Capturing the Carol

For a recent book study at St. Mark, we read and discussed Charles Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol.  With Advent just a couple of weeks away, I wondered how reading this tale might influence our thinking, and impact our Christmas celebrations.  Time will tell, I suppose, but it dawned on me some days after the discussion what might be the most important contribution that A Christmas Carol can make to our present generation; an obvious fact that initially eluded my contemplations of the story.  What is it?  Pictures.  Pictures of real, meaningful and unapologetic celebration.  Celebration that has a purity and essence that we moderns have lost, and desperately need to regain.

G.K. Chesterton contended that Dickens “was not only English, but unconsciously historic.  Upon him descended the real tradition of ‘Merry England,’ and not upon the pallid mediaevalists who thought they were reviving it.  The Pre-Raphaelites, the Gothicists, the admirers of the Middle Ages, had in their subtlety and sadness the spirit of the present day.  Dickens had in his buffoonery and bravery the spirit of the Middle Ages.  He was much more mediaeval in his attacks on mediaevalism than they were in their defences of it….

“In fighting for Christmas he was fighting for the old European festival, Pagan and Christian, for that trinity of eating, drinking, and praying which to moderns appears irreverent, for the holy day which is really a holiday.  He had himself the most babyish ideas about the past.  He supposed the Middle Ages to have consisted of tournaments and torture-chambers, he supposed himself to be a brisk man of the manufacturing age, almost Utilitarian.  But for all that he defended the mediaeval feast which was going out against the Utilitarianism which was coming in.  He could only see all that was bad in mediaevalism, but he fought for all that was good in it.  And he was all the more really in sympathy with the old strength and simplicity because he knew that it was good and did not know that it was old.  He cared as little for mediaevilsm as the mediaevals did.  He cared as much as they did for lustiness and virile laughter and sad tales of good lovers and pleasant tales of good livers. . . . He had no pleasure in looking on the dying Middle Ages.  But he looked on the living Middle Ages, on a piece of the old uproarious superstition still unbroken; and he hailed it like a new religion.  The Dickens character ate pudding to an extent at which the modern mediaevilists turned pale” (Charles Dickens, The Last of the Great Men).

It is precisely this ever-present spirit that sings to us throughout the carol.  Who among is not drawn to the infectious, heart-felt joy of Scrooge’s nephew?  Who among us would not thrill to throw ourselves to the dance with Old Fezziwig and his wife?  Would we dare to be too serious, or claim we have not practiced enough?  Who of us would not confess, with Dickens himself, the desire to be one of the children who “were not forty children conducting themselves like one, but every child conducting itself like forty?”  And we have yet to mention the elaborate descriptions of food that can no more be supported on the page than the prize turkey by its legs.  Can any of us approach the delight of the Cratchits in their goose, pudding, and each another?   Would any of us venture not to join the revelry with Fred, his wife and their friends?  Would we be too mature for their games?  Or would we understand that “it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.”

We need these pictures, for they instruct us in the life to be lived.  They give us glimpses of the life we have neglected, and need to restore.  They are pictures of hearts that laugh, and know truly the meaning of “Merry Christmas!”  Let us listen well to Dickens’ Carol, and hasten to join the song.