Hope and the Holly Wreath
THE
COMMONWEAL
A Weekly Review of s The Arts, and Public Affairs. Volume V New York, Wednesday, December 22, 1926 Number 7 CONTENTS Hope and the Holly Wreath ............. 169 Week...
...There were no spiked cavemen's dubs in the romantic Arcady...
...Translated by Thomas Walsh I85 Carroll Club Christmas...
...ticed now...
...There is always room for him in the inn...
...Because the essence of His effort was to be human, it is the ultimate definition of any faith that professes to follow Him that it should be human, too...
...The Puritan face has been veiled, the romantic's dream has gone out of style...
...But a brand new model has appeared in turn--a model fairly well suggested by the image of a struggling and athletic swimmer...
...It is good if only because it is a protest against the tyrant of our time--a revolution which bursts into ex- plosive laughter...
...But there is a mighty truth, which the Dickens with whom we began, must have divined...
...If all did not burn candles before the Cross, at least they lighted them upon a tree...
...And, of course, it forgot all about what the start-had really been like...
...It was all quite as if some erratic Michael- angelo, with a passion for blossoming apple-trees, should suddenly make an angry attack upon a gar-dener whose snowballs were, to his mind, only trifling, fluity things...
...and if The Christmas Pudding...
...One thinks of Ibsen, fumbling in his Scandinavian darkness for the words with which t.o lash the hollowness of the engulfing commonplace, stirring some to reflection and driving others to despair...
...THE COMMONWEAL A Weekly Review of s The Arts, and Public Affairs...
...Today it is extremely difficult to re-store that concept, in the face of many phantoms and of hopelessness itself...
...Naturally there have been many bitter and futile rebellions...
...The whole complex intellectual business which attempted to exploit what civilization there was left after the break-up of the middle-ages, found expression in the formula that man, as he had been developed under the shadow of Christendom and its classic inheritance, was a hopeless and unsavory mess...
...the hollowness of its dreams is echoed by the feebleness of its waking smile...
...This return, however, was not normally in- terested in Christendom...
...The cheapness of its construction is evidenced by the very things upon which it prides itself in the way of ornament--its gewgaws and its glamour...
...How such a process of galvanization can go on without men rising in mobs wrathfully to protest against it, is difficult to understand...
...Nothing was ever more unsdentific than the theory of "life in nature" which went hand in hand with the growth of natural science...
...The very word "mirth" is Scandinavian in origin...
...Fill the bowls high, and invite all to feel the warmth of charity and jubilation...
...Perhaps the tremendous impetus given to marketing has its roots as much in commerce as in kindliness...
...T. Lawrason Riggs, Henry Longan Stuart, Ernest Brennecke, Jr., Robert Innes Center I9O Current Magazines...
...R. Dana Skinner 188 Books...
...174 A Poet Among Ambassadors...
...It is the most appallingly evil of all the Procrustean beds upon which the Chris- tian man has been asked to lie...
...It is precisely what Scrooge was before Marley died...
...So many other people, in the days before his time, had gone violently wrong by begin- ning with a dictum, even a very holy dictum...
...Dolores Benardete I76 Quality Street...
...In our own time, the pattern prevailingly suggested is considerably different in character...
...His life as a constant min- gling of tears and peals of laughter, of birth and death, of marriage and immaculate virginity, had that rich and moving greatness that is always to be found in preparation...
...It had never been intended that he climb over the walls of his own city, to veer toward Quixotic kingships of his own...
...And so also the human fashion is to be in the current of things: man con-ceives of himself, first of all, as part of the cosmic tide out of which the ships of earth and stars have come...
...Jules-Bois 175 The Christ-Child in Old England...
...These and the antique sacred silences out of which they came---silences of the Christmas night, across which folk hurried minster-ward through the snow--carried that in which Ibsen never dared to believe, a benediction in which there is also a hope...
...All birth is seen as happening under the sign of the ape and the atom...
...All death is measured by surviv- ing dividends and the echo of hushed huzzas...
...186 The Play...
...It was, of course, a sign which involved consider- able reminiscence...
...the honest merriment of mortals, as Dickens over-heard it, was therefore a beautiful, immemorial sign...
...The lithe muscles battle the waters...
...It happened to be the superb virtue of Charles Dickens that he could always take a human being for his text...
...The law of energy is the favorite rule, and the ex-penditure of energy to win out over the flood is the only expression in which personality seeks satisfaction...
...As a child he was to be watched over lovingly at his work and play--during all the ridiculous pastimes he found tremendously important...
...The entire frightfulness of this dream of men galvanized into a single attitude escaped detec- tion at oncemjust as the gradual galvanization of American college men into salesmen is not widely noI70 THE COMMONWEAL December 22, I026 ,m=l...
...But he could not raise a single shout of joy, even though the history of his people was full to the brim of joymparticularly the older and peculiarly sacred history...
...Oddly enough, it had apparently escaped attention that Holy Writ could be of little importance to heaven itself--that the only conceivable reason why it existed at all was because heaven, in a towering manifestation of affection, had attributed a certain importance to man...
...17 I Being Done Good...
...And nothing so definitely characterizes the modern time as its failure to understand Him as a man--its failure to see that Divinity might very easily have overawed the world with a merciless revelation of splendor, but that It accomplished the incomparably more difficult thing of growing up with men...
...Here, at least once in the year, we are human--we scatter the simplicities of carols and greetings, of gifts and merriment, as if we had all suddenly emerged from a room of sleep or torture...
...196 HOLLY WREATH it had failed to reveal some slight improvement as result, one might well be in a quandary to determine where were the traces of heaven upon the earth...
...Carl Holliday 184 Christmas Chants of Latin Lands...
...their very weariness is tri- umphant and exhilarating...
...and then he plunges his being, by a strange, illogical corollary, into the surge called civilization...
...169 Week by Week...
...He had confidence in furious hate, in the intellect, in a curious variety of mysticism even...
...The little human plant had been carefully nursed by the hand of Divinity during several thousands of years...
...That death, of course, though in its own way redemptive, derived its efficacy from an infinitely more significant birth...
...Deeply as we may regret the completeness and finality of his de- mise (being cold as a coffin-nail has its obvious mourn- ful disadvantages) the effect was nothing short of marvelously stimulating...
...Even...
...It is curious to note that in the North, where the departure from man as he had been fashioned by Christendom was earliest and most marked, the outcry against the newer human pat- terns has also been the most gloomily violent...
...The transcendent Pattern of the race began to be visible as a child, in a manger round which were whispered august and moving words of comfort...
...And however dim such faith may be now in many places, it does survive universally in this season's festival...
...People who could not join heartily in a Christmas feast were at least dispensed from a gloomy workaday fast...
...But what there is left of charity is none the less surpassingly good...
...So then, naturally enough, the first pat- tern displayed by the reformers was man wearing on his coat sleeve, as it were, the obvious marks of salvationmthe aweful, lugubrious grandeur of one set apart from his neighbors for purposes of the next world...
...but he was fatally unable to realize the strength of the Eternal Child...
...The faults of the world, as he faced them, were in a large measure attributable to the fact that the Puritans would stand on nothing but the Bible, and the philoso- phers on nothing but a theory...
...And Ibsen must have seen during his lifetime the whimsically attrac: tire "star boys" who advertised the gayety of the sea- son, and the "Lucia" who wears nine candles in her gleaming hair...
...C. R. Morey I82 HOPE AND THE O NE hates to think what the world would have been like if Marley had not died...
...It may be that the style of our celebration is somewhat marred...
...But while the dream lasted, the memory of God's carefully nourished human being faded con-siderably...
...Volume V New York, Wednesday, December 22, 1926 Number 7 CONTENTS Hope and the Holly Wreath...
...It is the truth that errant man differs in one important particular from the Child of Christmas night...
...It asked for a clean slate, for a fresh human start...
...Soon the effort to get rid of the Puritani- cal pattern (and of several other patterns just as bad, which cannot be enumerated here) expressed itself in a tremendous propaganda for a return to something earlier...
...Cond6 B. PaUen 179 Princeton Indexes Vatican Art...
...Man, small as he is in the tumult of the universe, bent by sorrow and varied idiocies, regains through communal mirth the stature in which destiny found him good...
Vol. 5 • December 1926 • No. 7
