysterious and agreeable pre-Christmas feeling which is the best of the whole matter. Christmas Day itself is sometimes almost too feverish a business of picking up blizzards of wrapping paper, convincing the Urchin that his own toys are just as interesting as the Urchiness’s, and treading on tiptoe for fear of walking on the clockwork train or the lurking doll. At Christmas time we always think—probably we are the only person who does—of the late admirable William Stubbs, once Bishop of Oxford and Regius Professor of history, the author of those three fat mulberry coloured volumes The Constitutional History of England, a work far from easy to read, and which, when we were compelled to study it, seemed of an intolerable dullness. Bishop Stubbs, in the dreadful words of the Dictionary of National Biography, “never forgot that he was a clergyman.” It is also said that “his lectures never attracted a large audience.” But what we are getting at is this, that on Christmas Day, 1873, the excellent Bishop retired from the gambols and gayeties of his five sons and one daughter and wrote the preface to his History. We love to think of him, worthy man, shutting himself up from the Yuletide riot in roomy old Kettel Hall (now a part of Trinity College, Oxford) and sitting down to write those words, “The History of Institutions cannot be mastered—can scarcely be approached—without an effort.” Now that we are somewhat matured, we think that we could probably reread his Constitutional History with much profit. In that Christmas Day preface, written while the young Stubbses were (we suppose) filling the house with juvenile clamour, there is one phrase that catches our eye as we take the book down for its annual dusting:
“Constitutional History reads the exploits and characters of men by a different light from that shed by the false glare of arms. The world’s heroes are no heroes to it.”
We shall remember the Christmas of 1921, partly, at any rate, by the wonderful succession of pellucid, frosty, moonlit nights that preceded it. We walked round and round our rustic grange trying to focus just what we wanted to say to our friends as a Christmas greeting. A curious misery was upon our spirit, for we felt that in many ways we had been recreant to the spirit of friendship. When we think, for instance, of the unanswered letters.... We have sinned horribly. Yet we wanted to give ourself the selfish pleasure of saying a word of affection to those who have been kind to us, and to whom, in the foolish but unavoidable hurry of daily affairs, we have been discourteous. (The way to love humanity, we said to ourself, is not to see too much of it.) Moreover, to write a kind of Christmas sermon is, apparently, to put one’s self into the loathsome false position of seeming to assume those virtues one praises.
We remember the first clergyman who made an impression upon our childish mind. It was in a country church in a village where we were visiting some kinsmen. This parson was a great bearded fellow, long since gone the way of flesh. He was a bit of a ritualist; his white surplice and embroidered streamers of red and gold impressed us enormously. He came very close to our idea of Divinity itself. We used to sit and hear him booming away and think, vaguely, how wonderful to be as virtuous as that. When the organ throbbed and his vast gray beard rose ecstatically above his white-robed chest we thought that here was Goodness incarnate. Years later we asked what had become of him. We heard that he had lost his job because he drank too much. The more we think about that the tenderer our feeling is towards his memory. Only the sinner has a right to preach.
Thinking about this pre-Christmas feeling, and wanting to say something about it, but not knowing how, we got (as we started to tell you) on a train. We went, for a few hours, to another city. There we saw, exhilaratingly different, but fundamentally the same, the shining business of life going forward. The people in that city were carrying on their own affairs, were hotfoot upon their own concerns; we saw their eager, absorbed faces, and what struck us was, here are all these people, whose lives are totally sundered from our own, but they have, at heart, the same hopes and aspirations, the same follies, weaknesses, disgusts, and bitternesses as ourself. And the same would be so of a thousand cities, and of a hundred thousand. Then we got into one of those things called a sleeper, which ought to be called a thinker. An ideal cloister for meditation. All down the dark aisle we could hear the innocent snores of our fellows, but we ourself lay wakeful. We felt rather like the mystic Russian peasant who goes to bed in his coffin. We were whirled along through a midnight landscape of transparent white moonlight, and, quite as cheerful as the dead child in Hans Andersen borne through starry space by the angel, we made our peace with everything. We claim no credit for this. We would have slept if we could. There was a huge bump in the middle of the berth, and there was a vile cold draught. We read part of Stephen Crane’s magnificent sketch The Scotch Express. But those miserable little dim lamps——
And then, strangely enough, there came a sudden realization of the amazing richness and fecundity of life. Every signboard along the railroad track is an illustration of it. Hideous enough, still it is a kind of endless vista into the huge jumble of human affairs. Here is a billboard crying out something about a Spark Plug, or about the Hotel Theresa; or on the side of a little shabby brick tenement a painted legend about Bromo Seltzer. Someone worked to put that advertisement up; someone had sufficient credulity or gambling audacity to pay for it; somewhere children are fed and clothed by that spark plug. Christmas itself suddenly seemed a kind of spark plug that ignites the gases and vapours of selfishness and distrust and explodes them away. Everything seemed extraordinarily gallant and exciting. Take the Hotel Theresa, for instance. We had never heard of it before. It is on 125th Street, we gathered. We would like to wager that all sorts of adventures are lying in wait up there, if we can slip away and go looking for them.
As we were lying in our cool tomb (Carl Sandburg’s phrase) in the thinking car, we meditated something like this: Christmas is certainly a time when a reasonable man should overhaul his religion and see if it amounts to anything. Christmas is a time when millions of people are thinking of the same thing. Humanity is so constituted that you can never get the world to agree about things that have happened; but it is happily at one about something that probably never happened—the Christmas story as told in the Gospels. If millions of simple people believe a thing, that doesn’t make it true; but perhaps it makes it better than true: it makes it Poetry, it makes it Beauty. Stephen Graham says, in that moving book With Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem (which certainly ought to be read by every one who is at all interested in religion; it is published by Thomas Nelson & Sons; you may have to get it from London, we don’t believe it is in print over here)—Stephen Graham says:
True Religion takes its rise out of Mystery, and not out of Miracle.
Religion, which has proved to be one of the greatest dividing and hostilizing forces in the world, is in its essence just the opposite. Surely, in the origin of the word, religion means a binding together, a ligament. Now take the most opposite people you can think of—say Babe Ruth and the Sultan of Turkey (is there still a Sultan?); or say Mr. Balfour and the chap who runs the elevator in this office. No matter how different these may be in training and outlook, there will be some province of human thought and emotion, some small, sensitive spot of the mind, in which they can meet and feel at one. We can imagine them sitting down together for lunch and having a mutually improving time, each admiring and enjoying the other. Widen the incongruity of the individuals as much as you like: imagine Mr. Joseph Conrad and Dr. Berthold Baer; or Mr. James W. Elliott (the Business Builder) and Mahatma Gandhi—we care not who they are, if they can make their thoughts intelligible to each other they can find that remote but definite point of tangency where any experienced mind can meet and sympathize with any other human mind, discussing the problems of destiny which are common to all. It is this Common Multiple of humanity, this sensitive pulse in the mind, this realization of a universal share in an overburdening mystery too real to be ignored, but too terrific to be defined or blurbed about, that is the province of religion.
And then the devil of it (for there is always a Devil in every sensible religion) is that the best way to be sure there is this possible point of junction is not to attempt to find it. Both Mr. Balfour and the cheerful elevator boy would probably pray heartily to be delivered from sitting down to lunch together. This mysterious mental sensitive spot that we speak of remains sensitive only as long as it remains private and secret. Perhaps religion can be defined as a sense of human fellowship that is best preserved by not being too companionable.
We were thinking, too, how extremely modern and contemporary the Christmas story seems. It is appropriate that the final instalment of the Income Tax falls just before Christmas. The same thing happened 1921 years ago. “There went out a decree that all the world should be taxed,” says Luke. That was why Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem—to pay their tax. And we can imagine that the Bethlehem Evening Star, if there had been newspapers at that time, would have had a column of social notes just similar in spirit to those of our own press to-day. The arrival of Joseph and Mary would not have been noticed. We might have read:
Mr. and Mrs. Pharisee of “White Sepulchre,” Galilee, are spending the winter at the Tiberius Hotel.
The Hon. Pontius Pilate, Governor of Judæa, is enjoying a week-end visit with Tetrarch and Mrs. Herod at the tetrarchal mansion.
Mr. and Mrs. Philip Herod are travelling in Syria for the winter. Mrs. Herod was before her marriage Miss Herodias, socially prominent.
Prof. Melchior, Prof. Balthazar, and Prof. Gaspar arrived last night from the West. They are said to be in town for some astronomical investigations. The professors had great trouble in securing hotel accommodations, the city being so crowded.
Rev. Caiaphas, one of the most respected High Priests in this diocese, has an apartment for the winter at Philactery Court.
The train pursued its steady way through the moonlight, and the silvered loveliness of earth and trees made us think generously of our own country. We are still foolish enough to love this America of ours with a dumb queer love. We still believe that in spite of Senates and Live Wires, in spite of the antics of some of the half-educated and well-meaning men who “govern” us, this country has a unique contribution to make to the world in future years. There should be international Christmas cards: there should be some way of one nation surprising another with a friendly message on the Morning of Mornings. We believe (perhaps we are not impartial) that the English-speaking race, by its contributions to human liberty, has a right to a leading place in the world’s affairs; but if it gives way to its characteristic vice of arrogance, we weary of it. We think of the feminine brilliance, charm, and emotional volatility of France; of the beautiful sensibility and self-control of Japan; of the melancholy idealism of Russia; of the sober industry of Germany. Have we, then, nothing to learn from these? Printers’ ink is scattered about these days with such profusion that it becomes almost meaningless. Sitting in the subway, and raising our eye plaintively from a newspaper to an advertising card, we have wondered which was the greater menace, Pyorrhea or Japan? Both were said to be menaces. It is our own conviction that nothing can be a menace to America but itself.
This seems a dismal kind of Christmas homily, but we enjoyed ourself immensely while we were meditating it in our lower berth. Very likely if it had been an upper berth the result would have been different. In any case, we take the liberty of wishing our friends—who are, by this time, too indurated to feel surprise or chagrin at anything we may say—a Merry Christmas. We wish for them a cheerful and laborious New Year, with good books to read, and both the time and the inclination to think. We even wish for them occasional eccentric seizures, such as we feel at the present; when we have a dim suspicion that behind the noble and never sufficiently praised comedy of life there lies some simple satisfying answer to many gropings. A simple thing, but too terrible and far-reaching ever to be wholly put into practice by puzzled and compromising mankind. We mean, of course, the teachings of Christ. Consider the German generals and military men, who lost everything. But the German toymakers conquered the world.
THE END
