Book: Dreamthorp

A >> Alexander Smith >> Dreamthorp







CHRISTMAS

Over the dial-face of the year, on which the hours are months, the apex
resting in sunshine, the base in withered leaves and snows, the finger of
time does not travel with the same rapidity. Slowly it creeps up from
snow to sunshine; when it has gained the summit it seems almost to rest
for a little; rapidly it rushes down from sunshine to the snow. Judging
from my own feelings, the distance from January to June is greater than
from June to January--the period from Christmas to Midsummer seems longer
than the period from Midsummer to Christmas. This feeling arises, I
should fancy, from the preponderance of _light_ on that half of the dial
on which the finger seems to be travelling upwards, compared with the
half on which it seems to be travelling downwards. This light to the
eye, the mind translates into time. Summer days are long, often
wearisomely so. The long-lighted days are bracketed together by a little
bar of twilight, in which but a star or two find time to twinkle.
Usually one has less occupation in summer than in winter, and the
surplusage of summer light, a stage too large for the play, wearies,
oppresses, sometimes appalls. From the sense of time we can only shelter
ourselves by occupation; and when occupation ceases while yet some three
or four hours of light remain, the burden falls down, and is often
greater than we can bear. Personally, I have a certain morbid fear of
those endless summer twilights. A space of light stretching from
half-past 2 A.M. to 11 P.M. affects me with a sense of infinity, of
horrid sameness, just as the sea or the desert would do. I feel that for
too long a period I am under the eye of the taskmaster. Twilight is
always in itself, or at least in its suggestions, melancholy; and these
midsummer twilights are so long, they pass through such series of lovely
change, they are throughout so mournfully beautiful, that in the brain
they beget strange thoughts, and in the heart strange feelings. We see
too much of the sky, and the long, lovely, pathetic, lingering evening
light, with its suggestions of eternity and death, which one cannot for
the soul of one put into words, is somewhat too much for the comfort of a
sensitive human mortal. The day dies, and makes no apology for being
such an unconscionable time in dying; and all the while it colours our
thoughts with its own solemnity. There is no relief from this kind of
thing at midsummer. You cannot close your shutters and light your
candles; that in the tone of mind which circumstances superinduce would
be brutality. You cannot take Pickwick to the window and read it by the
dying light; that is profanation. If you have a friend with you, you
can't talk; the hour makes you silent. You are driven in on your
self-consciousness. The long light wearies the eye, a sense of time
disturbs and saddens the spirit; and that is the reason, I think, that
one half of the year seems so much longer than the other half; that on
the dial-plate whose hours are months, the restless finger _seems_ to
move more slowly when travelling upward from autumn leaves and snow to
light, than when it is travelling downward from light to snow and
withered leaves.

Of all the seasons of the year, I like winter best. That peculiar burden
of time I have been speaking of, does not affect me now. The day is
short, and I can fill it with work; when evening comes, I have my lighted
room and my books. Should black care haunt me, I throw it off the scent
in Spenser's forests, or seek refuge from it among Shakspeare's men and
women, who are by far the best company I have met with, or am like to
meet with, on earth. I am sitting at this present moment with my
curtains drawn; the cheerful fire is winking at all the furniture in the
room, and from every leg and arm the furniture is winking to the fire in
return. I put off the outer world with my great-coat and boots, and put
on contentment and idleness with my slippers. On the hearth-rug, Pepper,
coiled in a shaggy ball, is asleep in the ruddy light and heat. An
imaginative sense of the cold outside increases my present comfort--just
as one never hugs one's own good luck so affectionately as when listening
to the relation of some horrible misfortune which has overtaken others.
Winter has fallen on Dreamthorp, and it looks as pretty when covered with
snow as when covered with apple blossom. Outside, the ground is hard as
iron; and over the low dark hill, lo! the tender radiance that precedes
the morn. Every window in the little village has its light, and to the
traveller coming on, enveloped in his breath, the whole place shines like
a congregation of glow-worms. A pleasant enough sight to him if his home
be there! At this present season, the canal is not such a pleasant
promenade as it was in summer. The barges come and go as usual, but at
this time I do not envy the bargemen quite so much. The horse comes
smoking along; the tarpaulin which covers the merchandise is sprinkled
with hoar-frost; and the helmsman, smoking his short pipe for the mere
heat of it, cowers over a few red cinders contained in a framework of
iron. The labour of the poor fellows will soon be over for a time; for
if this frost continues, the canal will be sheathed in a night, and next
day stones will be thrown upon it, and a daring urchin venturing upon it
will go souse head over heels, and run home with his teeth in a chatter;
and the day after, the lake beneath the old castle will be sheeted, and
the next, the villagers will be sliding on its gleaming face from ruddy
dawn at nine to ruddy eve at three; and hours later, skaters yet
unsatisfied will be moving ghost-like in the gloom--now one, now another,
shooting on sounding irons into a clear space of frosty light, chasing
the moon, or the flying image of a star! Happy youths leaning against
the frosty wind!

I am a Christian, I hope, although far from a muscular one--consequently
I cannot join the skaters on the lake. The floor of ice, with the people
upon it, will be but a picture to me. And, in truth, it is in its
pictorial aspect that I chiefly love the bleak season. As an artist,
winter can match summer any day. The heavy, feathery flakes have been
falling all the night through, we shall suppose, and when you get up in
the morning the world is draped in white. What a sight it is! It is the
world you knew, but yet a different one. The familiar look has gone, and
another has taken its place; and a not unpleasant puzzlement arises in
your mind, born of the patent and the remembered aspect. It reminds you
of a friend who has been suddenly placed in new circumstances, in whom
there is much that you recognise, and much that is entirely strange. How
purely, divinely white when the last snowflake has just fallen! How
exquisite and virginal the repose! It touches you like some perfection
of music. And winter does not work only on a broad scale; he is careful
in trifles. Pluck a single ivy leaf from the old wall, and see what a
jeweller he is! How he has silvered over the dark-green reticulations
with his frosts! The faggot which the Tramp gathers for his fire is
thicklier incrusted with gems than ever was sceptre of the Moguls. Go
into the woods, and behold on the black boughs his glories of pearl and
diamond--pendant splendours that, smitten by the noon-ray, melt into
tears and fall but to congeal into splendours again. Nor does he work in
black and white alone. He has on his palette more gorgeous colours than
those in which swim the summer setting suns; and with these, about three
o'clock, he begins to adorn his west, sticking his red hot ball of a sun
in the very midst; and a couple of hours later, when the orb has fallen,
and the flaming crimson has mellowed into liquid orange, you can see the
black skeletons of trees scribbled upon the melancholy glory. Nor need I
speak of the magnificence of a winter midnight, when space, sombre blue,
crowded with star and planet, "burnished by the frost," is glittering
like the harness of an archangel full panoplied against a battle day.

For years and years now I have watched the seasons come and go around
Dreamthorp, and each in its turn interests me as if I saw it for the
first time. But the other week it seems that I saw the grain ripen; then
by day a motley crew of reapers were in the fields, and at night a big
red moon looked down upon the stocks of oats and barley; then in mighty
wains the plenteous harvest came swaying home, leaving a largess on the
roads for every bird; then the round, yellow, comfortable-looking stacks
stood around the farm-houses, hiding them to the chimneys; then the woods
reddened, the beech hedges became russet, and every puff of wind made
rustle the withered leaves; then the sunset came before the early dark,
and in the east lay banks of bleak pink vapour, which are ever a prophecy
of cold; then out of a low dingy heaven came all day, thick and silent,
the whirling snow,--and so by exquisite succession of sight and sound
have I been taken from the top of the year to the bottom of it, from
midsummer, with its unreaped harvests, to the night on which I am sitting
here--Christmas, 1862.

Sitting here, I incontinently find myself holding a levee of departed
Christmas nights. Silently, and without special call, into my study of
imagination come these apparitions, clad in snowy mantles, brooched and
gemmed with frosts. Their numbers I do not care to count, for I know
they are the numbers of my years. The visages of two or three are sad
enough, but on the whole 'tis a congregation of jolly ghosts. The
nostrils of my memory are assailed by a faint odour of plum-pudding and
burnt brandy. I hear a sound as of light music, a whisk of women's
dresses whirled round in dance, a click as of glasses pledged by friends.
Before one of these apparitions is a mound, as of a new-made grave, on
which the snow is lying. I know, I know! Drape thyself not in white
like the others, but in mourning stole of crape; and instead of dance
music, let there haunt around thee the service for the dead! I know that
sprig of Mistletoe, O Spirit in the midst! Under it I swung the girl I
loved--girl no more now than I am a boy--and kissed her spite of blush
and pretty shriek. And thee, too, with fragrant trencher in hand, over
which blue tongues of flame are playing, do I know--most ancient
apparition of them all. I remember thy reigning night. Back to very
days of childhood am I taken by the ghostly raisins simmering in a
ghostly brandy flame. Where now the merry boys and girls that thrust
their fingers in thy blaze? And now, when I think of it, thee also would
I drape in black raiment, around thee also would I make the burial
service murmur.

Men hold the anniversaries of their birth, of their marriage, of the
birth of their first-born, and they hold--although they spread no feast,
and ask no friends to assist--many another anniversary besides. On many
a day in every year does a man remember what took place on that self-same
day in some former year, and chews the sweet or bitter herb of memory, as
the case may be. Could I ever hope to write a decent Essay, I should
like to write one "On the Revisiting of Places." It is strange how
important the poorest human being is to himself! how he likes to double
back on his experiences, to stand on the place he has stood on before, to
meet himself face to face, as it were! I go to the great city in which
my early life was spent, and I love to indulge myself in this whim. The
only thing I care about is that portion of the city which is connected
with myself. I don't think this passion of reminiscence is debased by
the slightest taint of vanity. The lamp-post, under the light of which
in the winter rain there was a parting so many years ago, I contemplate
with the most curious interest. I stare on the windows of the houses in
which I once lived, with a feeling which I should find difficult to
express in words. I think of the life I led there, of the good and the
bad news that came, of the sister who died, of the brother who was born;
and were it at all possible, I should like to knock at the once familiar
door, and look at the old walls--which could speak to me so
strangely--once again. To revisit that city is like walking away back
into my yesterdays. I startle myself with myself at the corners of
streets, I confront forgotten bits of myself at the entrance to houses.
In windows which to another man would seem blank and meaningless, I find
personal poems too deep to be ever turned into rhymes--more pathetic,
mayhap, than I have ever found on printed page. The spot of ground on
which a man has stood is for ever interesting to him. Every experience
is an anchor holding him the more firmly to existence. It is for this
reason that we hold our sacred days, silent and solitary anniversaries of
joy and bitterness, renewing ourselves thereby, going back upon
ourselves, living over again the memorable experience. The full yellow
moon of next September will gather into itself the light of the full
yellow moons of Septembers long ago. In this Christmas night all the
other Christmas nights of my life live. How warm, breathing, full of
myself is the year 1862, now almost gone! How bare, cheerless, unknown,
the year 1863, about to come in! It stretches before me in imagination
like some great, gaunt untenanted ruin of a Colosseum, in which no
footstep falls, no voice is heard; and by this night year its naked
chambers and windows, three hundred and sixty-five in number, will be
clothed all over, and hidden by myself as if with covering ivies.
Looking forward into an empty year strikes one with a certain awe,
because one finds therein no recognition. The years behind have a
friendly aspect, and they are warmed by the fires we have kindled, and
all their echoes are the echoes of our own voices.

This, then, is Christmas, 1862. Everything is silent in Dreamthorp. The
smith's hammer reposes beside the anvil. The weaver's flying shuttle is
at rest. Through the clear wintry sunshine the bells this morning rang
from the gray church tower amid the leafless elms, and up the walk the
villagers trooped in their best dresses and their best faces--the latter
a little reddened by the sharp wind: mere redness in the middle aged; in
the maids, wonderful bloom to the eyes of their lovers--and took their
places decently in the ancient pews. The clerk read the beautiful
prayers of our Church, which seem more beautiful at Christmas than at any
other period. For that very feeling which breaks down at this time the
barriers which custom, birth, or wealth have erected between man and man,
strikes down the barrier of time which intervenes between the worshipper
of to-day and the great body of worshippers who are at rest in their
graves. On such a day as this, hearing these prayers, we feel a kinship
with the devout generations who heard them long ago. The devout lips of
the Christian dead murmured the responses which we now murmur; along this
road of prayer did their thoughts of our innumerable dead, our brothers
and sisters in faith and hope, approach the Maker, even as ours at
present approach Him. Prayers over, the clergyman--who is no Boanerges,
or Chrysostom, golden-mouthed, but a loving, genial-hearted, pious man,
the whole extent of his life from boyhood until now, full of charity and
kindly deeds, as autumn fields with heavy wheaten ears; the clergyman, I
say--for the sentence is becoming unwieldy on my hands, and one must
double back to secure connexion--read out in that silvery voice of his,
which is sweeter than any music to my ear, those chapters of the New
Testament that deal with the birth of the Saviour. And the red-faced
rustic congregation hung on the good man's voice as he spoke of the
Infant brought forth in a manger, of the shining angels that appeared in
mid-air to the shepherds, of the miraculous star that took its station in
the sky, and of the wise men who came from afar and laid their gifts of
frankincense and myrrh at the feet of the child. With the story every
one was familiar, but on that day, and backed by the persuasive melody of
the reader's voice, it seemed to all quite new--at least, they listened
attentively as if it were. The discourse that followed possessed no
remarkable thoughts; it dealt simply with the goodness of the Maker of
heaven and earth, and the shortness of time, with the duties of
thankfulness and charity to the poor; and I am persuaded that every one
who heard returned to his house in a better frame of mind. And so the
service remitted us all to our own homes, to what roast-beef and
plum-pudding slender means permitted, to gatherings around cheerful
fires, to half-pleasant, half-sad remembrances of the dead and the absent.

From sermon I have returned like the others, and it is my purpose to hold
Christmas alone. I have no one with me at table, and my own thoughts
must be my Christmas guests. Sitting here, it is pleasant to think how
much kindly feeling exists this present night in England. By imagination
I can taste of every table, pledge every toast, silently join in every
roar of merriment. I become a sort of universal guest. With what
propriety is this jovial season, placed amid dismal December rains and
snows! How one pities the unhappy Australians, with whom everything is
turned topsy-turvy, and who hold Christmas at midsummer! The face of
Christmas glows all the brighter for the cold. The heart warms as the
frost increases. Estrangements which have embittered the whole year,
melt in to-night's hospitable smile. There are warmer hand-shakings on
this night than during the by-past twelve months. Friend lives in the
mind of friend. There is more charity at this time than at any other.
You get up at midnight and toss your spare coppers to the half-benumbed
musicians whiffling beneath your windows, although at any other time you
would consider their performance a nuisance, and call angrily for the
police. Poverty, and scanty clothing, and fireless grates, come home at
this season to the bosoms of the rich, and they give of their abundance.
The very red-breast of the woods enjoys his Christmas feast. Good
feeling incarnates itself in plum-pudding. The Master's words, "The poor
ye have always with you," wear at this time a deep significance. For at
least one night on each year over all Christendom there is brotherhood.
And good men, sitting amongst their families, or by a solitary fire like
me, when they remember the light that shone over the poor clowns huddling
on the Bethlehem plains eighteen hundred years ago, the apparition of
shining angels overhead, the song "Peace on earth and good-will toward
men," which for the first time hallowed the midnight air,--pray for that
strain's fulfilment, that battle and strife may vex the nations no more,
that not only on Christmas-eve, but the whole year round, men shall be
brethren owning one Father in heaven.

Although suggested by the season, and by a solitary dinner, it is not my
purpose to indulge in personal reminiscence and talk. Let all that pass.
This is Christmas-day, the anniversary of the world's greatest event. To
one day all the early world looked forward; to the same day the later
world looks back. That day holds time together. Isaiah, standing on the
peaks of prophecy, looked across ruined empires and the desolations of
many centuries, and saw on the horizon the new star arise, and was glad.
On this night eighteen hundred years ago, Jove was discrowned, the Pagan
heaven emptied of its divinities, and Olympus left to the solitude of its
snows. On this night, so many hundred years bygone, the despairing voice
was heard shrieking on the Aegean, "Pan is dead, great Pan is dead!" On
this night, according to the fine reverence of the poets, all things that
blast and blight are powerless, disarmed by sweet influence:--

"Some say that ever 'gainst the season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated
The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then they say no spirit dares stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike;
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm:
So hallowed and so gracious is the time."


The flight of the Pagan mythology before the new faith has been a
favourite subject with the poets; and it has been my custom for many
seasons to read Milton's "Hymn to the Nativity" on the evening of
Christmas-day. The bass of heaven's deep organ seems to blow in the
lines, and slowly and with many echoes the strain melts into silence. To
my ear the lines sound like the full-voiced choir and the rolling organ
of a cathedral, when the afternoon light streaming through the painted
windows fills the place with solemn colours and masses of gorgeous gloom.
To-night I shall float my lonely hours away on music:--

"The oracles are dumb,
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving:
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.

"The lonely mountains o'er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard and loud lament:
From haunted spring, and dale
Edged with poplars pale,
The parting genius is with sighing sent:
With flower-enwoven tresses torn
The nymphs in twilight shades of tangled thickets mourn.

"Peor and Baalim
Forsake their temples dim
With that twice-battered god of Palestine;
And mooned Ashtaroth,
Heaven's queen and mother both,
Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shine!
The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn,
In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn.

"And sullen Moloch, fled,
Hath left in shadows dread
His burning idol, all of blackest hue:
In vain with cymbals' ring
They call the grisly king
In dismal dance about the furnace blue:
The Brutish gods of Nile as fast,
Isis, and Orus, and the dog Anubis haste.

"He feels from Juda's land
The dreaded Infant's hand,
The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyne:
Nor all the gods beside
Dare longer there abide,
Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine.
Our Babe to shew His Godhead true
Can in His swaddling bands control the damned crew."


These verses, as if loath to die, linger with a certain persistence in
mind and ear. This is the "mighty line" which critics talk about! And
just as in an infant's face you may discern the rudiments of the future
man, so in the glorious hymn may be traced the more majestic lineaments
of the "Paradise Lost."

Strangely enough, the next noblest dirge for the unrealmed divinities
which I can call to remembrance, and at the same time the most eloquent
celebration of the new power and prophecy of its triumph, has been
uttered by Shelley, who cannot in any sense be termed a Christian poet.
It is one of the choruses in "Hellas," and perhaps had he lived longer
amongst us, it would have been the prelude to higher strains. Of this I
am certain, that before his death the mind of that brilliant genius was
rapidly changing,--that for him the cross was gathering attractions round
it,--that the wall which he complained had been built up between his
heart and his intellect was being broken down, and that rays of a strange
splendour were already streaming upon him through the interstices. What
a contrast between the darkened glory of "Queen Mab"--of which in
afterlife he was ashamed, both as a literary work and as an expression of
opinion--and the intense, clear, lyrical light of this triumphant poem!--

"A power from the unknown God,
A Promethean conqueror came:
Like a triumphal path he trod
The thorns of death and shame.
A mortal shape to him
Was like the vapour dim
Which the orient planet animates with light.
Hell, sin, and slavery came
Like bloodhounds mild and tame,
Nor prey'd until their lord had taken flight.
The moon of Mahomet
Arose, and it shall set;
While blazon'd, as on heaven's immortal noon,
The Cross leads generations on.

"Swift as the radiant shapes of sleep,
From one whose dreams are paradise,
Fly, when the fond wretch wakes to weep,
And day peers forth with her blank eyes:
So fleet, so faint, so fair,
The powers of earth and air
Fled from the folding star of Bethlehem.
Apollo, Pan, and Love,
And even Olympian Jove,
Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them.
Our hills, and seas, and streams,
Dispeopled of their dreams,
Their water turned to blood, their dew to tears,
Wailed for the golden years."


For my own part, I cannot read these lines without emotion--not so much
for their beauty as for the change in the writer's mind which they
suggest. The self-sacrifice which lies at the centre of Christianity
should have touched this man more deeply than almost any other. That it
was beginning to touch and mould him, I verily believe. He died and made
_that_ sign. Of what music did that storm in Spezia Bay rob the world!

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