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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14653 ***
+
+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
+
+CHAPTER
+
+   I. THE FACT
+  II. THE REASON
+ III. THE SOLSTICE AND GOODWILL
+  IV. THE APPOSITENESS OF CHRISTMAS
+   V. DEFENCE OF FEASTING
+  VI. TO REVITALIZE THE FESTIVAL
+ VII. THE GIFT OF ONESELF
+VIII. THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND
+  IX. THE REACTION
+   X. ON THE LAST DAY OF THE YEAR
+
+
+
+
+
+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 enjoyment of the summer holiday. We
+experience no difficulty in inducing the holiday feeling. There is no
+fear of the institution of the summer holiday losing its heartiness. Nor
+do we need the example of children to aid us in savouring the August
+"festivities."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If any person here breaks in with the statement that I am deceived and
+the truth is not in me, and that Christmas stands just where it did in
+the esteem of all right-minded people, and that he who casts a doubt on
+the heartiness of Christmas is not right-minded, let that person read no
+more. This book is not written for him. And if any other person,
+kindlier, condescendingly protests that there is nothing wrong with
+Christmas except my advancing age, let that person read no more. This
+book is not written for him, either. It is written for persons who can
+look facts cheerfully in the face. That Christmas has lost some of its
+magic is a fact that the common sense of the western hemisphere will not
+dispute. To blink the fact is infantile. To confront it, to try to
+understand it, to reckon with it, and to obviate any evil that may
+attach to it--this course alone is meet for an honest man.
+
+
+
+
+
+TWO
+
+THE REASON
+
+
+If the decadence of Christmas were a purely subjective phenomenon,
+confined to the breasts of those of us who have ceased to be children
+then it follows that Christmas has always been decadent, because people
+have always been ceasing to be children. It follows also that the
+festival was originally got up by disillusioned adults, for the benefit
+of the children. Which is totally absurd. Adults have never yet invented
+any institution, festival or diversion specially for the benefit of
+children. The egoism of adults makes such an effort impossible, and the
+ingenuity and pliancy of children make it unnecessary. The pantomime,
+for example, which is now pre-eminently a diversion for children, was
+created by adults for the amusement of adults. Children have merely
+accepted it and appropriated it. Children, being helpless, are of course
+fatalists and imitators. They take what comes, and they do the best they
+can with it. And when they have made something their own that was adult,
+they stick to it like leeches.
+
+They are terrific Tories, are children; they are even reactionary! They
+powerfully object to changes. What they most admire in a pantomime is
+the oldest part of it, the only true pantomime--the harlequinade! Hence
+the very nature of children is a proof that what Christmas is now to
+them, it was in the past to their elders. If they now feel and exhibit
+faith and enthusiasm in the practice of the festival, be sure that, at
+one time, adults felt and exhibited the same faith and enthusiasm--yea,
+and more! For in neither faith nor enthusiasm can a child compete with a
+convinced adult. No child could believe in anything as passionately as
+the modern millionaire believes in money, or as the modern social
+reformer believes in the virtue of Acts of Parliament.
+
+Another and a crowning proof that Christmas has been diminished in our
+hearts lies in the fiery lyrical splendour of the old Christmas hymns.
+Those hymns were not written by people who made-believe at Christmas for
+the pleasure of youngsters. They were written by devotees. And this age
+could not have produced them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No! The decay of the old Christmas spirit among adults is undeniable,
+and its cause is fairly plain. It is due to the labours of a set of
+idealists--men who cared not for money, nor for glory, nor for anything
+except their ideal. Their ideal was to find out the truth concerning
+nature and concerning human history; and they sacrificed all--they
+sacrificed the peace of mind of whole generations--to the pleasure of
+slaking their ardour for truth. For them the most important thing in the
+world was the satisfaction of their curiosity. They would leave naught
+alone; and they scorned consequences. Useless to cry to them: "That is
+holy. Touch it not!" I mean the great philosophers and men of
+science--especially the geologists--of the nineteenth century. I mean
+such utterly pure-minded men as Lyell, Spencer, Darwin and Huxley. They
+inaugurated the mighty age of doubt and scepticism. They made it
+impossible to believe all manner of things which before them none had
+questioned. The movement spread until uneasiness was everywhere in the
+realm of thought, and people walked about therein fearsomely, as in a
+land subject to earthquakes. It was as if people had said: "We don't
+know what will topple next. Let's raze everything to the ground, and
+then we shall feel safer." And there came a moment after which nobody
+could ever look at a picture of the Nativity in the old way. Pictures of
+the Nativity were admired perhaps as much as ever, but for the exquisite
+beauty of their naïveté, the charm of their old-world simplicity, not
+as artistic renderings of fact.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An age of scepticism has its faults, like any other age, though certain
+persons have pretended the contrary. Having been compelled to abandon
+its belief in various statements of alleged fact, it lumps principles
+and ideals with alleged facts, and hastily decides not to believe in
+anything at all. It gives up faith, it despises faith, in spite of the
+warning of its greatest philosophers, including Herbert Spencer, that
+faith of some sort is necessary to a satisfactory existence in a
+universe full of problems which science admits it can never solve. None
+were humbler than the foremost scientists about the narrowness of the
+field of knowledge, as compared with the immeasurability of the field
+of faith. But the warning has been ignored, as warnings nearly always
+are. Faith is at a discount. And the qualities which go with faith are
+at a discount; such as enthusiasm, spontaneity, ebullition, lyricism,
+and self-expression in general. Sentimentality is held in such horror
+that people are afraid even of sentiment. Their secret cry is: "Give us
+something in which we can believe."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They forget, in their confusion, that the great principles, spiritual
+and moral, remain absolutely intact. They forget that, after all the
+shattering discoveries of science and conclusions of philosophy, mankind
+has still to live with dignity amid hostile nature, and in the presence
+of an unknowable power and that mankind can only succeed in this
+tremendous feat by the exercise of faith and of that mutual goodwill
+which is based in sincerity and charity. They forget that, while facts
+are nothing, these principles are everything. And so, at that epoch of
+the year which nature herself has ordained for the formal recognition of
+the situation of mankind in the universe and of its resulting duties to
+itself and to the Unknown--at that epoch, they bewail, sadly or
+impatiently or cynically: "Oh! The bottom has been knocked out of
+Christmas!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the bottom has not been knocked out of Christmas. And people know
+it. Somewhere, in the most central and mysterious fastness of their
+hearts, they know it. If they were not, in spite of themselves,
+convinced of it, why should they be so pathetically anxious to keep
+alive in themselves, and to foster in their children, the Christmas
+spirit? Obviously, a profound instinct is for ever reminding them that,
+without the Christmas spirit, they are lost. The forms of faith change,
+but the spirit of faith, which is the Christmas spirit, is immortal amid
+its endless vicissitudes. At a crisis of change, faith is weakened for
+the majority; for the majority it may seem to be dead. It is conserved,
+however, in the hearts of the few supremely great and in the hearts of
+the simple. The supremely great are hidden from the majority; but the
+simple are seen of all men, and them we encourage, often without knowing
+why, to be the depositaries of that which we cannot ourselves guard, but
+which we dimly feel to be indispensable to our safety.
+
+
+
+
+
+THREE
+
+THE SOLSTICE AND GOOD WILL
+
+
+In order to see that there is underlying Christmas an idea of faith
+which will at any rate last as long as the planet lasts, it is only
+necessary to ask and answer the question: "Why was the Christmas feast
+fixed for the twenty-fifth of December?" For it is absolutely certain,
+and admitted by everybody of knowledge, that Christ was not born on the
+twenty-fifth of December. Those disturbing impassioned inquirers after
+truth, who will not leave us peaceful in our ignorance, have settled
+that for us, by pointing out, among other things, that the twenty-fifth
+of December falls in the very midst of the Palestine rainy season, and
+that, therefore, shepherds were assuredly not on that date watching
+their flocks by night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Christians were not, at first, united in the celebration of Christmas.
+Some kept Christmas in January, others in April, others in May. It was a
+pre-Christian force which drove them all into agreement upon the
+twenty-fifth of December. Just as they wisely took the Christmas tree
+from the Roman Saturnalia, so they took the date of their festival from
+the universal pre-Christian festival of the winter solstice, Yule, when
+mankind celebrated the triumph of the sun over the powers of darkness,
+when the night begins to decrease and the day to increase, when the
+year turns, and hope is born again because the worst is over. No more
+suitably symbolic moment could have been chosen for a festival of faith,
+goodwill and joy. And the appositeness of the moment is just as perfect
+in this era of electric light and central heating, as it was in the era
+of Virgil, who, by the way, described a Christmas tree. We shall say
+this year, with exactly the same accents of relief and hope as our pagan
+ancestors used, and as the woaded savage used: "The days will begin to
+lengthen now!" For, while we often falsely fancy that we have subjugated
+nature to our service, the fact is that we are as irremediably as ever
+at the mercy of nature.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Indeed, the attitude of us moderns towards the forces by which our
+existence is governed ought to be, and probably is, more reverent and
+awe-struck than that of the earlier world. The discoveries of science
+have at once quickened our imagination and compelled us to admit that
+what we know is the merest trifle. The pagan in his ignorance explained
+everything. Our knowledge has only deepened the mystery, and all that we
+shall learn will but deepen it further. We can explain the solstice. We
+are aware with absolute certitude that the solstice and the equinox and
+the varying phenomena of the seasons are due to the fact that the plane
+of the equator is tilted at a slight angle to the plane of the ecliptic.
+When we put on the first overcoat in autumn, and when we give orders to
+let the furnace out in spring, we know that we are arranging our lives
+in accordance with that angle. And we are quite duly proud of our
+knowledge. And much good does our knowledge do us!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, it does do us some good, and in a spiritual way, too! For nobody
+can even toy with astronomy without picturing to himself, more clearly
+and startlingly than would be otherwise possible, a revolving globe that
+whizzes through elemental space around a ball of fire: which, in turn,
+is rushing with all its satellites at an inconceivable speed from
+nowhere to nowhere; and to the surface of the revolving, whizzing globe
+a multitude of living things desperately clinging, and these living
+things, in the midst of cataclysmic danger, and between the twin enigmas
+of birth and death, quarrelling and hating and calling themselves kings
+and queens and millionaires and beautiful women and aristocrats and
+geniuses and lackeys and superior persons! Perhaps the highest value of
+astronomy is that it renders more vivid the ironical significance of
+such a vision, and thus brings home to us the truth that in spite of all
+the differences which we have invented, mankind is a fellowship of
+brothers, overshadowed by insoluble and fearful mysteries, and dependent
+upon mutual goodwill and trust for the happiness it may hope to achieve.
+* * * Let us remember that Christmas is, among other things, the winter
+solstice, and that the bottom has not yet been knocked out of the winter
+solstice, nor is likely to be in the immediate future!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is a curious fact that the one faith which really does flourish and
+wax in these days should be faith in the idea of social justice. For
+social justice simply means the putting into practice of goodwill and
+the recognition of the brotherhood of mankind. Formerly, people were
+enthusiastic and altruistic for a theological idea, for a national idea,
+for a political idea. You could see men on the rack for the sake of a
+dogma; you could see men of a great nation fitting out regiments and
+ruining themselves and going forth to save a small nation from
+destruction. You could see men giving their lives to the aggrandisement
+of an empire. And the men who did these things had the best brains and
+the quickest wits and the warmest hearts of their time. But today,
+whenever you meet a first-class man who is both enthusiastic and
+altruistic, you may be sure that his pet scheme is neither theological,
+military nor political; you may be sure that he has got into his head
+the notion that some class of persons somewhere are not being treated
+fairly, are not being treated with fraternal goodwill, and that he is
+determined to put the matter right, or perish.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In England, nearly all the most interesting people are social reformers:
+and the only circles of society in which you are not bored, in which
+there is real conversation, are the circles of social reform. These
+people alone have an abounding and convincing faith. Their faith has,
+for example, convinced many of the best literary artists of the day,
+with the result that a large proportion of the best modern imaginative
+literature has been inspired by the dream of social justice. Take away
+that idea from the works of H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy and George
+Bernard Shaw, and there would be exactly nothing left. Despite any
+appearance to the contrary, therefore, the idea of universal goodwill is
+really alive upon the continents of this planet: more so, indeed, than
+any other idea--for the vitality of an idea depends far less on the
+numbers of people who hold it than on the quality of the heart and brain
+of the people who hold it. Whether the growth of the idea is due to the
+spiritual awe and humility which are the consequence of increased
+scientific knowledge, I cannot say, and I do not seriously care.
+
+
+
+
+
+FOUR
+
+THE APPOSITENESS OF CHRISTMAS
+
+
+"Yes," you say, "I am quite at one with you as to the immense importance
+of goodwill in social existence, and I have the same faith in it as you
+have. But why a festival? Why eating and drinking and ceremonies? Surely
+one can have faith without festivals?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The answer is that one cannot; or at least that in practice, one never
+does. A disinclination for festivals, a morbid self-conscious fear of
+letting oneself go, is a sure sign of lack of faith. If you have not
+enough enthusiasm for the cult of goodwill to make you positively
+desire to celebrate the cult, then your faith is insufficient and needs
+fostering by study and meditation. Why, if you decide to found a
+sailing-club up your creek, your very first thought is to signalise your
+faith in the sailing of those particular waters by a dinner and a
+jollity, and you take care that the event shall be an annual one! * * *
+You have faith in your wife, and in your affection for her. Surely you
+don't need a festival to remind you of that faith, you so superior to
+human weaknesses? But you do! You insist on having it. And, if the
+festival did not happen, you would feel gloomy and discouraged. A
+birthday is a device for recalling to you in a formal and impressive
+manner that a certain person still lives and is in need of goodwill. It
+is a device which experience has proved to be both valuable and
+necessary.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Real faith effervesces; it shoots forth in every direction; it
+communicates itself. And the inevitable result is a festival. The
+festival is anticipated with pleasure, and it is remembered with
+pleasure. And thus it reacts stimulatingly on that which gave it birth,
+as the vitality of children reacts stimulatingly on the vitality of
+parents. It provides a concrete symbol of that which is invisible and
+intangible, and mankind is not yet so advanced in the path of spiritual
+perfection that we can afford to dispense with concrete symbols. Now, if
+we maintain festivals and formalities for the healthy continuance and
+honour of a pastime or of a personal affection, shall we not maintain a
+festival--and a mighty one--in behalf of a faith which makes the
+corporate human existence bearable amid the menaces and mysteries that
+for ever threaten it,--the faith of universal goodwill and mutual
+confidence?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If then, there is to be a festival, why should it not be the festival of
+Christmas? It can, indeed, be no other. Christmas is most plainly
+indicated. It is dignified and made precious by traditions which go back
+much further than the Christian era; and it has this tremendous
+advantage--it exists! In spite of our declining faith, it has been
+preserved to us, and here it is, ready to hand. Not merely does it fall
+at the point which uncounted generations have agreed to consider as the
+turn of the solar year and as the rebirth of hope! It falls also
+immediately before the end of the calendar year, and thus prepares us
+for a fresh beginning that shall put the old to shame. It could not be
+better timed. Further, its traditional spirit of peace and goodwill is
+the very spirit which we desire to foster. And finally its customs--or
+at any rate, its main customs--are well designed to symbolize that
+spirit. If we have allowed the despatch of Christmas cards to degenerate
+into naught but a tedious shuffling of paste-boards and overwork of
+post-office officials, the fault is not in the custom but in ourselves.
+The custom is a most striking one--so long as we have sufficient
+imagination to remember vividly that we are all in the same boat--I
+mean, on the same planet--and clinging desperately to the flying ball,
+and dependent for daily happiness on one another's good will! A
+Christmas card sent by one human being to another human being is more
+than a piece of coloured stationery sent by one log of wood to another
+log of wood: it is an inspiring and reassuring message of high value.
+The mischief is that so many self-styled human beings are just logs of
+wood, rather stylishly dressed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And then the custom of present-giving! What better and more convincing
+proof of sympathy than a gift? The gift is one of these obvious
+contrivances--like the wheel or the lever--which smooth and simplify
+earthly life, and the charm of whose utility no obviousness can stale.
+But of course any contrivance can be rendered futile by clumsiness or
+negligence. There is a sort of Christmas giver who says pettishly: "Oh!
+I don't know what to give to So-and-So this Christmas! What a bother! I
+shall write and tell her to choose something herself, and send the bill
+to me!" And he writes. And though he does not suspect it, what he really
+writes, and what So-and-So reads, is this: "Dear So-and-So. It is
+nothing to me that you and I are alive together on this planet, and in
+various ways mutually dependent. But I am bound by custom to give you a
+present. I do not, however, take sufficient interest in your life to
+know what object it would give you pleasure to possess; and I do not
+want to be put to the trouble of finding out, nor of obtaining the
+object and transmitting it to you. Will you, therefore, buy something
+for yourself and send the bill to me. Of course, a sense of social
+decency will prevent you from spending more than a small sum, and I
+shall be spared all exertion beyond signing a cheque. Yours insincerely
+and loggishly * * *." So managed, the contrivance of present-giving
+becomes positively sinister in its working. But managed with the
+sympathetic imagination which is infallibly produced by real faith in
+goodwill, its efficacy may approach the miraculous.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Christmas ceremony of good-wishing by word of mouth has never been
+in any danger of falling into insincerity. Such is the power of
+tradition and virtue of a festival, and such the instinctive
+brotherliness of men, that on this day the mere sight of an
+acquaintance will soften the voice and warm the heart of the most
+superior sceptic and curmudgeon that the age of disillusion has
+produced. In spite of himself, faith flickers up in him again, be it
+only for a moment. And, during that moment, he is almost like those
+whose bright faith the age has never tarnished, like the great and like
+the simple, to whom it is quite unnecessary to offer a defence and
+explanation of Christmas or to suggest the basis of a new faith therein.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FIVE
+
+DEFENCE OF FEASTING
+
+
+And now I can hear the superior sceptic disdainfully questioning: "Yes,
+but what about the orgy of Christmas? What about all the eating and
+drinking?" To which I can only answer that faith causes effervescence,
+expansion, joy, and that joy has always, for excellent reasons, been
+connected with feasting. The very words 'feast' and 'festival' are
+etymologically inseparable. The meal is the most regular and the least
+dispensable of daily events; it happens also to be an event which is in
+itself almost invariably a source of pleasure, or, at worst, of
+satisfaction: and it will continue to have this precious quality so long
+as our souls are encased in bodies. What could be more natural,
+therefore, than that it should be employed, with due enlargement and
+ornamentation, as the kernel of the festival? What more logical than
+that the meal should be elevated into a feast?
+
+"But," exclaims the superior sceptic, "this idea involves the idea of
+excess!" What if it does? I would not deny it! Assuredly, a feast means
+more than enough, and more than enough means excess. It is only because
+a feast means excess that it assists in the bringing about of expansion
+and joy. Such is human nature, and it is the case of human nature that
+we are discussing. Of course, excess usually exacts its toll, within
+twenty-four hours, especially from the weak. But the benefit is worth
+its price. The body pays no more than the debt which the soul has
+incurred. An occasional change of habit is essential to well-being, and
+every change of habit results in temporary derangement and
+inconvenience.
+
+Do not misunderstand me. Do not push my notion of excess to extremes.
+When I defend the excess inevitably incident to a feast, I am not
+seeking to prove that a man in celebrating Christmas is entitled to
+drink champagne in a public restaurant until he becomes an object of
+scorn and disgust to the waiters who have travelled from Switzerland in
+order to receive his tips. Much less should I be prepared to justify him
+if, in his own home, he sank lower than the hog. Nor would I
+sympathetically carry him to bed. There is such a thing as excess in
+moderation and dignity. Every wise man has practised this. And he who
+has not practised it is a fool, and deserves even a harder name. He
+ought indeed to inhabit a planet himself, for all his faith in humanity
+will be exhausted in believing in himself. * * * So much for the feast!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the accompaniments of the feast are also excessive. For example, you
+make a tug-of-war with your neighbour at table, and the rope is a
+fragile packet of tinselled paper, which breaks with a report like a
+pistol. You open your half of the packet, and discover some doggerel
+verse which you read aloud, and also a perfectly idiotic coloured cap,
+which you put on your head to the end of looking foolish. And this
+ceremony is continued until the whole table is surrounded by
+preposterous headgear, and doggerel verse is lying by every plate.
+Surely no man in his senses, no woman in hers, would, etc., etc. * * *!
+But one of the spiritual advantages of feasting is that it expands you
+beyond your common sense. One excess induces another, and a finer one.
+This acceptance of the ridiculous is good for you. It is particularly
+good for an Anglo-Saxon, who is so self-contained and self-controlled
+that his soul might stiffen as the unused limb of an Indian fakir
+stiffens, were it not for periodical excitements like that of the
+Christmas feast. Everybody has experienced the self-conscious reluctance
+which precedes the putting on of the cap, and the relief, followed by
+further expansion and ecstasy, which ensues after the putting on.
+Everybody who has put on a cap is aware that it is a beneficial thing to
+put on a cap. Quite apart from the fact that the mysterious and fanciful
+race of children are thereby placated and appeased, the soul of the
+capped one is purified by this charming excess.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And the Tree! What an excess of the fantastic to pretend that all those
+glittering balls, those coloured candles and those variegated parcels
+are the blossoms of the absurd tree! How excessively grotesque to tie
+all those parcels to the branches, in order to take them off again!
+Surely, something less medieval, more ingenious, more modern than this
+could be devised--if symbolism is to be indulged in at all! Can you
+devise it, O sceptical one, revelling in disillusion? Can you invent a
+symbol more natural and graceful than the symbol of the Tree? Perhaps
+you would have a shop-counter, and shelves behind it, so as to instill
+early into the youthful mind that this is a planet of commerce! Perhaps
+you would abolish the doggerel of crackers, and substitute therefor
+extracts from the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin! Perhaps you would
+exchange the caps for blazonry embroidered with chemical formula, your
+object being the advancement of science! Perhaps you would do away with
+the orgiastic eating and drinking, and arrange for a formal conversation
+about astronomy and the idea of human fraternity, upon strictly
+reasonable rations of shredded wheat! You would thus create an original
+festival, and eliminate all fear of a dyspeptic morrow. You would
+improve the mind. And you would avoid the ridiculous. But also, in
+avoiding the ridiculous, you would tumble into the ridiculous, deeply
+and hopelessly! And think how your very original festival would delight
+the participators, how they would look forward to it with joy, and back
+upon it with pleasurable regret; how their minds would dwell sweetly
+upon the conception of shredded wheat, and how their faith would be
+encouraged and strengthened by the intellectuality of the formal
+conversation!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He who girds at an ancient established festival should reflect upon
+sundry obvious truths before he withers up the said festival by the
+sirocco of his contempt. These truths are as follows:--First, a
+festival, though based upon intelligence, is not an affair of the
+intellect, but an affair of the emotions. Second, the human soul can
+only be reached through the human body. Third, it is impossible to
+replace an ancient festival by a new one. Robespierre, amongst others,
+tried to do so, and achieved the absurd. Reformers, heralds of new
+faiths, and rejuvenators of old faiths, have always, when they
+succeeded, adopted an ancient festival, with all or most of its forms,
+and been content to breathe into it a new spirit to replace the old
+spirit which had vanished or was vanishing. Anybody who, persuaded that
+Christmas is not what it was, feels that a festival must nevertheless be
+preserved, will do well to follow this example. To be content with the
+old forms and to vitalize them: that is the problem. Solve it, and the
+forms will soon begin to adapt themselves to the process of
+vitalization. All history is a witness in proof.
+
+
+
+
+
+SIX
+
+TO REVITALIZE THE FESTIVAL
+
+
+It being agreed, then, that the Christmas festival has lost a great deal
+of its old vitality, and that, to many people, it is a source of tedium
+and the cause of insincerity; and it being further agreed that the
+difficulty cannot be got over by simply abolishing the festival, as no
+one really wants it to be abolished; the question remains--what should
+be done to vitalize it? The former spirit of faith, the spirit which
+made the great Christmas of the golden days, has been weakened; but one
+element of it--that which is founded on the conviction that goodwill
+among men is a prime necessity of reasonable living--survives with a
+certain vigour, though even it has not escaped the general scepticism of
+the age. This element unites in agreement all the pugnacious sectaries
+who join battle over the other elements of the former faith. This
+element has no enemies. None will deny its lasting virtue. Obviously,
+therefore, the right course is to concentrate on the cultivation of
+goodwill. If goodwill can be consciously increased, the festival of
+Christmas will cease to be perfunctory. It will acquire a fresh and more
+genuine significance, which, however, will not in any way inconvenience
+those who have never let go of the older significance. No tradition will
+be overthrown, no shock administered, and nobody will be able to croak
+about iconoclasm and new-fangled notions and the sudden end of the
+world, and so on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The fancy of some people will at once run to the formation of a grand
+international Society for the revivifying of Christmas by the
+cultivation of goodwill, with branches in all the chief cities of Europe
+and America, and headquarters--of course at the Hague; and committees
+and subcommittees, and presidents and vice-presidents; and honorary
+secretaries and secretaries paid; and quarterly and annual meetings, and
+triennial congresses! And a literary organ or two! And a
+badge--naturally a badge, designed by a famous artist in harmonious
+tints!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But my fancy does not run at all in this direction. I am convinced that
+we have already far too many societies for the furtherance of our ends.
+To my mind, most societies with a moral aim are merely clumsy machines
+for doing simple jobs with the maximum of friction, expense and
+inefficiency. I should define the majority of these societies as a group
+of persons each of whom expects the others to do something very
+wonderful. Why create a society in order to help you to perform some act
+which nobody can perform but yourself? No society can cultivate goodwill
+in you. You might as well create a society for shaving or for saying
+your prayers. And further, goodwill is far less a process of performing
+acts than a process of thinking thoughts. To think, is it necessary to
+involve yourself in the cog-wheels of a society? Moreover, a society
+means fuss and shouting: two species of disturbance which are both
+futile and deleterious, particularly in an intimate affair of morals.
+
+You can best help the general cultivation of goodwill along by
+cultivating goodwill in your own heart. Until you have started the task
+of personal cultivation, you will probably assume that there will be
+time left over for superintending the cultivation of goodwill in other
+people's hearts. But a very little experience ought to show you that
+this is a delusion. You will perceive, if not at once, later, that you
+have bitten off just about as much as you can chew. And you will
+appreciate also the wisdom of not advertising your enterprise. Why,
+indeed, should you breathe a word to a single soul concerning your
+admirable intentions? Rest assured that any unusual sprouting of the
+desired crop will be instantly noticed by the persons interested.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next point is: Towards whom are you to cultivate goodwill?
+Naturally, one would answer: Towards the whole of humanity. But the
+whole of humanity, as far as you are concerned, amounts to naught but a
+magnificent abstract conception. And it is very difficult to cultivate
+goodwill towards a magnificent abstract conception. The object of
+goodwill ought to be clearly defined, and very visible to the physical
+eye, especially in the case of people, such as us, who are only just
+beginning to give to the cultivation of goodwill, perhaps, as much
+attention as we give to our clothes or our tobacco. If a novice sets out
+to embrace the whole of humanity in his goodwill, he will have even
+less success than a young man endeavouring to fall in love with four
+sisters at once; and his daily companions--those who see him eat his
+bacon and lace his boots and earn his living--will most certainly have a
+rough time of it. * * * No! It will be best for you to centre your
+efforts on quite a small group of persons, and let the rest of humanity
+struggle on as well as it can, with no more of your goodwill than it has
+hitherto had.
+
+In choosing the small group of people, it will be unnecessary for you to
+go to Timbuktu, or into the next street or into the next house. And, in
+this group of people you will be wise, while neglecting no member of the
+group, to specialise on one member. Your wife, if you have one, or your
+husband? Not necessarily. I was meaning simply that one who most
+frequently annoys you. He may be your husband, or she may be your wife.
+These things happen. He may be your butler. Or you may be his butler.
+She may be your daughter, or he may be your father, and you a charming
+omniscient girl of seventeen wiser than anybody else. Whoever he or she
+may be who oftenest inspires you with a feeling of irritated
+superiority, aim at that person in particular.
+
+The frequency of your early failures with him or her will show you how
+prudent you were not to make an attempt on the whole of humanity at
+once. And also you will see that you did well not to publish your
+excellent intentions. If nobody is aware of your striving, nobody will
+be aware that you have failed in striving. Your successes will appear
+effortless, and most important of all, you will be free from the horrid
+curse of self-consciousness. Herein is one of the main advantages of not
+wearing a badge. Lastly, you will have the satisfaction of feeling that,
+if everybody else is doing as you are, the whole of humanity is being
+attended to after all. And the comforting thought is that very probably,
+almost certainly, quite a considerable number of people are in fact
+doing as you are; some of them--make no doubt--are doing a shade better.
+I now come to the actual method of cultivating goodwill.
+
+
+
+
+
+SEVEN
+
+THE GIFT OF ONESELF
+
+
+Children divide their adult acquaintances into two categories--those who
+sympathise with them in the bizarre and trying adventure called life;
+and those who don't. The second category is much the larger of the two.
+Very many people belong to it who think that they belong to the first.
+They may deceive themselves, but they cannot deceive a child. Although
+you may easily practise upon the credulity of a child in matters of
+fact, you cannot cheat his moral and social judgment. He will add you
+up, and he will add anybody up, and he will estimate conduct, upon
+principles of his own and in a manner terribly impartial. Parents have
+no sterner nor more discerning critics than their own children.
+
+And so you may be polite to a child, and pretend to appreciate his point
+of view; but, unless you really do put yourself to the trouble of
+understanding him, unless you throw yourself, by the exercise of
+imagination, into his world, you will not succeed in being his friend.
+To be his friend means an effort on your part, it means that you must
+divest yourself of your own mental habit, and, for the time being, adopt
+his. And no nice phrases, no gifts of money, sweets or toys, can take
+the place of this effort, and this sacrifice of self. With five minutes
+of genuine surrender to him, you can win more of his esteem and
+gratitude than five hundred pounds would buy. His notion of real
+goodwill is the imaginative sharing of his feelings, a convinced
+participation in his pains and pleasures. He is well aware that, if you
+honestly do this, you will be on his side.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now, adults, of course, are tremendously clever and accomplished persons
+and children are no match for them; but still, with all their talents
+and omniscience and power, adults seem to lack important pieces of
+knowledge which children possess; they seem to forget, and to fail to
+profit by, their infantile experience. Else why should adults in general
+be so extraordinarily ignorant of the great truth that the secret of
+goodwill lies in the sympathetic exercise of the imagination? Since
+goodwill is the secret of human happiness, it follows that the secret
+of goodwill must be one of the most precious aids to sensible living;
+and yet adults, though they once knew it, have gone and forgotten it!
+Children may well be excused for concluding that the ways of the adult,
+in their capricious irrationality, are past finding out.
+
+To increase your goodwill for a fellow creature, it is necessary to
+imagine that you are he: and nothing else is necessary. This feat is not
+easy; but it can be done. Some people have less of the divine faculty of
+imagination than others, but nobody is without it, and, like all other
+faculties, it improves with use, just as it deteriorates with neglect.
+Imagination is a function of the brain. In order to cultivate goodwill
+for a person, you must think frequently about that person. You must
+inform yourself about all his activities. You must be able in your
+mind's eye to follow him hour by hour throughout the day, and you must
+ascertain if he sleeps well at night--because this is not a trifle. And
+you must reflect upon his existence with the same partiality as you
+reflect upon your own. (Why not?) That is to say, you must lay the
+fullest stress on his difficulties, disappointments and unhappinesses,
+and you must minimise his good fortune. You must magnify his efforts
+after righteousness, and forget his failures. You must ever remember
+that, after all, he is not to blame for the faults of his character,
+which faults, in his case as in yours, are due partly to heredity and
+partly to environment. And beyond everything you must always give him
+credit for good intentions. Do not you, though sometimes mistakenly,
+always act for the best? You know you do! And are you alone among
+mortals in rectitude?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This mental exercise in relation to another person takes time, and it
+involves a fatiguing effort. I repeat that it is not easy. Nor is it
+invariably agreeable. You may, indeed, find it tedious, for example, to
+picture in vivid detail all the worries that have brought about your
+wife's exacerbation--negligent maid, dishonest tradesman, milk in a
+thunder storm, hypercritical husband, dirt in the wrong place--but, when
+you have faithfully done so, I absolutely defy you to speak to her in
+the same tone as you used to employ, and to cherish resentment against
+her as you used to do. And I absolutely defy you not to feel less
+discontented with yourself than in the past. It is impossible that the
+exercise of imagination about a person should not result in goodwill
+towards that person. The exercise may put a strain upon you; but its
+effect is a scientific certainty. It is the supreme social exercise, for
+it is the giving of oneself in the most intimate and complete sense. It
+is the suspension of one's individuality in favour of another. It
+establishes a new attitude of mind, which, though it may well lead to
+specific social acts, is more valuable than any specific act, for it is
+ceaselessly translating itself into demeanour.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The critic with that terrible English trait, an exaggerated sense of the
+ridiculous, will at this point probably remark to himself, smiling: "I
+suppose the time will come, when by dint of regular daily practice, I
+shall have achieved perfect goodwill towards the first object of my
+attentions. I can then regard that person as 'done.' I can put him on a
+shelf, and turn to the next; and, in the end, all my relations, friends
+and acquaintances will be 'done' and I can stare at them in a row on the
+shelf of my mind, with pride and satisfaction * * *." Except that no
+person will ever be quite "done," human nature, still being human, in
+spite of the recent advances of civilisation, I do not deprecate this
+manner of stating the case.
+
+The ambitious and resolute man, with an exaggerated sense of the
+ridiculous, would see nothing ridiculous in ticking off a number of
+different objects as they were successively achieved. If for example it
+was part of his scheme to learn various foreign languages, he would know
+that he could only succeed by regular application of the brain, by
+concentration of thought daily; he would also know that he could never
+acquire any foreign language in absolute perfection. Still, he would
+reach a certain stage in a language, and then he would put it aside and
+turn to the next one on his programme, and so on. Assuredly, he would
+not be ashamed of employing method to reach his end.
+
+Now all that can be said of the acquirement of foreign languages can be
+said of the acquirement of goodwill. In remedying the deficiences of the
+heart and character, as in remedying the deficiences of mere knowledge,
+the brain is the sole possible instrument, and the best results will be
+obtained by using it regularly and scientifically, according to an
+arranged method. Why, therefore, if a man be proud of method in
+improving his knowledge, should he see something ridiculous in a
+deliberate plan for improving his heart--the affair of his heart being
+immensely more important, more urgent and more difficult? The reader who
+has found even one good answer to the above question, need read no more
+of this book, for he will have confounded me and it.
+
+
+
+
+
+EIGHT
+
+THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND
+
+
+The consequences of the social self-discipline which I have outlined
+will be various. A fairly early result will be the gradual decline, and
+ultimately the death, of the superior person in oneself. It is true
+that the superior person in oneself has nine lives, and is capable of
+rising from the dead after even the most fatal blows. But, at worst,
+the superior person--(and who among us does not shelter that sinister
+inhabitant in his soul?)--will have a very poor time in the soul of him
+who steadily practises the imaginative understanding of other people.
+In the first place, the mere exercise of the imagination on others
+absolutely scotches egotism as long as it lasts, and leaves it weakened
+afterwards. And, in the second and more important place, an improved
+comprehension of others (which means an intensified sympathy with them)
+must destroy the illusion, so widespread, that one's own case is
+unique. The amicable study of one's neighbours on the planet inevitably
+shows that the same troubles, the same fortitudes, the same feats of
+intelligence, the same successes and failures, are constantly happening
+everywhere. One can, indeed, see oneself in nearly everybody else, and,
+in particular, one is struck by the fact that the quality in which one
+took most pride is simply spread abroad throughout humanity in heaps!
+It is only in sympathetically contemplating others that one can get
+oneself in a true perspective. Yet probably the majority of human
+beings never do contemplate others, save with the abstracted gaze which
+proves that the gazer sees nothing but his own dream.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Another result of the discipline is an immensely increased interest in
+one's friends. One regards them even with a sort of proprietary
+interest, for, by imagination, one has come into sympathetic possession
+of them. Further, one has for them that tender feeling which always
+follows the conferring of a benefit, especially the secret conferring of
+a benefit. It is the benefactor, not the person benefited, who is
+grateful. The benefit which one has conferred is, of course, the gift of
+oneself. The resulting emotion is independent of any sympathy rendered
+by the other; and where the sympathy is felt to be mutual, friendship
+acquires a new significance. The exercise of sympathetic imagination
+will cause one to look upon even a relative as a friend--a startling
+achievement! It will provide a new excitement and diversion in life.
+
+When the month of December dawns, there need be no sensation of weary
+apprehension about the difficulty of choosing a present that will suit a
+friend. Certainly it will not be necessary, from sheer indifference and
+ignorance, to invite the friend to choose his own present. On the
+contrary, one will be, in secret, so intimate with the friend's
+situation and wants and desires, that sundry rival schemes for
+pleasuring him will at once offer themselves. And when he receives the
+present finally selected, he will have the conviction, always
+delightfully flattering to a donee, that he has been the object of a
+particular attention and insight. * * * And when the cards of greeting
+are despatched, formal phrases will go forth charged, in the
+consciousness of the sender, with a genuine meaning, with the force of a
+climax, as though the sender had written thereon, in invisible ink: "I
+have had you well in mind during the last twelve months; I think I
+understand your difficulties and appreciate your efforts better than I
+did, and so it is with a peculiar sympathetic knowledge that I wish you
+good luck. I have guessed what particular kind of good luck you require,
+and I wish accordingly. My wish is not vague and perfunctory only."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And on the day of festival itself one feels that one really has
+something to celebrate. The occasion has a basis, if it had no basis
+for one before; and if a basis previously existed, then it is widened
+and strengthened. The festival becomes a public culmination to a private
+enterprise. One is not reminded by Christmas of goodwill, because the
+enterprise of imaginative sympathy has been a daily affair throughout
+the year; but Christmas provides an excuse for taking satisfaction in
+the success of the enterprise and new enthusiasm to correct its
+failures. The symbolism of the situation of Christmas, at the turn of
+the year, develops an added impressiveness, and all the Christmas
+customs, apt to produce annoyance in the breasts of the unsentimental,
+are accepted with indulgence, even with eagerness, because their
+symbolism also is shown in a clearer light. Christmas becomes as
+personal as a birthday. One eats and drinks to excess, not because it
+is the custom to eat and drink to excess, but from sheer effervescent
+faith in an idea. And as one sits with one's friends, possessing them in
+the privacy of one's heart, permeated by a sense of the value of
+sympathetic comprehension in this formidable adventure of existence on a
+planet that rushes eternally through the night of space; assured indeed
+that companionship and mutual understanding alone make the adventure
+agreeable,--one sees in a flash that Christmas, whatever else it may be,
+is and must be the Feast of St. Friend, and a day on that account
+supreme among the days of the year.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The third and greatest consequence of the systematic cultivation of
+goodwill now grows blindingly apparent. To state it earlier in all its
+crudity would have been ill-advised; and I purposely refrained from
+doing so. It is the augmentation of one's own happiness. The increase of
+amity, the diminution of resentment and annoyance, the regular
+maintenance of an attitude mildly benevolent towards mankind,--these
+things are the surest way to happiness. And it is because they are the
+surest way to happiness, that the most enlightened go after them. All
+real motives are selfish motives; were it otherwise humanity would be
+utterly different from what it is. A man may perform some act which will
+benefit another while working some striking injury to himself. But his
+reason for doing it is that he prefers the evil of the injury to the
+deeper evil of the fundamental dissatisfaction which would torment him
+if he did not perform the act. Nobody yet sought the good of another
+save as a means to his own good. And it is in accordance with common
+sense that this should be so. There is, however, a lower egotism and a
+higher. It is the latter which we call unselfishness. And it is the
+latter of which Christmas is the celebration. We shall legitimately bear
+in mind, therefore, that Christmas, in addition to being the Feast of
+St. Friend, is even more profoundly the feast of one's own welfare.
+
+
+
+
+
+NINE
+
+THE REACTION
+
+
+A reaction sets in between Christmas and the New Year. It is inevitable;
+and I should be writing basely if I did not devote to it a full chapter.
+In those few dark days of inactivity, between a fete and the resumption
+of the implacable daily round, when the weather is usually cynical, and
+we are paying in our tissues the fair price of excess, we see life and
+the world in a grey and sinister light, which we imagine to be the only
+true light. Take the case of the average successful man of thirty-five.
+What is he thinking as he lounges about on the day after Christmas?
+
+His thoughts probably run thus: "Even if I live to a good old age,
+which is improbable, as many years lie behind me as before me. I have
+lived half my life, and perhaps more than half my life. I have realised
+part of my worldly ambition. I have made many good resolutions, and kept
+one or two of them in k more or less imperfect manner. I cannot, as a
+commonsense person, hope to keep a larger proportion of good resolutions
+in the future than I have kept in the past. I have tried to understand
+and sympathise with my fellow creatures, and though I have not entirely
+failed to do so, I have nearly failed. I am not happy and I am not
+content. And if, after all these years, I am neither happy nor content,
+what chance is there of my being happy and content in the second half
+of my life? The realisation of part of my worldly ambition has not made
+me any happier, and, therefore, it is unlikely that the realisation of
+the whole of my ambition will make me any happier. My strength cannot
+improve; it can only weaken; and my health likewise. I in my turn am
+coming to believe--what as a youth I rejected with disdain--namely, that
+happiness is what one is not, and content is what one has not. Why,
+then, should I go on striving after the impossible? Why should I not let
+things slide?"
+
+Thus reflects the average successful man, and there is not one of us,
+successful or unsuccessful, ambitious or unambitious, whose reflections
+have not often led him to a conclusion equally dissatisfied. Why should
+I or anybody pretend that this is not so?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And yet, in the very moment of his discouragement and of his blackest
+vision of things, that man knows quite well that he will go on striving.
+He knows that his instinct to strive will be stronger than his genuine
+conviction that the desired end cannot be achieved. Positive though he
+may be that a worldly ambition realised will produce the same
+dissatisfaction as Dead Sea fruit in the mouth, he will still continue
+to struggle. * * * Now you cannot argue against facts, and this is a
+fact. It must be accepted. Conduct must be adjusted to it. The struggle
+being inevitable, it must be carried through as well as it can be
+carried through. It will not end brilliantly, but precautions can be
+taken against it ending disgracefully. These precautions consist in the
+devising of a plan of campaign, and the plan of campaign is defined by a
+series of resolutions: which resolutions are generally made at or
+immediately before the beginning of a New Year. Without these the
+struggle would be formless, confused, blind and even more futile than it
+is with them. Organised effort is bound to be less ineffective than
+unorganised effort.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A worldly ambition can be, frequently is, realised: but an ideal cannot
+be attained--if it could, it would not be an ideal. The virtue of an
+ideal is its unattainability. It seems, when it is first formed, just as
+attainable as a worldly ambition which indeed is often schemed as a
+means to it. After twenty-four hours, the ideal is all but attained.
+After forty-eight, it is a little farther off. After a week, it has
+receded still further. After a month it is far away; and towards the end
+of a year even the keen eye of hope has almost lost sight of it; it is
+definitely withdrawn from the practical sphere. And then, such is the
+divine obstinacy of humanity, the turn of the year gives us an excuse
+for starting afresh, and forming a new ideal, and forgetting our shame
+in yet another organised effort. Such is the annual circle of the ideal,
+the effort, the failure and the shame. A rather pitiful history it may
+appear! And yet it is also rather a splendid history! For the failure
+and the shame are due to the splendour of our ideal and to the audacity
+of our faith in ourselves. It is only in comparison with our ideal that
+we have fallen low. We are higher, in our failure and our shame, than we
+should have been if we had not attempted to rise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are those who will say: "At any rate, we might moderate somewhat
+the splendour of our ideal and the audacity of our self-conceit, so that
+there should be a less grotesque disparity between the aim and the
+achievement. Surely such moderation would be more in accord with common
+sense! Surely it would lessen the spiritual fatigue and disappointment
+caused by sterile endeavour!" It would. But just try to moderate the
+ideal and the self-conceit! And you will find, in spite of all your sad
+experiences, that you cannot. If there is the stuff of a man in you, you
+simply cannot! The truth, is that, in the supreme things, a man does
+not act under the rules of earthly common sense. He transcends them,
+because there is a quality in him which compels him to do so. Common
+sense may persuade him to attempt to keep down the ideal, and
+self-conceit may pretend to agree. But all the time, self-conceit will
+be whispering: "I can go one better than that." And lo! the ideal is
+furtively raised again.
+
+A man really has little scientific control over the height of his ideal
+and the intensity of his belief in himself. He is born with them, as he
+is born with a certain pulse and a certain reflex action. He can neglect
+the ideal, so that it almost dissolves, but he cannot change its height.
+He can maim his belief in himself by persistent abandonment to folly,
+but he cannot lower its flame by an effort of the will, as he might
+lower the flame of a gas by a calculated turn of the hand. In the secret
+and inmost constitution of humanity it is ordained that the disparity
+between the aim and the achievement shall seem grotesque; it is ordained
+that there shall be an enormous fuss about pretty nearly nothing; it is
+ordained that the mountain shall bring forth a mouse. But it is also
+ordained that men shall go blithely on just the same, ignoring in
+practice the ridiculousness which they admit in theory, and drawing
+renewed hope and conceit from some magic, exhaustless source. And this
+is the whole philosophy of the New Year's resolution.
+
+
+
+
+
+TEN
+
+ON THE LAST DAY OF THE YEAR
+
+
+There are few people who arrive at a true understanding of life, even in
+the calm and disillusioned hours of reflection that come between the end
+of one annual period and the beginning of another. Nearly everybody has
+an idea at the back of his head that if only he could conquer certain
+difficulties and embarrassments, he might really start to live properly,
+in the full sense of living. And if he has pluck he says to himself: "I
+_will_ smooth things out, and then I'll really live." In the same way,
+nearly everybody, regarding the spectacle of the world, sees therein a
+principle which he calls Evil; and he thinks: "If only we could get rid
+of this Evil, if only we could set things right, how splendid the world
+would be!" Now, in the meaning usually attached to it, there is no such
+positive principle as Evil. Assuming that there is such a positive
+principle in a given phenomenon--such as the character of a particular
+man--you must then admit that there is the same positive principle
+everywhere, for just as the character of no man is so imperfect that you
+could not conceive a worse, so the character of no man is so perfect
+that you could not conceive a better. Do away with Evil from the world,
+and you would not merely abolish certain specially distressing matters,
+you would change everything. You would in fact achieve perfection. And
+when we say that one thing is evil and another good, all that we mean
+is that one thing is less advanced than another in the way of
+perfection. Evil cannot therefore be a positive principle; it signifies
+only the falling short of perfection.
+
+And supposing that the desires of mankind were suddenly fulfilled, and
+the world was rendered perfect! There would be no motive for effort, no
+altercation of conflicting motives in the human heart; nothing to do, no
+one to befriend, no anxiety, no want unsatisfied. Equilibrium would be
+established. A cheerful world! You can see instantly how amusing it
+would be. It would have only one drawback--that of being dead. Its
+reason for being alive would have ceased to operate. Life means change
+through constant development. But you cannot develop the perfect. The
+perfect can merely expire.
+
+That average successful man whom I have previously cited feels all this
+by instinct, though he does not comprehend it by reason. He reaches his
+ambition, and retires from the fight in order to enjoy life,--and what
+does he then do? He immediately creates for himself a new series of
+difficulties and embarrassments, either by undertaking the management of
+a large estate, or by some other device. If he does not maintain for
+himself conditions which necessitate some kind of struggle, he quickly
+dies--spiritually or physically, often both. The proportion of men who,
+having established an equilibrium, proceed to die on the spot, is
+enormous. Continual effort, which means, of course, continual
+disappointment, is the _sine qua non_--without it there is literally
+nothing vital. Its abolition is the abolition of life. Hence, people,
+who, failing to savour the struggle itself, anticipate the end of the
+struggle as the beginning of joy and happiness--these people are simply
+missing life; they are longing to exchange life for death. The hemlock
+would save them a lot of weary waiting.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We shall now perceive, I think, what is wrong with the assumptions of
+the average successful man as set forth in the previous chapter. In
+postulating that happiness is what one is not, he has got hold of a
+mischievous conception of happiness. Let him examine his conception of
+happiness, and he will find that it consists in the enjoyment of love
+and luxury, and in the freedom from enforced effort. He generally wants
+all three ingredients. Now passionate love does not mean happiness; it
+means excitement, apprehension and continually renewed desire. And
+affectionate love, from which the passion has faded, means something
+less than happiness, for, mingled with its gentle tranquility is a
+disturbing regret for the more fiery past. Luxury, according to the
+universal experience of those who have had it, has no connection
+whatever with happiness. And as for freedom from enforced effort, it
+means simply death.
+
+Happiness as it is dreamed of cannot possibly exist save for brief
+periods of self-deception which are followed by terrible periods of
+reaction. Real, practicable happiness is due primarily not to any kind
+of environment, but to an inward state of mind. Real happiness consists
+first in acceptance of the fact that discontent is a condition of life,
+and, second, in an honest endeavour to adjust conduct to an ideal. Real
+happiness is not an affair of the future; it is an affair of the
+present. Such as it is, if it cannot be obtained now, it can never be
+obtained. Real happiness lives in patience, having comprehended that if
+very little is accomplished towards perfection, so a man's existence is
+a very little moment in the vast expanse of the universal life, and
+having also comprehended that it is the struggle which is vital, and
+that the end of the struggle is only another name for death.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Well," I hear you exclaiming, "if this is all we can look forward to,
+if this is all that real, practicable happiness amounts to, is life
+worth living?" That is a question which each person has to answer for
+himself. If he answers it in the negative, no argument, no persuasion,
+no sentimentalisation of the facts of life, will make him alter his
+opinion. Most people, however, answer it in the affirmative. Despite all
+the drawbacks, despite all the endless disappointments, they decide that
+life is worth living. There are two species of phenomena which bring
+them to this view. The first may be called the golden moments of life,
+which seem somehow in their transient brevity to atone for the dull
+exasperation of interminable mediocre hours: moments of triumph in the
+struggle, moments of fierce exultant resolve; moments of joy in
+nature--moments which defy oblivion in the memory, and which, being
+priceless, cannot be too dearly bought.
+
+The second species of compensatory phenomena are all the agreeable
+experiences connected with human friendship; the general feeling, under
+diverse forms, that one is not alone in the world. It is for the
+multiplication and intensification of these phenomena that Christmas,
+the Feast of St. Friend, exists. And, on the last day of the year, on
+the eve of a renewed effort, our thoughts may profitably be centered
+upon a plan of campaign whose execution shall result in a less imperfect
+intercourse.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14653 ***
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14653 ***</div>
+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Feast of St. Friend, by Arnold Bennett</h1>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h1>THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND</h1>
+
+<h2>A CHRISTMAS BOOK</h2>
+
+<div class="center">
+<a name='image1' id='image1'></a>
+<img src='images/image1.png'
+alt="text decoration" title="text decoration" />
+</div>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>ARNOLD BENNETT</h2>
+<h4>Author of <i>The Old Wives' Tale</i>,
+<i>Buried Alive</i>, etc., etc.</h4>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h6><i>New York</i><br />
+George H. Doran Company</h6>
+
+<h4>1911</h4>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS" />CONTENTS:</h2>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+
+<div style="margin-left: 25%; margin-right: 25%;">
+
+ <a href="#ONE"><b>THE FACT</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#TWO"><b>THE REASON</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#THREE"><b>THE SOLSTICE AND GOODWILL</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#FOUR"><b>THE APPOSITENESS OF CHRISTMAS</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#FIVE"><b>DEFENCE OF FEASTING</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#SIX"><b>TO REVITALIZE THE FESTIVAL</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#SEVEN"><b>THE GIFT OF ONESELF</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#EIGHT"><b>THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#NINE"><b>THE REACTION</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#TEN"><b>ON THE LAST DAY OF THE YEAR</b></a><br />
+
+</div>
+<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h2><a name="ONE" id="ONE" />ONE<a name="Page_1" id="Page_1" /></h2>
+
+<h2>THE FACT</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>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 <a name="Page_2" id="Page_2" />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
+&quot;Christians awake, salute the happy morn.&quot; 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 <a name="Page_3" id="Page_3" />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 <a name="Page_4" id="Page_4" />had our pain's worth, and more. This was the
+past.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>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 <a name="Page_5" id="Page_5" />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 &quot;Christians Awake&quot; 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: &quot;I condescend to this,&quot; and as if I had said: &quot;So do I.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Such a moment comes to most of us <a name="Page_6" id="Page_6" />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 &quot;Auld Lang Syne.&quot; And what a blessing it will be when the
+&quot;festivities&quot; (as they are misleadingly called) are over, and we can
+settle down into commonsense again!</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>I do not mean that our hearts are black with despair on Christmas Day.<a name="Page_7" id="Page_7" />
+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 &quot;Christmas feeling.&quot; We have to remind ourselves that
+&quot;it will never do&quot; to let the heartiness of Christmas be impaired. The
+peculiarity of our attitude towards Christmas, which at worst is a
+vaca<a name="Page_8" id="Page_8" />tion, may be clearly seen by contrasting it with our attitude
+towards another vacation&mdash;the summer holiday. We do not have to brace
+and force ourselves up to the enjoyment of the summer holiday. We
+experience no difficulty in inducing the holiday feeling. There is no
+fear of the institution of the summer holiday losing its heartiness. Nor
+do we need the example of children to aid us in savouring the August
+&quot;festivities.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>If any person here breaks in with the statement that I am deceived and
+the truth is not in me, and that Christmas stands just where it did in
+the esteem of all right-minded people, and that he who casts a doubt on
+the heartiness of Christmas is not right-minded, let that person read no
+more. This <a name="Page_9" id="Page_9" />book is not written for him. And if any other person,
+kindlier, condescendingly protests that there is nothing wrong with
+Christmas except my advancing age, let that person read no more. This
+book is not written for him, either. It is written for persons who can
+look facts cheerfully in the face. That Christmas has lost some of its
+magic is a fact that the common sense of the western hemisphere will not
+dispute. To blink the fact is infantile. To confront it, to try to
+understand it, to reckon with it, and to obviate any evil that may
+attach to it&mdash;this course alone is meet for an honest man.<a name="Page_10" id="Page_10" /><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11" /></p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h2><a name="TWO" id="TWO" /><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12" /><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13" />TWO</h2>
+
+<h2>THE REASON</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>If the decadence of Christmas were a purely subjective phenomenon,
+confined to the breasts of those of us who have ceased to be children
+then it follows that Christmas has always been decadent, because people
+have always been ceasing to be children. It follows also that the
+festival was originally got up by disillusioned adults, for the benefit
+of the children. Which is totally absurd. Adults have never yet invented
+any institution, festival or diversion specially for the benefit of
+children. The egoism of adults makes such an effort impos<a name="Page_14" id="Page_14" />sible, and the
+ingenuity and pliancy of children make it unnecessary. The pantomime,
+for example, which is now pre-eminently a diversion for children, was
+created by adults for the amusement of adults. Children have merely
+accepted it and appropriated it. Children, being helpless, are of course
+fatalists and imitators. They take what comes, and they do the best they
+can with it. And when they have made something their own that was adult,
+they stick to it like leeches.</p>
+
+<p>They are terrific Tories, are children; they are even reactionary! They
+powerfully object to changes. What they most admire in a pantomime is
+the oldest part of it, the only true pantomime&mdash;the harlequinade! Hence
+the very nature of children is a proof that what Christmas is now to
+them, it was <a name="Page_15" id="Page_15" />in the past to their elders. If they now feel and exhibit
+faith and enthusiasm in the practice of the festival, be sure that, at
+one time, adults felt and exhibited the same faith and enthusiasm&mdash;yea,
+and more! For in neither faith nor enthusiasm can a child compete with a
+convinced adult. No child could believe in anything as passionately as
+the modern millionaire believes in money, or as the modern social
+reformer believes in the virtue of Acts of Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>Another and a crowning proof that Christmas has been diminished in our
+hearts lies in the fiery lyrical splendour of the old Christmas hymns.
+Those hymns were not written by people who made-believe at Christmas for
+the pleasure of youngsters. They were <a name="Page_16" id="Page_16" />written by devotees. And this age
+could not have produced them.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>No! The decay of the old Christmas spirit among adults is undeniable,
+and its cause is fairly plain. It is due to the labours of a set of
+idealists&mdash;men who cared not for money, nor for glory, nor for anything
+except their ideal. Their ideal was to find out the truth concerning
+nature and concerning human history; and they sacrificed all&mdash;they
+sacrificed the peace of mind of whole generations&mdash;to the pleasure of
+slaking their ardour for truth. For them the most important thing in the
+world was the satisfaction of their curiosity. They would leave naught
+alone; and they scorned consequences. Useless to cry to them: &quot;That is
+holy. Touch it not!&quot; I mean the great philosophers and men <a name="Page_17" id="Page_17" />of
+science&mdash;especially the geologists&mdash;of the nineteenth century. I mean
+such utterly pure-minded men as Lyell, Spencer, Darwin and Huxley. They
+inaugurated the mighty age of doubt and scepticism. They made it
+impossible to believe all manner of things which before them none had
+questioned. The movement spread until uneasiness was everywhere in the
+realm of thought, and people walked about therein fearsomely, as in a
+land subject to earthquakes. It was as if people had said: &quot;We don't
+know what will topple next. Let's raze everything to the ground, and
+then we shall feel safer.&quot; And there came a moment after which nobody
+could ever look at a picture of the Nativity in the old way. Pictures of
+the Nativity were admired perhaps as much as ever, but for the exquisite
+<a name="Page_18" id="Page_18" />beauty of their naïveté, the charm of their old-world simplicity, not
+as artistic renderings of fact.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>An age of scepticism has its faults, like any other age, though certain
+persons have pretended the contrary. Having been compelled to abandon
+its belief in various statements of alleged fact, it lumps principles
+and ideals with alleged facts, and hastily decides not to believe in
+anything at all. It gives up faith, it despises faith, in spite of the
+warning of its greatest philosophers, including Herbert Spencer, that
+faith of some sort is necessary to a satisfactory existence in a
+universe full of problems which science admits it can never solve. None
+were humbler than the foremost scientists about the narrowness of the
+field of knowledge, as <a name="Page_19" id="Page_19" />compared with the immeasurability of the field
+of faith. But the warning has been ignored, as warnings nearly always
+are. Faith is at a discount. And the qualities which go with faith are
+at a discount; such as enthusiasm, spontaneity, ebullition, lyricism,
+and self-expression in general. Sentimentality is held in such horror
+that people are afraid even of sentiment. Their secret cry is: &quot;Give us
+something in which we can believe.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>They forget, in their confusion, that the great principles, spiritual
+and moral, remain absolutely intact. They forget that, after all the
+shattering discoveries of science and conclusions of philosophy, mankind
+has still to live with dignity amid hostile nature, and in the presence
+of an unknowable <a name="Page_20" id="Page_20" />power and that mankind can only succeed in this
+tremendous feat by the exercise of faith and of that mutual goodwill
+which is based in sincerity and charity. They forget that, while facts
+are nothing, these principles are everything. And so, at that epoch of
+the year which nature herself has ordained for the formal recognition of
+the situation of mankind in the universe and of its resulting duties to
+itself and to the Unknown&mdash;at that epoch, they bewail, sadly or
+impatiently or cynically: &quot;Oh! The bottom has been knocked out of
+Christmas!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>But the bottom has not been knocked out of Christmas. And people know
+it. Somewhere, in the most central and mysterious fastness of their
+hearts, they know it. If they were not, in spite of themselves,
+convinced of it, why <a name="Page_21" id="Page_21" />should they be so pathetically anxious to keep
+alive in themselves, and to foster in their children, the Christmas
+spirit? Obviously, a profound instinct is for ever reminding them that,
+without the Christmas spirit, they are lost. The forms of faith change,
+but the spirit of faith, which is the Christmas spirit, is immortal amid
+its endless vicissitudes. At a crisis of change, faith is weakened for
+the majority; for the majority it may seem to be dead. It is conserved,
+however, in the hearts of the few supremely great and in the hearts of
+the simple. The supremely great are hidden from the majority; but the
+simple are seen of all men, and them we encourage, often without knowing
+why, to be the depositaries of that which we cannot ourselves guard, but
+which we dimly feel to be indispensable to our safety.<a name="Page_22" id="Page_22" /><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23" /></p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h2><a name="THREE" id="THREE" /><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24" /><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25" />THREE</h2>
+
+<h2>THE SOLSTICE AND GOOD WILL</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>In order to see that there is underlying Christmas an idea of faith
+which will at any rate last as long as the planet lasts, it is only
+necessary to ask and answer the question: &quot;Why was the Christmas feast
+fixed for the twenty-fifth of December?&quot; For it is absolutely certain,
+and admitted by everybody of knowledge, that Christ was not born on the
+twenty-fifth of December. Those disturbing impassioned inquirers after
+truth, who will not leave us peaceful in our ignorance, have settled
+that for us, by pointing out, among other things, that the <a name="Page_26" id="Page_26" />twenty-fifth
+of December falls in the very midst of the Palestine rainy season, and
+that, therefore, shepherds were assuredly not on that date watching
+their flocks by night.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Christians were not, at first, united in the celebration of Christmas.
+Some kept Christmas in January, others in April, others in May. It was a
+pre-Christian force which drove them all into agreement upon the
+twenty-fifth of December. Just as they wisely took the Christmas tree
+from the Roman Saturnalia, so they took the date of their festival from
+the universal pre-Christian festival of the winter solstice, Yule, when
+mankind celebrated the triumph of the sun over the powers of darkness,
+when the night begins to decrease and the day to increase, when <a name="Page_27" id="Page_27" />the
+year turns, and hope is born again because the worst is over. No more
+suitably symbolic moment could have been chosen for a festival of faith,
+goodwill and joy. And the appositeness of the moment is just as perfect
+in this era of electric light and central heating, as it was in the era
+of Virgil, who, by the way, described a Christmas tree. We shall say
+this year, with exactly the same accents of relief and hope as our pagan
+ancestors used, and as the woaded savage used: &quot;The days will begin to
+lengthen now!&quot; For, while we often falsely fancy that we have subjugated
+nature to our service, the fact is that we are as irremediably as ever
+at the mercy of nature.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Indeed, the attitude of us moderns towards the forces by which our
+exist<a name="Page_28" id="Page_28" />ence is governed ought to be, and probably is, more reverent and
+awe-struck than that of the earlier world. The discoveries of science
+have at once quickened our imagination and compelled us to admit that
+what we know is the merest trifle. The pagan in his ignorance explained
+everything. Our knowledge has only deepened the mystery, and all that we
+shall learn will but deepen it further. We can explain the solstice. We
+are aware with absolute certitude that the solstice and the equinox and
+the varying phenomena of the seasons are due to the fact that the plane
+of the equator is tilted at a slight angle to the plane of the ecliptic.
+When we put on the first overcoat in autumn, and when we give orders to
+let the furnace out in spring, we know that we are arranging our lives
+in ac<a name="Page_29" id="Page_29" />cordance with that angle. And we are quite duly proud of our
+knowledge. And much good does our knowledge do us!</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Well, it does do us some good, and in a spiritual way, too! For nobody
+can even toy with astronomy without picturing to himself, more clearly
+and startlingly than would be otherwise possible, a revolving globe that
+whizzes through elemental space around a ball of fire: which, in turn,
+is rushing with all its satellites at an inconceivable speed from
+nowhere to nowhere; and to the surface of the revolving, whizzing globe
+a multitude of living things desperately clinging, and these living
+things, in the midst of cataclysmic danger, and between the twin enigmas
+of birth and death, quarrelling and hating and calling themselves kings
+and <a name="Page_30" id="Page_30" />queens and millionaires and beautiful women and aristocrats and
+geniuses and lackeys and superior persons! Perhaps the highest value of
+astronomy is that it renders more vivid the ironical significance of
+such a vision, and thus brings home to us the truth that in spite of all
+the differences which we have invented, mankind is a fellowship of
+brothers, overshadowed by insoluble and fearful mysteries, and dependent
+upon mutual goodwill and trust for the happiness it may hope to achieve.
+* * * Let us remember that Christmas is, among other things, the winter
+solstice, and that the bottom has not yet been knocked out of the winter
+solstice, nor is likely to be in the immediate future!</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>It is a curious fact that the one faith which really does flourish and
+wax in <a name="Page_31" id="Page_31" />these days should be faith in the idea of social justice. For
+social justice simply means the putting into practice of goodwill and
+the recognition of the brotherhood of mankind. Formerly, people were
+enthusiastic and altruistic for a theological idea, for a national idea,
+for a political idea. You could see men on the rack for the sake of a
+dogma; you could see men of a great nation fitting out regiments and
+ruining themselves and going forth to save a small nation from
+destruction. You could see men giving their lives to the aggrandisement
+of an empire. And the men who did these things had the best brains and
+the quickest wits and the warmest hearts of their time. But today,
+whenever you meet a first-class man who is both enthusiastic and
+altruistic, you may be sure that his pet <a name="Page_32" id="Page_32" />scheme is neither theological,
+military nor political; you may be sure that he has got into his head
+the notion that some class of persons somewhere are not being treated
+fairly, are not being treated with fraternal goodwill, and that he is
+determined to put the matter right, or perish.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>In England, nearly all the most interesting people are social reformers:
+and the only circles of society in which you are not bored, in which
+there is real conversation, are the circles of social reform. These
+people alone have an abounding and convincing faith. Their faith has,
+for example, convinced many of the best literary artists of the day,
+with the result that a large proportion of the best modern imaginative
+literature has been inspired by the dream of <a name="Page_33" id="Page_33" />social justice. Take away
+that idea from the works of H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy and George
+Bernard Shaw, and there would be exactly nothing left. Despite any
+appearance to the contrary, therefore, the idea of universal goodwill is
+really alive upon the continents of this planet: more so, indeed, than
+any other idea&mdash;for the vitality of an idea depends far less on the
+numbers of people who hold it than on the quality of the heart and brain
+of the people who hold it. Whether the growth of the idea is due to the
+spiritual awe and humility which are the consequence of increased
+scientific knowledge, I cannot say, and I do not seriously care.<a name="Page_34" id="Page_34" /><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35" /></p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div><br /></div>
+
+
+<h2><a name="FOUR" id="FOUR" /><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36" /><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37" />FOUR</h2>
+
+<h2>THE APPOSITENESS OF CHRISTMAS</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes,&quot; you say, &quot;I am quite at one with you as to the immense importance
+of goodwill in social existence, and I have the same faith in it as you
+have. But why a festival? Why eating and drinking and ceremonies? Surely
+one can have faith without festivals?&quot;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>The answer is that one cannot; or at least that in practice, one never
+does. A disinclination for festivals, a morbid self-conscious fear of
+letting oneself go, is a sure sign of lack of faith. If you have not
+enough enthusiasm for the <a name="Page_38" id="Page_38" />cult of goodwill to make you positively
+desire to celebrate the cult, then your faith is insufficient and needs
+fostering by study and meditation. Why, if you decide to found a
+sailing-club up your creek, your very first thought is to signalise your
+faith in the sailing of those particular waters by a dinner and a
+jollity, and you take care that the event shall be an annual one! * * *
+You have faith in your wife, and in your affection for her. Surely you
+don't need a festival to remind you of that faith, you so superior to
+human weaknesses? But you do! You insist on having it. And, if the
+festival did not happen, you would feel gloomy and discouraged. A
+birthday is a device for recalling to you in a formal and impressive
+manner that a certain person still lives and is in need of <a name="Page_39" id="Page_39" />goodwill. It
+is a device which experience has proved to be both valuable and
+necessary.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Real faith effervesces; it shoots forth in every direction; it
+communicates itself. And the inevitable result is a festival. The
+festival is anticipated with pleasure, and it is remembered with
+pleasure. And thus it reacts stimulatingly on that which gave it birth,
+as the vitality of children reacts stimulatingly on the vitality of
+parents. It provides a concrete symbol of that which is invisible and
+intangible, and mankind is not yet so advanced in the path of spiritual
+perfection that we can afford to dispense with concrete symbols. Now, if
+we maintain festivals and formalities for the healthy continuance and
+honour of a pastime or of a per<a name="Page_40" id="Page_40" />sonal affection, shall we not maintain a
+festival&mdash;and a mighty one&mdash;in behalf of a faith which makes the
+corporate human existence bearable amid the menaces and mysteries that
+for ever threaten it,&mdash;the faith of universal goodwill and mutual
+confidence?</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>If then, there is to be a festival, why should it not be the festival of
+Christmas? It can, indeed, be no other. Christmas is most plainly
+indicated. It is dignified and made precious by traditions which go back
+much further than the Christian era; and it has this tremendous
+advantage&mdash;it exists! In spite of our declining faith, it has been
+preserved to us, and here it is, ready to hand. Not merely does it fall
+at the point which uncounted generations have agreed to consider as the
+turn of <a name="Page_41" id="Page_41" />the solar year and as the rebirth of hope! It falls also
+immediately before the end of the calendar year, and thus prepares us
+for a fresh beginning that shall put the old to shame. It could not be
+better timed. Further, its traditional spirit of peace and goodwill is
+the very spirit which we desire to foster. And finally its customs&mdash;or
+at any rate, its main customs&mdash;are well designed to symbolize that
+spirit. If we have allowed the despatch of Christmas cards to degenerate
+into naught but a tedious shuffling of paste-boards and overwork of
+post-office officials, the fault is not in the custom but in ourselves.
+The custom is a most striking one&mdash;so long as we have sufficient
+imagination to remember vividly that we are all in the same boat&mdash;I
+mean, on the same planet&mdash;and clinging des<a name="Page_42" id="Page_42" />perately to the flying ball,
+and dependent for daily happiness on one another's good will! A
+Christmas card sent by one human being to another human being is more
+than a piece of coloured stationery sent by one log of wood to another
+log of wood: it is an inspiring and reassuring message of high value.
+The mischief is that so many self-styled human beings are just logs of
+wood, rather stylishly dressed.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>And then the custom of present-giving! What better and more convincing
+proof of sympathy than a gift? The gift is one of these obvious
+contrivances&mdash;like the wheel or the lever&mdash;which smooth and simplify
+earthly life, and the charm of whose utility no obviousness can stale.
+But of course any <a name="Page_43" id="Page_43" />contrivance can be rendered futile by clumsiness or
+negligence. There is a sort of Christmas giver who says pettishly: &quot;Oh!
+I don't know what to give to So-and-So this Christmas! What a bother! I
+shall write and tell her to choose something herself, and send the bill
+to me!&quot; And he writes. And though he does not suspect it, what he really
+writes, and what So-and-So reads, is this: &quot;Dear So-and-So. It is
+nothing to me that you and I are alive together on this planet, and in
+various ways mutually dependent. But I am bound by custom to give you a
+present. I do not, however, take sufficient interest in your life to
+know what object it would give you pleasure to possess; and I do not
+want to be put to the trouble of finding out, nor of obtaining the
+object and transmitting it to you. Will you, <a name="Page_44" id="Page_44" />therefore, buy something
+for yourself and send the bill to me. Of course, a sense of social
+decency will prevent you from spending more than a small sum, and I
+shall be spared all exertion beyond signing a cheque. Yours insincerely
+and loggishly * * *.&quot; So managed, the contrivance of present-giving
+becomes positively sinister in its working. But managed with the
+sympathetic imagination which is infallibly produced by real faith in
+goodwill, its efficacy may approach the miraculous.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>The Christmas ceremony of good-wishing by word of mouth has never been
+in any danger of falling into insincerity. Such is the power of
+tradition and virtue of a festival, and such the instinctive
+brotherliness of men, that on this day the mere sight of an
+<a name="Page_45" id="Page_45" />acquaintance will soften the voice and warm the heart of the most
+superior sceptic and curmudgeon that the age of disillusion has
+produced. In spite of himself, faith flickers up in him again, be it
+only for a moment. And, during that moment, he is almost like those
+whose bright faith the age has never tarnished, like the great and like
+the simple, to whom it is quite unnecessary to offer a defence and
+explanation of Christmas or to suggest the basis of a new faith therein.<a name="Page_46" id="Page_46" /><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47" /></p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h2><a name="FIVE" id="FIVE" /><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48" /><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49" />FIVE</h2>
+
+<h2>DEFENCE OF FEASTING</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>And now I can hear the superior sceptic disdainfully questioning: &quot;Yes,
+but what about the orgy of Christmas? What about all the eating and
+drinking?&quot; To which I can only answer that faith causes effervescence,
+expansion, joy, and that joy has always, for excellent reasons, been
+connected with feasting. The very words 'feast' and 'festival' are
+etymologically inseparable. The meal is the most regular and the least
+dispensable of daily events; it happens also to be an event which is in
+itself almost invariably a source of pleasure, or, at worst, <a name="Page_50" id="Page_50" />of
+satisfaction: and it will continue to have this precious quality so long
+as our souls are encased in bodies. What could be more natural,
+therefore, than that it should be employed, with due enlargement and
+ornamentation, as the kernel of the festival? What more logical than
+that the meal should be elevated into a feast?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But,&quot; exclaims the superior sceptic, &quot;this idea involves the idea of
+excess!&quot; What if it does? I would not deny it! Assuredly, a feast means
+more than enough, and more than enough means excess. It is only because
+a feast means excess that it assists in the bringing about of expansion
+and joy. Such is human nature, and it is the case of human nature that
+we are discussing. Of course, excess usually exacts its toll, within
+twenty-<a name="Page_51" id="Page_51" />four hours, especially from the weak. But the benefit is worth
+its price. The body pays no more than the debt which the soul has
+incurred. An occasional change of habit is essential to well-being, and
+every change of habit results in temporary derangement and
+inconvenience.</p>
+
+<p>Do not misunderstand me. Do not push my notion of excess to extremes.
+When I defend the excess inevitably incident to a feast, I am not
+seeking to prove that a man in celebrating Christmas is entitled to
+drink champagne in a public restaurant until he becomes an object of
+scorn and disgust to the waiters who have travelled from Switzerland in
+order to receive his tips. Much less should I be prepared to justify him
+if, in his own home, he sank lower than the hog. Nor would I
+sympathetically <a name="Page_52" id="Page_52" />carry him to bed. There is such a thing as excess in
+moderation and dignity. Every wise man has practised this. And he who
+has not practised it is a fool, and deserves even a harder name. He
+ought indeed to inhabit a planet himself, for all his faith in humanity
+will be exhausted in believing in himself. * * * So much for the feast!</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>But the accompaniments of the feast are also excessive. For example, you
+make a tug-of-war with your neighbour at table, and the rope is a
+fragile packet of tinselled paper, which breaks with a report like a
+pistol. You open your half of the packet, and discover some doggerel
+verse which you read aloud, and also a perfectly idiotic coloured cap,
+which you put on your head <a name="Page_53" id="Page_53" />to the end of looking foolish. And this
+ceremony is continued until the whole table is surrounded by
+preposterous headgear, and doggerel verse is lying by every plate.
+Surely no man in his senses, no woman in hers, would, etc., etc. * * *!
+But one of the spiritual advantages of feasting is that it expands you
+beyond your common sense. One excess induces another, and a finer one.
+This acceptance of the ridiculous is good for you. It is particularly
+good for an Anglo-Saxon, who is so self-contained and self-controlled
+that his soul might stiffen as the unused limb of an Indian fakir
+stiffens, were it not for periodical excitements like that of the
+Christmas feast. Everybody has experienced the self-conscious reluctance
+which precedes the putting on of the cap, and the relief, <a name="Page_54" id="Page_54" />followed by
+further expansion and ecstasy, which ensues after the putting on.
+Everybody who has put on a cap is aware that it is a beneficial thing to
+put on a cap. Quite apart from the fact that the mysterious and fanciful
+race of children are thereby placated and appeased, the soul of the
+capped one is purified by this charming excess.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>And the Tree! What an excess of the fantastic to pretend that all those
+glittering balls, those coloured candles and those variegated parcels
+are the blossoms of the absurd tree! How excessively grotesque to tie
+all those parcels to the branches, in order to take them off again!
+Surely, something less medieval, more ingenious, more modern than this
+could be devised&mdash;if symbolism is to be indulged in at all! Can <a name="Page_55" id="Page_55" />you
+devise it, O sceptical one, revelling in disillusion? Can you invent a
+symbol more natural and graceful than the symbol of the Tree? Perhaps
+you would have a shop-counter, and shelves behind it, so as to instill
+early into the youthful mind that this is a planet of commerce! Perhaps
+you would abolish the doggerel of crackers, and substitute therefor
+extracts from the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin! Perhaps you would
+exchange the caps for blazonry embroidered with chemical formula, your
+object being the advancement of science! Perhaps you would do away with
+the orgiastic eating and drinking, and arrange for a formal conversation
+about astronomy and the idea of human fraternity, upon strictly
+reasonable rations of shredded wheat! You would thus create an <a name="Page_56" id="Page_56" />original
+festival, and eliminate all fear of a dyspeptic morrow. You would
+improve the mind. And you would avoid the ridiculous. But also, in
+avoiding the ridiculous, you would tumble into the ridiculous, deeply
+and hopelessly! And think how your very original festival would delight
+the participators, how they would look forward to it with joy, and back
+upon it with pleasurable regret; how their minds would dwell sweetly
+upon the conception of shredded wheat, and how their faith would be
+encouraged and strengthened by the intellectuality of the formal
+conversation!</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>He who girds at an ancient established festival should reflect upon
+sundry obvious truths before he withers up the said festival by the
+sirocco of his <a name="Page_57" id="Page_57" />contempt. These truths are as follows:&mdash;First, a
+festival, though based upon intelligence, is not an affair of the
+intellect, but an affair of the emotions. Second, the human soul can
+only be reached through the human body. Third, it is impossible to
+replace an ancient festival by a new one. Robespierre, amongst others,
+tried to do so, and achieved the absurd. Reformers, heralds of new
+faiths, and rejuvenators of old faiths, have always, when they
+succeeded, adopted an ancient festival, with all or most of its forms,
+and been content to breathe into it a new spirit to replace the old
+spirit which had vanished or was vanishing. Anybody who, persuaded that
+Christmas is not what it was, feels that a festival must nevertheless be
+preserved, will do well to follow this example. To be <a name="Page_58" id="Page_58" />content with the
+old forms and to vitalize them: that is the problem. Solve it, and the
+forms will soon begin to adapt themselves to the process of
+vitalization. All history is a witness in proof.<a name="Page_59" id="Page_59" /></p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h2><a name="SIX" id="SIX" /><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60" /><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61" />SIX</h2>
+
+<h2>TO REVITALIZE THE FESTIVAL</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>It being agreed, then, that the Christmas festival has lost a great deal
+of its old vitality, and that, to many people, it is a source of tedium
+and the cause of insincerity; and it being further agreed that the
+difficulty cannot be got over by simply abolishing the festival, as no
+one really wants it to be abolished; the question remains&mdash;what should
+be done to vitalize it? The former spirit of faith, the spirit which
+made the great Christmas of the golden days, has been weakened; but one
+element of it&mdash;that which is founded on the conviction that goodwill
+among <a name="Page_62" id="Page_62" />men is a prime necessity of reasonable living&mdash;survives with a
+certain vigour, though even it has not escaped the general scepticism of
+the age. This element unites in agreement all the pugnacious sectaries
+who join battle over the other elements of the former faith. This
+element has no enemies. None will deny its lasting virtue. Obviously,
+therefore, the right course is to concentrate on the cultivation of
+goodwill. If goodwill can be consciously increased, the festival of
+Christmas will cease to be perfunctory. It will acquire a fresh and more
+genuine significance, which, however, will not in any way inconvenience
+those who have never let go of the older significance. No tradition will
+be overthrown, no shock administered, and nobody will be able to croak
+about iconoclasm and <a name="Page_63" id="Page_63" />new-fangled notions and the sudden end of the
+world, and so on.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>The fancy of some people will at once run to the formation of a grand
+international Society for the revivifying of Christmas by the
+cultivation of goodwill, with branches in all the chief cities of Europe
+and America, and headquarters&mdash;of course at the Hague; and committees
+and subcommittees, and presidents and vice-presidents; and honorary
+secretaries and secretaries paid; and quarterly and annual meetings, and
+triennial congresses! And a literary organ or two! And a
+badge&mdash;naturally a badge, designed by a famous artist in harmonious
+tints!</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>But my fancy does not run at all in this direction. I am convinced that
+we <a name="Page_64" id="Page_64" />have already far too many societies for the furtherance of our ends.
+To my mind, most societies with a moral aim are merely clumsy machines
+for doing simple jobs with the maximum of friction, expense and
+inefficiency. I should define the majority of these societies as a group
+of persons each of whom expects the others to do something very
+wonderful. Why create a society in order to help you to perform some act
+which nobody can perform but yourself? No society can cultivate goodwill
+in you. You might as well create a society for shaving or for saying
+your prayers. And further, goodwill is far less a process of performing
+acts than a process of thinking thoughts. To think, is it necessary to
+involve yourself in the cog-wheels of a society? Moreover, a society
+means fuss and <a name="Page_65" id="Page_65" />shouting: two species of disturbance which are both
+futile and deleterious, particularly in an intimate affair of morals.</p>
+
+<p>You can best help the general cultivation of goodwill along by
+cultivating goodwill in your own heart. Until you have started the task
+of personal cultivation, you will probably assume that there will be
+time left over for superintending the cultivation of goodwill in other
+people's hearts. But a very little experience ought to show you that
+this is a delusion. You will perceive, if not at once, later, that you
+have bitten off just about as much as you can chew. And you will
+appreciate also the wisdom of not advertising your enterprise. Why,
+indeed, should you breathe a word to a single soul concerning your
+admirable intentions? Rest assured <a name="Page_66" id="Page_66" />that any unusual sprouting of the
+desired crop will be instantly noticed by the persons interested.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>The next point is: Towards whom are you to cultivate goodwill?
+Naturally, one would answer: Towards the whole of humanity. But the
+whole of humanity, as far as you are concerned, amounts to naught but a
+magnificent abstract conception. And it is very difficult to cultivate
+goodwill towards a magnificent abstract conception. The object of
+goodwill ought to be clearly defined, and very visible to the physical
+eye, especially in the case of people, such as us, who are only just
+beginning to give to the cultivation of goodwill, perhaps, as much
+attention as we give to our clothes or our tobacco. If a novice sets out
+to embrace the whole of <a name="Page_67" id="Page_67" />humanity in his goodwill, he will have even
+less success than a young man endeavouring to fall in love with four
+sisters at once; and his daily companions&mdash;those who see him eat his
+bacon and lace his boots and earn his living&mdash;will most certainly have a
+rough time of it. * * * No! It will be best for you to centre your
+efforts on quite a small group of persons, and let the rest of humanity
+struggle on as well as it can, with no more of your goodwill than it has
+hitherto had.</p>
+
+<p>In choosing the small group of people, it will be unnecessary for you to
+go to Timbuktu, or into the next street or into the next house. And, in
+this group of people you will be wise, while neglecting no member of the
+group, to specialise on one member. Your wife, if you have one, or your
+husband? Not <a name="Page_68" id="Page_68" />necessarily. I was meaning simply that one who most
+frequently annoys you. He may be your husband, or she may be your wife.
+These things happen. He may be your butler. Or you may be his butler.
+She may be your daughter, or he may be your father, and you a charming
+omniscient girl of seventeen wiser than anybody else. Whoever he or she
+may be who oftenest inspires you with a feeling of irritated
+superiority, aim at that person in particular.</p>
+
+<p>The frequency of your early failures with him or her will show you how
+prudent you were not to make an attempt on the whole of humanity at
+once. And also you will see that you did well not to publish your
+excellent intentions. If nobody is aware of your striving, nobody will
+be aware that you have failed <a name="Page_69" id="Page_69" />in striving. Your successes will appear
+effortless, and most important of all, you will be free from the horrid
+curse of self-consciousness. Herein is one of the main advantages of not
+wearing a badge. Lastly, you will have the satisfaction of feeling that,
+if everybody else is doing as you are, the whole of humanity is being
+attended to after all. And the comforting thought is that very probably,
+almost certainly, quite a considerable number of people are in fact
+doing as you are; some of them&mdash;make no doubt&mdash;are doing a shade better.
+I now come to the actual method of cultivating goodwill.<a name="Page_70" id="Page_70" /><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71" /></p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h2><a name="SEVEN" id="SEVEN" /><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72" /><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73" />SEVEN</h2>
+
+<h2>THE GIFT OF ONESELF</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>Children divide their adult acquaintances into two categories&mdash;those who
+sympathise with them in the bizarre and trying adventure called life;
+and those who don't. The second category is much the larger of the two.
+Very many people belong to it who think that they belong to the first.
+They may deceive themselves, but they cannot deceive a child. Although
+you may easily practise upon the credulity of a child in matters of
+fact, you cannot cheat his moral and social judgment. He will add you
+up, and he will add anybody up, and he will estimate con<a name="Page_74" id="Page_74" />duct, upon
+principles of his own and in a manner terribly impartial. Parents have
+no sterner nor more discerning critics than their own children.</p>
+
+<p>And so you may be polite to a child, and pretend to appreciate his point
+of view; but, unless you really do put yourself to the trouble of
+understanding him, unless you throw yourself, by the exercise of
+imagination, into his world, you will not succeed in being his friend.
+To be his friend means an effort on your part, it means that you must
+divest yourself of your own mental habit, and, for the time being, adopt
+his. And no nice phrases, no gifts of money, sweets or toys, can take
+the place of this effort, and this sacrifice of self. With five minutes
+of genuine surrender to him, you can win more of his esteem and
+gratitude than five hun<a name="Page_75" id="Page_75" />dred pounds would buy. His notion of real
+goodwill is the imaginative sharing of his feelings, a convinced
+participation in his pains and pleasures. He is well aware that, if you
+honestly do this, you will be on his side.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Now, adults, of course, are tremendously clever and accomplished persons
+and children are no match for them; but still, with all their talents
+and omniscience and power, adults seem to lack important pieces of
+knowledge which children possess; they seem to forget, and to fail to
+profit by, their infantile experience. Else why should adults in general
+be so extraordinarily ignorant of the great truth that the secret of
+goodwill lies in the sympathetic exercise of the imagination? Since
+goodwill is the secret of human happi<a name="Page_76" id="Page_76" />ness, it follows that the secret
+of goodwill must be one of the most precious aids to sensible living;
+and yet adults, though they once knew it, have gone and forgotten it!
+Children may well be excused for concluding that the ways of the adult,
+in their capricious irrationality, are past finding out.</p>
+
+<p>To increase your goodwill for a fellow creature, it is necessary to
+imagine that you are he: and nothing else is necessary. This feat is not
+easy; but it can be done. Some people have less of the divine faculty of
+imagination than others, but nobody is without it, and, like all other
+faculties, it improves with use, just as it deteriorates with neglect.
+Imagination is a function of the brain. In order to cultivate goodwill
+for a person, you must think frequently about that person. You must
+in<a name="Page_77" id="Page_77" />form yourself about all his activities. You must be able in your
+mind's eye to follow him hour by hour throughout the day, and you must
+ascertain if he sleeps well at night&mdash;because this is not a trifle. And
+you must reflect upon his existence with the same partiality as you
+reflect upon your own. (Why not?) That is to say, you must lay the
+fullest stress on his difficulties, disappointments and unhappinesses,
+and you must minimise his good fortune. You must magnify his efforts
+after righteousness, and forget his failures. You must ever remember
+that, after all, he is not to blame for the faults of his character,
+which faults, in his case as in yours, are due partly to heredity and
+partly to environment. And beyond everything you must always give him
+credit for good intentions. Do not you, <a name="Page_78" id="Page_78" />though sometimes mistakenly,
+always act for the best? You know you do! And are you alone among
+mortals in rectitude?</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>This mental exercise in relation to another person takes time, and it
+involves a fatiguing effort. I repeat that it is not easy. Nor is it
+invariably agreeable. You may, indeed, find it tedious, for example, to
+picture in vivid detail all the worries that have brought about your
+wife's exacerbation&mdash;negligent maid, dishonest tradesman, milk in a
+thunder storm, hypercritical husband, dirt in the wrong place&mdash;but, when
+you have faithfully done so, I absolutely defy you to speak to her in
+the same tone as you used to employ, and to cherish resentment against
+her as you used to do. And I absolutely <a name="Page_79" id="Page_79" />defy you not to feel less
+discontented with yourself than in the past. It is impossible that the
+exercise of imagination about a person should not result in goodwill
+towards that person. The exercise may put a strain upon you; but its
+effect is a scientific certainty. It is the supreme social exercise, for
+it is the giving of oneself in the most intimate and complete sense. It
+is the suspension of one's individuality in favour of another. It
+establishes a new attitude of mind, which, though it may well lead to
+specific social acts, is more valuable than any specific act, for it is
+ceaselessly translating itself into demeanour.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>The critic with that terrible English trait, an exaggerated sense of the
+ridiculous, will at this point probably re<a name="Page_80" id="Page_80" />mark to himself, smiling: &quot;I
+suppose the time will come, when by dint of regular daily practice, I
+shall have achieved perfect goodwill towards the first object of my
+attentions. I can then regard that person as 'done.' I can put him on a
+shelf, and turn to the next; and, in the end, all my relations, friends
+and acquaintances will be 'done' and I can stare at them in a row on the
+shelf of my mind, with pride and satisfaction * * *.&quot; Except that no
+person will ever be quite &quot;done,&quot; human nature, still being human, in
+spite of the recent advances of civilisation, I do not deprecate this
+manner of stating the case.</p>
+
+<p>The ambitious and resolute man, with an exaggerated sense of the
+ridiculous, would see nothing ridiculous in ticking off a number of
+different ob<a name="Page_81" id="Page_81" />jects as they were successively achieved. If for example it
+was part of his scheme to learn various foreign languages, he would know
+that he could only succeed by regular application of the brain, by
+concentration of thought daily; he would also know that he could never
+acquire any foreign language in absolute perfection. Still, he would
+reach a certain stage in a language, and then he would put it aside and
+turn to the next one on his programme, and so on. Assuredly, he would
+not be ashamed of employing method to reach his end.</p>
+
+<p>Now all that can be said of the acquirement of foreign languages can be
+said of the acquirement of goodwill. In remedying the deficiences of the
+heart and character, as in remedying the deficiences of mere knowledge,
+the brain is the sole possible instrument, <a name="Page_82" id="Page_82" />and the best results will be
+obtained by using it regularly and scientifically, according to an
+arranged method. Why, therefore, if a man be proud of method in
+improving his knowledge, should he see something ridiculous in a
+deliberate plan for improving his heart&mdash;the affair of his heart being
+immensely more important, more urgent and more difficult? The reader who
+has found even one good answer to the above question, need read no more
+of this book, for he will have confounded me and it.<a name="Page_83" id="Page_83" /></p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h2><a name="EIGHT" id="EIGHT" /><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84" /><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85" />EIGHT</h2>
+
+<h2>THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>The consequences of the social self-discipline which I have outlined
+will be various. A fairly early result will be the gradual decline, and
+ultimately the death, of the superior person in oneself. It is true that
+the superior person in oneself has nine lives, and is capable of rising
+from the dead after even the most fatal blows. But, at worst, the
+superior person&mdash;(and who among us does not shelter that sinister
+inhabitant in his soul?)&mdash;will have a very poor time in the soul of him
+who steadily practises the imaginative understanding of other people. In
+the first place, <a name="Page_86" id="Page_86" />the mere exercise of the imagination on others
+absolutely scotches egotism as long as it lasts, and leaves it weakened
+afterwards. And, in the second and more important place, an improved
+comprehension of others (which means an intensified sympathy with them)
+must destroy the illusion, so widespread, that one's own case is unique.
+The amicable study of one's neighbours on the planet inevitably shows
+that the same troubles, the same fortitudes, the same
+feats of intelligence, the same successes and failures, are constantly
+happening everywhere. One can, indeed, see oneself in nearly everybody
+else, and, in particular, one is struck by the fact that the quality in
+which one took most pride is simply spread abroad throughout humanity in
+heaps! It is only in sympathetically contemplating others that one can
+get <a name="Page_87" id="Page_87" />oneself in a true perspective. Yet probably the majority of human
+beings never do contemplate others, save with the abstracted gaze which
+proves that the gazer sees nothing but his own dream.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Another result of the discipline is an immensely increased interest in
+one's friends. One regards them even with a sort of proprietary
+interest, for, by imagination, one has come into sympathetic possession
+of them. Further, one has for them that tender feeling which always
+follows the conferring of a benefit, especially the secret conferring of
+a benefit. It is the benefactor, not the person benefited, who is
+grateful. The benefit which one has conferred is, of course, the gift of
+oneself. The resulting emotion is independent of any sympathy rendered
+by the other; <a name="Page_88" id="Page_88" />and where the sympathy is felt to be mutual, friendship
+acquires a new significance. The exercise of sympathetic imagination
+will cause one to look upon even a relative as a friend&mdash;a startling
+achievement! It will provide a new excitement and diversion in life.</p>
+
+<p>When the month of December dawns, there need be no sensation of weary
+apprehension about the difficulty of choosing a present that will suit a
+friend. Certainly it will not be necessary, from sheer indifference and
+ignorance, to invite the friend to choose his own present. On the
+contrary, one will be, in secret, so intimate with the friend's
+situation and wants and desires, that sundry rival schemes for
+pleasuring him will at once offer themselves. And when he receives the
+present finally selected, he will have the conviction, always
+delightfully flattering <a name="Page_89" id="Page_89" />to a donee, that he has been the object of a
+particular attention and insight. * * * And when the cards of greeting
+are despatched, formal phrases will go forth charged, in the
+consciousness of the sender, with a genuine meaning, with the force of a
+climax, as though the sender had written thereon, in invisible ink: &quot;I
+have had you well in mind during the last twelve months; I think I
+understand your difficulties and appreciate your efforts better than I
+did, and so it is with a peculiar sympathetic knowledge that I wish you
+good luck. I have guessed what particular kind of good luck you require,
+and I wish accordingly. My wish is not vague and perfunctory only.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>And on the day of festival itself one feels that one really has
+something to <a name="Page_90" id="Page_90" />celebrate. The occasion has a basis, if it had no basis
+for one before; and if a basis previously existed, then it is widened
+and strengthened. The festival becomes a public culmination to a private
+enterprise. One is not reminded by Christmas of goodwill, because the
+enterprise of imaginative sympathy has been a daily affair throughout
+the year; but Christmas provides an excuse for taking satisfaction in
+the success of the enterprise and new enthusiasm to correct its
+failures. The symbolism of the situation of Christmas, at the turn of
+the year, develops an added impressiveness, and all the Christmas
+customs, apt to produce annoyance in the breasts of the unsentimental,
+are accepted with indulgence, even with eagerness, because their
+symbolism also is shown in a clearer light. Christmas becomes as
+<a name="Page_91" id="Page_91" />personal as a birthday. One eats and drinks to excess, not because it
+is the custom to eat and drink to excess, but from sheer effervescent
+faith in an idea. And as one sits with one's friends, possessing them in
+the privacy of one's heart, permeated by a sense of the value of
+sympathetic comprehension in this formidable adventure of existence on a
+planet that rushes eternally through the night of space; assured indeed
+that companionship and mutual understanding alone make the adventure
+agreeable,&mdash;one sees in a flash that Christmas, whatever else it may be,
+is and must be the Feast of St. Friend, and a day on that account
+supreme among the days of the year.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>The third and greatest consequence of the systematic cultivation of
+<a name="Page_92" id="Page_92" />goodwill now grows blindingly apparent. To state it earlier in all its
+crudity would have been ill-advised; and I purposely refrained from
+doing so. It is the augmentation of one's own happiness. The increase of
+amity, the diminution of resentment and annoyance, the regular
+maintenance of an attitude mildly benevolent towards mankind,&mdash;these
+things are the surest way to happiness. And it is because they are the
+surest way to happiness, that the most enlightened go after them. All
+real motives are selfish motives; were it otherwise humanity would be
+utterly different from what it is. A man may perform some act which will
+benefit another while working some striking injury to himself. But his
+reason for doing it is that he prefers the evil of the injury to the
+deeper evil of the <a name="Page_93" id="Page_93" />fundamental dissatisfaction which would torment him
+if he did not perform the act. Nobody yet sought the good of another
+save as a means to his own good. And it is in accordance with common
+sense that this should be so. There is, however, a lower egotism and a
+higher. It is the latter which we call unselfishness. And it is the
+latter of which Christmas is the celebration. We shall legitimately bear
+in mind, therefore, that Christmas, in addition to being the Feast of
+St. Friend, is even more profoundly the feast of one's own welfare.<a name="Page_94" id="Page_94" /><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95" /></p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div><br /></div>
+
+
+<h2><a name="NINE" id="NINE" /><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96" /><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97" />NINE</h2>
+
+<h2>THE REACTION</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>A reaction sets in between Christmas and the New Year. It is inevitable;
+and I should be writing basely if I did not devote to it a full chapter.
+In those few dark days of inactivity, between a fete and the resumption
+of the implacable daily round, when the weather is usually cynical, and
+we are paying in our tissues the fair price of excess, we see life and
+the world in a grey and sinister light, which we imagine to be the only
+true light. Take the case of the average successful man of thirty-five.
+What is he thinking as he lounges about on the day after Christmas?</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98" />His thoughts probably run thus: &quot;Even if I live to a good old age,
+which is improbable, as many years lie behind me as before me. I have
+lived half my life, and perhaps more than half my life. I have realised
+part of my worldly ambition. I have made many good resolutions, and kept
+one or two of them in k more or less imperfect manner. I cannot, as a
+commonsense person, hope to keep a larger proportion of good resolutions
+in the future than I have kept in the past. I have tried to understand
+and sympathise with my fellow creatures, and though I have not entirely
+failed to do so, I have nearly failed. I am not happy and I am not
+content. And if, after all these years, I am neither happy nor content,
+what chance is there of my being happy and <a name="Page_99" id="Page_99" />content in the second half
+of my life? The realisation of part of my worldly ambition has not made
+me any happier, and, therefore, it is unlikely that the realisation of
+the whole of my ambition will make me any happier. My strength cannot
+improve; it can only weaken; and my health likewise. I in my turn am
+coming to believe&mdash;what as a youth I rejected with disdain&mdash;namely, that
+happiness is what one is not, and content is what one has not. Why,
+then, should I go on striving after the impossible? Why should I not let
+things slide?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Thus reflects the average successful man, and there is not one of us,
+successful or unsuccessful, ambitious or unambitious, whose reflections
+have not often led him to a conclusion equally dis<a name="Page_100" id="Page_100" />satisfied. Why should
+I or anybody pretend that this is not so?</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>And yet, in the very moment of his discouragement and of his blackest
+vision of things, that man knows quite well that he will go on striving.
+He knows that his instinct to strive will be stronger than his genuine
+conviction that the desired end cannot be achieved. Positive though he
+may be that a worldly ambition realised will produce the same
+dissatisfaction as Dead Sea fruit in the mouth, he will still continue
+to struggle. * * * Now you cannot argue against facts, and this is a
+fact. It must be accepted. Conduct must be adjusted to it. The struggle
+being inevitable, it must be carried through as well as it can be
+carried through. It will not end brilliantly, but precautions <a name="Page_101" id="Page_101" />can be
+taken against it ending disgracefully. These precautions consist in the
+devising of a plan of campaign, and the plan of campaign is defined by a
+series of resolutions: which resolutions are generally made at or
+immediately before the beginning of a New Year. Without these the
+struggle would be formless, confused, blind and even more futile than it
+is with them. Organised effort is bound to be less ineffective than
+unorganised effort.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>A worldly ambition can be, frequently is, realised: but an ideal cannot
+be attained&mdash;if it could, it would not be an ideal. The virtue of an
+ideal is its unattainability. It seems, when it is first formed, just as
+attainable as a worldly ambition which indeed is often schemed as a
+means to it. After twen<a name="Page_102" id="Page_102" />ty-four hours, the ideal is all but attained.
+After forty-eight, it is a little farther off. After a week, it has
+receded still further. After a month it is far away; and towards the end
+of a year even the keen eye of hope has almost lost sight of it; it is
+definitely withdrawn from the practical sphere. And then, such is the
+divine obstinacy of humanity, the turn of the year gives us an excuse
+for starting afresh, and forming a new ideal, and forgetting our shame
+in yet another organised effort. Such is the annual circle of the ideal,
+the effort, the failure and the shame. A rather pitiful history it may
+appear! And yet it is also rather a splendid history! For the failure
+and the shame are due to the splendour of our ideal and to the audacity
+of our faith in ourselves. It is only in com<a name="Page_103" id="Page_103" />parison with our ideal that
+we have fallen low. We are higher, in our failure and our shame, than we
+should have been if we had not attempted to rise.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>There are those who will say: &quot;At any rate, we might moderate somewhat
+the splendour of our ideal and the audacity of our self-conceit, so that
+there should be a less grotesque disparity between the aim and the
+achievement. Surely such moderation would be more in accord with common
+sense! Surely it would lessen the spiritual fatigue and disappointment
+caused by sterile endeavour!&quot; It would. But just try to moderate the
+ideal and the self-conceit! And you will find, in spite of all your sad
+experiences, that you cannot. If there is the stuff of a man in you, you
+<a name="Page_104" id="Page_104" />simply cannot! The truth, is that, in the supreme things, a man does
+not act under the rules of earthly common sense. He transcends them,
+because there is a quality in him which compels him to do so. Common
+sense may persuade him to attempt to keep down the ideal, and
+self-conceit may pretend to agree. But all the time, self-conceit will
+be whispering: &quot;I can go one better than that.&quot; And lo! the ideal is
+furtively raised again.</p>
+
+<p>A man really has little scientific control over the height of his ideal
+and the intensity of his belief in himself. He is born with them, as he
+is born with a certain pulse and a certain reflex action. He can neglect
+the ideal, so that it almost dissolves, but he cannot change its height.
+He can maim his belief in himself by persistent abandon<a name="Page_105" id="Page_105" />ment to folly,
+but he cannot lower its flame by an effort of the will, as he might
+lower the flame of a gas by a calculated turn of the hand. In the secret
+and inmost constitution of humanity it is ordained that the disparity
+between the aim and the achievement shall seem grotesque; it is ordained
+that there shall be an enormous fuss about pretty nearly nothing; it is
+ordained that the mountain shall bring forth a mouse. But it is also
+ordained that men shall go blithely on just the same, ignoring in
+practice the ridiculousness which they admit in theory, and drawing
+renewed hope and conceit from some magic, exhaustless source. And this
+is the whole philosophy of the New Year's resolution.<a name="Page_106" id="Page_106" /><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107" /></p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h2><a name="TEN" id="TEN" /><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108" /><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109" />TEN</h2>
+
+<h2>ON THE LAST DAY OF THE YEAR</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>There are few people who arrive at a true understanding of life, even in
+the calm and disillusioned hours of reflection that come between the end
+of one annual period and the beginning of another. Nearly everybody has
+an idea at the back of his head that if only he could conquer certain
+difficulties and embarrassments, he might really start to live properly,
+in the full sense of living. And if he has pluck he says to himself: &quot;I
+<i>will</i> smooth things out, and then I'll really live.&quot; In the same way,
+nearly everybody, regarding the spectacle of the world, sees therein a
+<a name="Page_110" id="Page_110" />principle which he calls Evil; and he thinks: &quot;If only we could get rid
+of this Evil, if only we could set things right, how splendid the world
+would be!&quot; Now, in the meaning usually attached to it, there is no such
+positive principle as Evil. Assuming that there is such a positive
+principle in a given phenomenon&mdash;such as the character of a particular
+man&mdash;you must then admit that there is the same positive principle
+everywhere, for just as the character of no man is so imperfect that you
+could not conceive a worse, so the character of no man is so perfect
+that you could not conceive a better. Do away with Evil from the world,
+and you would not merely abolish certain specially distressing matters,
+you would change everything. You would in fact achieve perfection. And
+when we say <a name="Page_111" id="Page_111" />that one thing is evil and another good, all that we mean
+is that one thing is less advanced than another in the way of
+perfection. Evil cannot therefore be a positive principle; it signifies
+only the falling short of perfection.</p>
+
+<p>And supposing that the desires of mankind were suddenly fulfilled, and
+the world was rendered perfect! There would be no motive for effort, no
+altercation of conflicting motives in the human heart; nothing to do, no
+one to befriend, no anxiety, no want unsatisfied. Equilibrium would be
+established. A cheerful world! You can see instantly how amusing it
+would be. It would have only one drawback&mdash;that of being dead. Its
+reason for being alive would have ceased to operate. Life means change
+through constant development. But you cannot develop the perfect. The
+perfect can merely expire.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112" />That average successful man whom I have previously cited feels all this
+by instinct, though he does not comprehend it by reason. He reaches his
+ambition, and retires from the fight in order to enjoy life,&mdash;and what
+does he then do? He immediately creates for himself a new series of
+difficulties and embarrassments, either by undertaking the management of
+a large estate, or by some other device. If he does not maintain for
+himself conditions which necessitate some kind of struggle, he quickly
+dies&mdash;spiritually or physically, often both. The proportion of men who,
+having established an equilibrium, proceed to die on the spot, is
+enormous. Continual effort, which means, of course, continual
+disappointment, is the <i>sine qua non</i>&mdash;without it there is literally
+nothing vital. Its abolition is the abol<a name="Page_113" id="Page_113" />ition of life. Hence, people,
+who, failing to savour the struggle itself, anticipate the end of the
+struggle as the beginning of joy and happiness&mdash;these people are simply
+missing life; they are longing to exchange life for death. The hemlock
+would save them a lot of weary waiting.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>We shall now perceive, I think, what is wrong with the assumptions of
+the average successful man as set forth in the previous chapter. In
+postulating that happiness is what one is not, he has got hold of a
+mischievous conception of happiness. Let him examine his conception of
+happiness, and he will find that it consists in the enjoyment of love
+and luxury, and in the freedom from enforced effort. He generally wants
+all three ingredients. Now pas<a name="Page_114" id="Page_114" />sionate love does not mean happiness; it
+means excitement, apprehension and continually renewed desire. And
+affectionate love, from which the passion has faded, means something
+less than happiness, for, mingled with its gentle tranquility is a
+disturbing regret for the more fiery past. Luxury, according to the
+universal experience of those who have had it, has no connection
+whatever with happiness. And as for freedom from enforced effort, it
+means simply death.</p>
+
+<p>Happiness as it is dreamed of cannot possibly exist save for brief
+periods of self-deception which are followed by terrible periods of
+reaction. Real, practicable happiness is due primarily not to any kind
+of environment, but to an inward state of mind. Real happiness consists
+first in acceptance of the <a name="Page_115" id="Page_115" />fact that discontent is a condition of life,
+and, second, in an honest endeavour to adjust conduct to an ideal. Real
+happiness is not an affair of the future; it is an affair of the
+present. Such as it is, if it cannot be obtained now, it can never be
+obtained. Real happiness lives in patience, having comprehended that if
+very little is accomplished towards perfection, so a man's existence is
+a very little moment in the vast expanse of the universal life, and
+having also comprehended that it is the struggle which is vital, and
+that the end of the struggle is only another name for death.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>&quot;Well,&quot; I hear you exclaiming, &quot;if this is all we can look forward to,
+if this is all that real, practicable happiness amounts to, is life
+worth living?&quot; That <a name="Page_116" id="Page_116" />is a question which each person has to answer for
+himself. If he answers it in the negative, no argument, no persuasion,
+no sentimentalisation of the facts of life, will make him alter his
+opinion. Most people, however, answer it in the affirmative. Despite all
+the drawbacks, despite all the endless disappointments, they decide that
+life is worth living. There are two species of phenomena which bring
+them to this view. The first may be called the golden moments of life,
+which seem somehow in their transient brevity to atone for the dull
+exasperation of interminable mediocre hours: moments of triumph in the
+struggle, moments of fierce exultant resolve; moments of joy in
+nature&mdash;moments which defy oblivion in the memory, and which, being
+priceless, cannot be too dearly bought.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117" />The second species of compensatory phenomena are all the agreeable
+experiences connected with human friendship; the general feeling, under
+diverse forms, that one is not alone in the world. It is for the
+multiplication and intensification of these phenomena that Christmas,
+the Feast of St. Friend, exists. And, on the last day of the year, on
+the eve of a renewed effort, our thoughts may profitably be centered
+upon a plan of campaign whose execution shall result in a less imperfect
+intercourse.</p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14653 ***</div>
+</body>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #14653 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14653)
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Feast of St. Friend, by Arnold Bennett
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Feast of St. Friend
+
+Author: Arnold Bennett
+
+Release Date: January 10, 2005  [eBook #14653]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Project Gutenberg Beginners
+Projects, Melissa Er-Raqabi, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+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
+
+CHAPTER
+
+   I. THE FACT
+  II. THE REASON
+ III. THE SOLSTICE AND GOODWILL
+  IV. THE APPOSITENESS OF CHRISTMAS
+   V. DEFENCE OF FEASTING
+  VI. TO REVITALIZE THE FESTIVAL
+ VII. THE GIFT OF ONESELF
+VIII. THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND
+  IX. THE REACTION
+   X. ON THE LAST DAY OF THE YEAR
+
+
+
+
+
+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 enjoyment of the summer holiday. We
+experience no difficulty in inducing the holiday feeling. There is no
+fear of the institution of the summer holiday losing its heartiness. Nor
+do we need the example of children to aid us in savouring the August
+"festivities."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If any person here breaks in with the statement that I am deceived and
+the truth is not in me, and that Christmas stands just where it did in
+the esteem of all right-minded people, and that he who casts a doubt on
+the heartiness of Christmas is not right-minded, let that person read no
+more. This book is not written for him. And if any other person,
+kindlier, condescendingly protests that there is nothing wrong with
+Christmas except my advancing age, let that person read no more. This
+book is not written for him, either. It is written for persons who can
+look facts cheerfully in the face. That Christmas has lost some of its
+magic is a fact that the common sense of the western hemisphere will not
+dispute. To blink the fact is infantile. To confront it, to try to
+understand it, to reckon with it, and to obviate any evil that may
+attach to it--this course alone is meet for an honest man.
+
+
+
+
+
+TWO
+
+THE REASON
+
+
+If the decadence of Christmas were a purely subjective phenomenon,
+confined to the breasts of those of us who have ceased to be children
+then it follows that Christmas has always been decadent, because people
+have always been ceasing to be children. It follows also that the
+festival was originally got up by disillusioned adults, for the benefit
+of the children. Which is totally absurd. Adults have never yet invented
+any institution, festival or diversion specially for the benefit of
+children. The egoism of adults makes such an effort impossible, and the
+ingenuity and pliancy of children make it unnecessary. The pantomime,
+for example, which is now pre-eminently a diversion for children, was
+created by adults for the amusement of adults. Children have merely
+accepted it and appropriated it. Children, being helpless, are of course
+fatalists and imitators. They take what comes, and they do the best they
+can with it. And when they have made something their own that was adult,
+they stick to it like leeches.
+
+They are terrific Tories, are children; they are even reactionary! They
+powerfully object to changes. What they most admire in a pantomime is
+the oldest part of it, the only true pantomime--the harlequinade! Hence
+the very nature of children is a proof that what Christmas is now to
+them, it was in the past to their elders. If they now feel and exhibit
+faith and enthusiasm in the practice of the festival, be sure that, at
+one time, adults felt and exhibited the same faith and enthusiasm--yea,
+and more! For in neither faith nor enthusiasm can a child compete with a
+convinced adult. No child could believe in anything as passionately as
+the modern millionaire believes in money, or as the modern social
+reformer believes in the virtue of Acts of Parliament.
+
+Another and a crowning proof that Christmas has been diminished in our
+hearts lies in the fiery lyrical splendour of the old Christmas hymns.
+Those hymns were not written by people who made-believe at Christmas for
+the pleasure of youngsters. They were written by devotees. And this age
+could not have produced them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No! The decay of the old Christmas spirit among adults is undeniable,
+and its cause is fairly plain. It is due to the labours of a set of
+idealists--men who cared not for money, nor for glory, nor for anything
+except their ideal. Their ideal was to find out the truth concerning
+nature and concerning human history; and they sacrificed all--they
+sacrificed the peace of mind of whole generations--to the pleasure of
+slaking their ardour for truth. For them the most important thing in the
+world was the satisfaction of their curiosity. They would leave naught
+alone; and they scorned consequences. Useless to cry to them: "That is
+holy. Touch it not!" I mean the great philosophers and men of
+science--especially the geologists--of the nineteenth century. I mean
+such utterly pure-minded men as Lyell, Spencer, Darwin and Huxley. They
+inaugurated the mighty age of doubt and scepticism. They made it
+impossible to believe all manner of things which before them none had
+questioned. The movement spread until uneasiness was everywhere in the
+realm of thought, and people walked about therein fearsomely, as in a
+land subject to earthquakes. It was as if people had said: "We don't
+know what will topple next. Let's raze everything to the ground, and
+then we shall feel safer." And there came a moment after which nobody
+could ever look at a picture of the Nativity in the old way. Pictures of
+the Nativity were admired perhaps as much as ever, but for the exquisite
+beauty of their naïveté, the charm of their old-world simplicity, not
+as artistic renderings of fact.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An age of scepticism has its faults, like any other age, though certain
+persons have pretended the contrary. Having been compelled to abandon
+its belief in various statements of alleged fact, it lumps principles
+and ideals with alleged facts, and hastily decides not to believe in
+anything at all. It gives up faith, it despises faith, in spite of the
+warning of its greatest philosophers, including Herbert Spencer, that
+faith of some sort is necessary to a satisfactory existence in a
+universe full of problems which science admits it can never solve. None
+were humbler than the foremost scientists about the narrowness of the
+field of knowledge, as compared with the immeasurability of the field
+of faith. But the warning has been ignored, as warnings nearly always
+are. Faith is at a discount. And the qualities which go with faith are
+at a discount; such as enthusiasm, spontaneity, ebullition, lyricism,
+and self-expression in general. Sentimentality is held in such horror
+that people are afraid even of sentiment. Their secret cry is: "Give us
+something in which we can believe."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They forget, in their confusion, that the great principles, spiritual
+and moral, remain absolutely intact. They forget that, after all the
+shattering discoveries of science and conclusions of philosophy, mankind
+has still to live with dignity amid hostile nature, and in the presence
+of an unknowable power and that mankind can only succeed in this
+tremendous feat by the exercise of faith and of that mutual goodwill
+which is based in sincerity and charity. They forget that, while facts
+are nothing, these principles are everything. And so, at that epoch of
+the year which nature herself has ordained for the formal recognition of
+the situation of mankind in the universe and of its resulting duties to
+itself and to the Unknown--at that epoch, they bewail, sadly or
+impatiently or cynically: "Oh! The bottom has been knocked out of
+Christmas!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the bottom has not been knocked out of Christmas. And people know
+it. Somewhere, in the most central and mysterious fastness of their
+hearts, they know it. If they were not, in spite of themselves,
+convinced of it, why should they be so pathetically anxious to keep
+alive in themselves, and to foster in their children, the Christmas
+spirit? Obviously, a profound instinct is for ever reminding them that,
+without the Christmas spirit, they are lost. The forms of faith change,
+but the spirit of faith, which is the Christmas spirit, is immortal amid
+its endless vicissitudes. At a crisis of change, faith is weakened for
+the majority; for the majority it may seem to be dead. It is conserved,
+however, in the hearts of the few supremely great and in the hearts of
+the simple. The supremely great are hidden from the majority; but the
+simple are seen of all men, and them we encourage, often without knowing
+why, to be the depositaries of that which we cannot ourselves guard, but
+which we dimly feel to be indispensable to our safety.
+
+
+
+
+
+THREE
+
+THE SOLSTICE AND GOOD WILL
+
+
+In order to see that there is underlying Christmas an idea of faith
+which will at any rate last as long as the planet lasts, it is only
+necessary to ask and answer the question: "Why was the Christmas feast
+fixed for the twenty-fifth of December?" For it is absolutely certain,
+and admitted by everybody of knowledge, that Christ was not born on the
+twenty-fifth of December. Those disturbing impassioned inquirers after
+truth, who will not leave us peaceful in our ignorance, have settled
+that for us, by pointing out, among other things, that the twenty-fifth
+of December falls in the very midst of the Palestine rainy season, and
+that, therefore, shepherds were assuredly not on that date watching
+their flocks by night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Christians were not, at first, united in the celebration of Christmas.
+Some kept Christmas in January, others in April, others in May. It was a
+pre-Christian force which drove them all into agreement upon the
+twenty-fifth of December. Just as they wisely took the Christmas tree
+from the Roman Saturnalia, so they took the date of their festival from
+the universal pre-Christian festival of the winter solstice, Yule, when
+mankind celebrated the triumph of the sun over the powers of darkness,
+when the night begins to decrease and the day to increase, when the
+year turns, and hope is born again because the worst is over. No more
+suitably symbolic moment could have been chosen for a festival of faith,
+goodwill and joy. And the appositeness of the moment is just as perfect
+in this era of electric light and central heating, as it was in the era
+of Virgil, who, by the way, described a Christmas tree. We shall say
+this year, with exactly the same accents of relief and hope as our pagan
+ancestors used, and as the woaded savage used: "The days will begin to
+lengthen now!" For, while we often falsely fancy that we have subjugated
+nature to our service, the fact is that we are as irremediably as ever
+at the mercy of nature.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Indeed, the attitude of us moderns towards the forces by which our
+existence is governed ought to be, and probably is, more reverent and
+awe-struck than that of the earlier world. The discoveries of science
+have at once quickened our imagination and compelled us to admit that
+what we know is the merest trifle. The pagan in his ignorance explained
+everything. Our knowledge has only deepened the mystery, and all that we
+shall learn will but deepen it further. We can explain the solstice. We
+are aware with absolute certitude that the solstice and the equinox and
+the varying phenomena of the seasons are due to the fact that the plane
+of the equator is tilted at a slight angle to the plane of the ecliptic.
+When we put on the first overcoat in autumn, and when we give orders to
+let the furnace out in spring, we know that we are arranging our lives
+in accordance with that angle. And we are quite duly proud of our
+knowledge. And much good does our knowledge do us!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, it does do us some good, and in a spiritual way, too! For nobody
+can even toy with astronomy without picturing to himself, more clearly
+and startlingly than would be otherwise possible, a revolving globe that
+whizzes through elemental space around a ball of fire: which, in turn,
+is rushing with all its satellites at an inconceivable speed from
+nowhere to nowhere; and to the surface of the revolving, whizzing globe
+a multitude of living things desperately clinging, and these living
+things, in the midst of cataclysmic danger, and between the twin enigmas
+of birth and death, quarrelling and hating and calling themselves kings
+and queens and millionaires and beautiful women and aristocrats and
+geniuses and lackeys and superior persons! Perhaps the highest value of
+astronomy is that it renders more vivid the ironical significance of
+such a vision, and thus brings home to us the truth that in spite of all
+the differences which we have invented, mankind is a fellowship of
+brothers, overshadowed by insoluble and fearful mysteries, and dependent
+upon mutual goodwill and trust for the happiness it may hope to achieve.
+* * * Let us remember that Christmas is, among other things, the winter
+solstice, and that the bottom has not yet been knocked out of the winter
+solstice, nor is likely to be in the immediate future!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is a curious fact that the one faith which really does flourish and
+wax in these days should be faith in the idea of social justice. For
+social justice simply means the putting into practice of goodwill and
+the recognition of the brotherhood of mankind. Formerly, people were
+enthusiastic and altruistic for a theological idea, for a national idea,
+for a political idea. You could see men on the rack for the sake of a
+dogma; you could see men of a great nation fitting out regiments and
+ruining themselves and going forth to save a small nation from
+destruction. You could see men giving their lives to the aggrandisement
+of an empire. And the men who did these things had the best brains and
+the quickest wits and the warmest hearts of their time. But today,
+whenever you meet a first-class man who is both enthusiastic and
+altruistic, you may be sure that his pet scheme is neither theological,
+military nor political; you may be sure that he has got into his head
+the notion that some class of persons somewhere are not being treated
+fairly, are not being treated with fraternal goodwill, and that he is
+determined to put the matter right, or perish.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In England, nearly all the most interesting people are social reformers:
+and the only circles of society in which you are not bored, in which
+there is real conversation, are the circles of social reform. These
+people alone have an abounding and convincing faith. Their faith has,
+for example, convinced many of the best literary artists of the day,
+with the result that a large proportion of the best modern imaginative
+literature has been inspired by the dream of social justice. Take away
+that idea from the works of H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy and George
+Bernard Shaw, and there would be exactly nothing left. Despite any
+appearance to the contrary, therefore, the idea of universal goodwill is
+really alive upon the continents of this planet: more so, indeed, than
+any other idea--for the vitality of an idea depends far less on the
+numbers of people who hold it than on the quality of the heart and brain
+of the people who hold it. Whether the growth of the idea is due to the
+spiritual awe and humility which are the consequence of increased
+scientific knowledge, I cannot say, and I do not seriously care.
+
+
+
+
+
+FOUR
+
+THE APPOSITENESS OF CHRISTMAS
+
+
+"Yes," you say, "I am quite at one with you as to the immense importance
+of goodwill in social existence, and I have the same faith in it as you
+have. But why a festival? Why eating and drinking and ceremonies? Surely
+one can have faith without festivals?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The answer is that one cannot; or at least that in practice, one never
+does. A disinclination for festivals, a morbid self-conscious fear of
+letting oneself go, is a sure sign of lack of faith. If you have not
+enough enthusiasm for the cult of goodwill to make you positively
+desire to celebrate the cult, then your faith is insufficient and needs
+fostering by study and meditation. Why, if you decide to found a
+sailing-club up your creek, your very first thought is to signalise your
+faith in the sailing of those particular waters by a dinner and a
+jollity, and you take care that the event shall be an annual one! * * *
+You have faith in your wife, and in your affection for her. Surely you
+don't need a festival to remind you of that faith, you so superior to
+human weaknesses? But you do! You insist on having it. And, if the
+festival did not happen, you would feel gloomy and discouraged. A
+birthday is a device for recalling to you in a formal and impressive
+manner that a certain person still lives and is in need of goodwill. It
+is a device which experience has proved to be both valuable and
+necessary.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Real faith effervesces; it shoots forth in every direction; it
+communicates itself. And the inevitable result is a festival. The
+festival is anticipated with pleasure, and it is remembered with
+pleasure. And thus it reacts stimulatingly on that which gave it birth,
+as the vitality of children reacts stimulatingly on the vitality of
+parents. It provides a concrete symbol of that which is invisible and
+intangible, and mankind is not yet so advanced in the path of spiritual
+perfection that we can afford to dispense with concrete symbols. Now, if
+we maintain festivals and formalities for the healthy continuance and
+honour of a pastime or of a personal affection, shall we not maintain a
+festival--and a mighty one--in behalf of a faith which makes the
+corporate human existence bearable amid the menaces and mysteries that
+for ever threaten it,--the faith of universal goodwill and mutual
+confidence?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If then, there is to be a festival, why should it not be the festival of
+Christmas? It can, indeed, be no other. Christmas is most plainly
+indicated. It is dignified and made precious by traditions which go back
+much further than the Christian era; and it has this tremendous
+advantage--it exists! In spite of our declining faith, it has been
+preserved to us, and here it is, ready to hand. Not merely does it fall
+at the point which uncounted generations have agreed to consider as the
+turn of the solar year and as the rebirth of hope! It falls also
+immediately before the end of the calendar year, and thus prepares us
+for a fresh beginning that shall put the old to shame. It could not be
+better timed. Further, its traditional spirit of peace and goodwill is
+the very spirit which we desire to foster. And finally its customs--or
+at any rate, its main customs--are well designed to symbolize that
+spirit. If we have allowed the despatch of Christmas cards to degenerate
+into naught but a tedious shuffling of paste-boards and overwork of
+post-office officials, the fault is not in the custom but in ourselves.
+The custom is a most striking one--so long as we have sufficient
+imagination to remember vividly that we are all in the same boat--I
+mean, on the same planet--and clinging desperately to the flying ball,
+and dependent for daily happiness on one another's good will! A
+Christmas card sent by one human being to another human being is more
+than a piece of coloured stationery sent by one log of wood to another
+log of wood: it is an inspiring and reassuring message of high value.
+The mischief is that so many self-styled human beings are just logs of
+wood, rather stylishly dressed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And then the custom of present-giving! What better and more convincing
+proof of sympathy than a gift? The gift is one of these obvious
+contrivances--like the wheel or the lever--which smooth and simplify
+earthly life, and the charm of whose utility no obviousness can stale.
+But of course any contrivance can be rendered futile by clumsiness or
+negligence. There is a sort of Christmas giver who says pettishly: "Oh!
+I don't know what to give to So-and-So this Christmas! What a bother! I
+shall write and tell her to choose something herself, and send the bill
+to me!" And he writes. And though he does not suspect it, what he really
+writes, and what So-and-So reads, is this: "Dear So-and-So. It is
+nothing to me that you and I are alive together on this planet, and in
+various ways mutually dependent. But I am bound by custom to give you a
+present. I do not, however, take sufficient interest in your life to
+know what object it would give you pleasure to possess; and I do not
+want to be put to the trouble of finding out, nor of obtaining the
+object and transmitting it to you. Will you, therefore, buy something
+for yourself and send the bill to me. Of course, a sense of social
+decency will prevent you from spending more than a small sum, and I
+shall be spared all exertion beyond signing a cheque. Yours insincerely
+and loggishly * * *." So managed, the contrivance of present-giving
+becomes positively sinister in its working. But managed with the
+sympathetic imagination which is infallibly produced by real faith in
+goodwill, its efficacy may approach the miraculous.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Christmas ceremony of good-wishing by word of mouth has never been
+in any danger of falling into insincerity. Such is the power of
+tradition and virtue of a festival, and such the instinctive
+brotherliness of men, that on this day the mere sight of an
+acquaintance will soften the voice and warm the heart of the most
+superior sceptic and curmudgeon that the age of disillusion has
+produced. In spite of himself, faith flickers up in him again, be it
+only for a moment. And, during that moment, he is almost like those
+whose bright faith the age has never tarnished, like the great and like
+the simple, to whom it is quite unnecessary to offer a defence and
+explanation of Christmas or to suggest the basis of a new faith therein.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FIVE
+
+DEFENCE OF FEASTING
+
+
+And now I can hear the superior sceptic disdainfully questioning: "Yes,
+but what about the orgy of Christmas? What about all the eating and
+drinking?" To which I can only answer that faith causes effervescence,
+expansion, joy, and that joy has always, for excellent reasons, been
+connected with feasting. The very words 'feast' and 'festival' are
+etymologically inseparable. The meal is the most regular and the least
+dispensable of daily events; it happens also to be an event which is in
+itself almost invariably a source of pleasure, or, at worst, of
+satisfaction: and it will continue to have this precious quality so long
+as our souls are encased in bodies. What could be more natural,
+therefore, than that it should be employed, with due enlargement and
+ornamentation, as the kernel of the festival? What more logical than
+that the meal should be elevated into a feast?
+
+"But," exclaims the superior sceptic, "this idea involves the idea of
+excess!" What if it does? I would not deny it! Assuredly, a feast means
+more than enough, and more than enough means excess. It is only because
+a feast means excess that it assists in the bringing about of expansion
+and joy. Such is human nature, and it is the case of human nature that
+we are discussing. Of course, excess usually exacts its toll, within
+twenty-four hours, especially from the weak. But the benefit is worth
+its price. The body pays no more than the debt which the soul has
+incurred. An occasional change of habit is essential to well-being, and
+every change of habit results in temporary derangement and
+inconvenience.
+
+Do not misunderstand me. Do not push my notion of excess to extremes.
+When I defend the excess inevitably incident to a feast, I am not
+seeking to prove that a man in celebrating Christmas is entitled to
+drink champagne in a public restaurant until he becomes an object of
+scorn and disgust to the waiters who have travelled from Switzerland in
+order to receive his tips. Much less should I be prepared to justify him
+if, in his own home, he sank lower than the hog. Nor would I
+sympathetically carry him to bed. There is such a thing as excess in
+moderation and dignity. Every wise man has practised this. And he who
+has not practised it is a fool, and deserves even a harder name. He
+ought indeed to inhabit a planet himself, for all his faith in humanity
+will be exhausted in believing in himself. * * * So much for the feast!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the accompaniments of the feast are also excessive. For example, you
+make a tug-of-war with your neighbour at table, and the rope is a
+fragile packet of tinselled paper, which breaks with a report like a
+pistol. You open your half of the packet, and discover some doggerel
+verse which you read aloud, and also a perfectly idiotic coloured cap,
+which you put on your head to the end of looking foolish. And this
+ceremony is continued until the whole table is surrounded by
+preposterous headgear, and doggerel verse is lying by every plate.
+Surely no man in his senses, no woman in hers, would, etc., etc. * * *!
+But one of the spiritual advantages of feasting is that it expands you
+beyond your common sense. One excess induces another, and a finer one.
+This acceptance of the ridiculous is good for you. It is particularly
+good for an Anglo-Saxon, who is so self-contained and self-controlled
+that his soul might stiffen as the unused limb of an Indian fakir
+stiffens, were it not for periodical excitements like that of the
+Christmas feast. Everybody has experienced the self-conscious reluctance
+which precedes the putting on of the cap, and the relief, followed by
+further expansion and ecstasy, which ensues after the putting on.
+Everybody who has put on a cap is aware that it is a beneficial thing to
+put on a cap. Quite apart from the fact that the mysterious and fanciful
+race of children are thereby placated and appeased, the soul of the
+capped one is purified by this charming excess.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And the Tree! What an excess of the fantastic to pretend that all those
+glittering balls, those coloured candles and those variegated parcels
+are the blossoms of the absurd tree! How excessively grotesque to tie
+all those parcels to the branches, in order to take them off again!
+Surely, something less medieval, more ingenious, more modern than this
+could be devised--if symbolism is to be indulged in at all! Can you
+devise it, O sceptical one, revelling in disillusion? Can you invent a
+symbol more natural and graceful than the symbol of the Tree? Perhaps
+you would have a shop-counter, and shelves behind it, so as to instill
+early into the youthful mind that this is a planet of commerce! Perhaps
+you would abolish the doggerel of crackers, and substitute therefor
+extracts from the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin! Perhaps you would
+exchange the caps for blazonry embroidered with chemical formula, your
+object being the advancement of science! Perhaps you would do away with
+the orgiastic eating and drinking, and arrange for a formal conversation
+about astronomy and the idea of human fraternity, upon strictly
+reasonable rations of shredded wheat! You would thus create an original
+festival, and eliminate all fear of a dyspeptic morrow. You would
+improve the mind. And you would avoid the ridiculous. But also, in
+avoiding the ridiculous, you would tumble into the ridiculous, deeply
+and hopelessly! And think how your very original festival would delight
+the participators, how they would look forward to it with joy, and back
+upon it with pleasurable regret; how their minds would dwell sweetly
+upon the conception of shredded wheat, and how their faith would be
+encouraged and strengthened by the intellectuality of the formal
+conversation!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He who girds at an ancient established festival should reflect upon
+sundry obvious truths before he withers up the said festival by the
+sirocco of his contempt. These truths are as follows:--First, a
+festival, though based upon intelligence, is not an affair of the
+intellect, but an affair of the emotions. Second, the human soul can
+only be reached through the human body. Third, it is impossible to
+replace an ancient festival by a new one. Robespierre, amongst others,
+tried to do so, and achieved the absurd. Reformers, heralds of new
+faiths, and rejuvenators of old faiths, have always, when they
+succeeded, adopted an ancient festival, with all or most of its forms,
+and been content to breathe into it a new spirit to replace the old
+spirit which had vanished or was vanishing. Anybody who, persuaded that
+Christmas is not what it was, feels that a festival must nevertheless be
+preserved, will do well to follow this example. To be content with the
+old forms and to vitalize them: that is the problem. Solve it, and the
+forms will soon begin to adapt themselves to the process of
+vitalization. All history is a witness in proof.
+
+
+
+
+
+SIX
+
+TO REVITALIZE THE FESTIVAL
+
+
+It being agreed, then, that the Christmas festival has lost a great deal
+of its old vitality, and that, to many people, it is a source of tedium
+and the cause of insincerity; and it being further agreed that the
+difficulty cannot be got over by simply abolishing the festival, as no
+one really wants it to be abolished; the question remains--what should
+be done to vitalize it? The former spirit of faith, the spirit which
+made the great Christmas of the golden days, has been weakened; but one
+element of it--that which is founded on the conviction that goodwill
+among men is a prime necessity of reasonable living--survives with a
+certain vigour, though even it has not escaped the general scepticism of
+the age. This element unites in agreement all the pugnacious sectaries
+who join battle over the other elements of the former faith. This
+element has no enemies. None will deny its lasting virtue. Obviously,
+therefore, the right course is to concentrate on the cultivation of
+goodwill. If goodwill can be consciously increased, the festival of
+Christmas will cease to be perfunctory. It will acquire a fresh and more
+genuine significance, which, however, will not in any way inconvenience
+those who have never let go of the older significance. No tradition will
+be overthrown, no shock administered, and nobody will be able to croak
+about iconoclasm and new-fangled notions and the sudden end of the
+world, and so on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The fancy of some people will at once run to the formation of a grand
+international Society for the revivifying of Christmas by the
+cultivation of goodwill, with branches in all the chief cities of Europe
+and America, and headquarters--of course at the Hague; and committees
+and subcommittees, and presidents and vice-presidents; and honorary
+secretaries and secretaries paid; and quarterly and annual meetings, and
+triennial congresses! And a literary organ or two! And a
+badge--naturally a badge, designed by a famous artist in harmonious
+tints!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But my fancy does not run at all in this direction. I am convinced that
+we have already far too many societies for the furtherance of our ends.
+To my mind, most societies with a moral aim are merely clumsy machines
+for doing simple jobs with the maximum of friction, expense and
+inefficiency. I should define the majority of these societies as a group
+of persons each of whom expects the others to do something very
+wonderful. Why create a society in order to help you to perform some act
+which nobody can perform but yourself? No society can cultivate goodwill
+in you. You might as well create a society for shaving or for saying
+your prayers. And further, goodwill is far less a process of performing
+acts than a process of thinking thoughts. To think, is it necessary to
+involve yourself in the cog-wheels of a society? Moreover, a society
+means fuss and shouting: two species of disturbance which are both
+futile and deleterious, particularly in an intimate affair of morals.
+
+You can best help the general cultivation of goodwill along by
+cultivating goodwill in your own heart. Until you have started the task
+of personal cultivation, you will probably assume that there will be
+time left over for superintending the cultivation of goodwill in other
+people's hearts. But a very little experience ought to show you that
+this is a delusion. You will perceive, if not at once, later, that you
+have bitten off just about as much as you can chew. And you will
+appreciate also the wisdom of not advertising your enterprise. Why,
+indeed, should you breathe a word to a single soul concerning your
+admirable intentions? Rest assured that any unusual sprouting of the
+desired crop will be instantly noticed by the persons interested.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next point is: Towards whom are you to cultivate goodwill?
+Naturally, one would answer: Towards the whole of humanity. But the
+whole of humanity, as far as you are concerned, amounts to naught but a
+magnificent abstract conception. And it is very difficult to cultivate
+goodwill towards a magnificent abstract conception. The object of
+goodwill ought to be clearly defined, and very visible to the physical
+eye, especially in the case of people, such as us, who are only just
+beginning to give to the cultivation of goodwill, perhaps, as much
+attention as we give to our clothes or our tobacco. If a novice sets out
+to embrace the whole of humanity in his goodwill, he will have even
+less success than a young man endeavouring to fall in love with four
+sisters at once; and his daily companions--those who see him eat his
+bacon and lace his boots and earn his living--will most certainly have a
+rough time of it. * * * No! It will be best for you to centre your
+efforts on quite a small group of persons, and let the rest of humanity
+struggle on as well as it can, with no more of your goodwill than it has
+hitherto had.
+
+In choosing the small group of people, it will be unnecessary for you to
+go to Timbuktu, or into the next street or into the next house. And, in
+this group of people you will be wise, while neglecting no member of the
+group, to specialise on one member. Your wife, if you have one, or your
+husband? Not necessarily. I was meaning simply that one who most
+frequently annoys you. He may be your husband, or she may be your wife.
+These things happen. He may be your butler. Or you may be his butler.
+She may be your daughter, or he may be your father, and you a charming
+omniscient girl of seventeen wiser than anybody else. Whoever he or she
+may be who oftenest inspires you with a feeling of irritated
+superiority, aim at that person in particular.
+
+The frequency of your early failures with him or her will show you how
+prudent you were not to make an attempt on the whole of humanity at
+once. And also you will see that you did well not to publish your
+excellent intentions. If nobody is aware of your striving, nobody will
+be aware that you have failed in striving. Your successes will appear
+effortless, and most important of all, you will be free from the horrid
+curse of self-consciousness. Herein is one of the main advantages of not
+wearing a badge. Lastly, you will have the satisfaction of feeling that,
+if everybody else is doing as you are, the whole of humanity is being
+attended to after all. And the comforting thought is that very probably,
+almost certainly, quite a considerable number of people are in fact
+doing as you are; some of them--make no doubt--are doing a shade better.
+I now come to the actual method of cultivating goodwill.
+
+
+
+
+
+SEVEN
+
+THE GIFT OF ONESELF
+
+
+Children divide their adult acquaintances into two categories--those who
+sympathise with them in the bizarre and trying adventure called life;
+and those who don't. The second category is much the larger of the two.
+Very many people belong to it who think that they belong to the first.
+They may deceive themselves, but they cannot deceive a child. Although
+you may easily practise upon the credulity of a child in matters of
+fact, you cannot cheat his moral and social judgment. He will add you
+up, and he will add anybody up, and he will estimate conduct, upon
+principles of his own and in a manner terribly impartial. Parents have
+no sterner nor more discerning critics than their own children.
+
+And so you may be polite to a child, and pretend to appreciate his point
+of view; but, unless you really do put yourself to the trouble of
+understanding him, unless you throw yourself, by the exercise of
+imagination, into his world, you will not succeed in being his friend.
+To be his friend means an effort on your part, it means that you must
+divest yourself of your own mental habit, and, for the time being, adopt
+his. And no nice phrases, no gifts of money, sweets or toys, can take
+the place of this effort, and this sacrifice of self. With five minutes
+of genuine surrender to him, you can win more of his esteem and
+gratitude than five hundred pounds would buy. His notion of real
+goodwill is the imaginative sharing of his feelings, a convinced
+participation in his pains and pleasures. He is well aware that, if you
+honestly do this, you will be on his side.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now, adults, of course, are tremendously clever and accomplished persons
+and children are no match for them; but still, with all their talents
+and omniscience and power, adults seem to lack important pieces of
+knowledge which children possess; they seem to forget, and to fail to
+profit by, their infantile experience. Else why should adults in general
+be so extraordinarily ignorant of the great truth that the secret of
+goodwill lies in the sympathetic exercise of the imagination? Since
+goodwill is the secret of human happiness, it follows that the secret
+of goodwill must be one of the most precious aids to sensible living;
+and yet adults, though they once knew it, have gone and forgotten it!
+Children may well be excused for concluding that the ways of the adult,
+in their capricious irrationality, are past finding out.
+
+To increase your goodwill for a fellow creature, it is necessary to
+imagine that you are he: and nothing else is necessary. This feat is not
+easy; but it can be done. Some people have less of the divine faculty of
+imagination than others, but nobody is without it, and, like all other
+faculties, it improves with use, just as it deteriorates with neglect.
+Imagination is a function of the brain. In order to cultivate goodwill
+for a person, you must think frequently about that person. You must
+inform yourself about all his activities. You must be able in your
+mind's eye to follow him hour by hour throughout the day, and you must
+ascertain if he sleeps well at night--because this is not a trifle. And
+you must reflect upon his existence with the same partiality as you
+reflect upon your own. (Why not?) That is to say, you must lay the
+fullest stress on his difficulties, disappointments and unhappinesses,
+and you must minimise his good fortune. You must magnify his efforts
+after righteousness, and forget his failures. You must ever remember
+that, after all, he is not to blame for the faults of his character,
+which faults, in his case as in yours, are due partly to heredity and
+partly to environment. And beyond everything you must always give him
+credit for good intentions. Do not you, though sometimes mistakenly,
+always act for the best? You know you do! And are you alone among
+mortals in rectitude?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This mental exercise in relation to another person takes time, and it
+involves a fatiguing effort. I repeat that it is not easy. Nor is it
+invariably agreeable. You may, indeed, find it tedious, for example, to
+picture in vivid detail all the worries that have brought about your
+wife's exacerbation--negligent maid, dishonest tradesman, milk in a
+thunder storm, hypercritical husband, dirt in the wrong place--but, when
+you have faithfully done so, I absolutely defy you to speak to her in
+the same tone as you used to employ, and to cherish resentment against
+her as you used to do. And I absolutely defy you not to feel less
+discontented with yourself than in the past. It is impossible that the
+exercise of imagination about a person should not result in goodwill
+towards that person. The exercise may put a strain upon you; but its
+effect is a scientific certainty. It is the supreme social exercise, for
+it is the giving of oneself in the most intimate and complete sense. It
+is the suspension of one's individuality in favour of another. It
+establishes a new attitude of mind, which, though it may well lead to
+specific social acts, is more valuable than any specific act, for it is
+ceaselessly translating itself into demeanour.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The critic with that terrible English trait, an exaggerated sense of the
+ridiculous, will at this point probably remark to himself, smiling: "I
+suppose the time will come, when by dint of regular daily practice, I
+shall have achieved perfect goodwill towards the first object of my
+attentions. I can then regard that person as 'done.' I can put him on a
+shelf, and turn to the next; and, in the end, all my relations, friends
+and acquaintances will be 'done' and I can stare at them in a row on the
+shelf of my mind, with pride and satisfaction * * *." Except that no
+person will ever be quite "done," human nature, still being human, in
+spite of the recent advances of civilisation, I do not deprecate this
+manner of stating the case.
+
+The ambitious and resolute man, with an exaggerated sense of the
+ridiculous, would see nothing ridiculous in ticking off a number of
+different objects as they were successively achieved. If for example it
+was part of his scheme to learn various foreign languages, he would know
+that he could only succeed by regular application of the brain, by
+concentration of thought daily; he would also know that he could never
+acquire any foreign language in absolute perfection. Still, he would
+reach a certain stage in a language, and then he would put it aside and
+turn to the next one on his programme, and so on. Assuredly, he would
+not be ashamed of employing method to reach his end.
+
+Now all that can be said of the acquirement of foreign languages can be
+said of the acquirement of goodwill. In remedying the deficiences of the
+heart and character, as in remedying the deficiences of mere knowledge,
+the brain is the sole possible instrument, and the best results will be
+obtained by using it regularly and scientifically, according to an
+arranged method. Why, therefore, if a man be proud of method in
+improving his knowledge, should he see something ridiculous in a
+deliberate plan for improving his heart--the affair of his heart being
+immensely more important, more urgent and more difficult? The reader who
+has found even one good answer to the above question, need read no more
+of this book, for he will have confounded me and it.
+
+
+
+
+
+EIGHT
+
+THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND
+
+
+The consequences of the social self-discipline which I have outlined
+will be various. A fairly early result will be the gradual decline, and
+ultimately the death, of the superior person in oneself. It is true
+that the superior person in oneself has nine lives, and is capable of
+rising from the dead after even the most fatal blows. But, at worst,
+the superior person--(and who among us does not shelter that sinister
+inhabitant in his soul?)--will have a very poor time in the soul of him
+who steadily practises the imaginative understanding of other people.
+In the first place, the mere exercise of the imagination on others
+absolutely scotches egotism as long as it lasts, and leaves it weakened
+afterwards. And, in the second and more important place, an improved
+comprehension of others (which means an intensified sympathy with them)
+must destroy the illusion, so widespread, that one's own case is
+unique. The amicable study of one's neighbours on the planet inevitably
+shows that the same troubles, the same fortitudes, the same feats of
+intelligence, the same successes and failures, are constantly happening
+everywhere. One can, indeed, see oneself in nearly everybody else, and,
+in particular, one is struck by the fact that the quality in which one
+took most pride is simply spread abroad throughout humanity in heaps!
+It is only in sympathetically contemplating others that one can get
+oneself in a true perspective. Yet probably the majority of human
+beings never do contemplate others, save with the abstracted gaze which
+proves that the gazer sees nothing but his own dream.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Another result of the discipline is an immensely increased interest in
+one's friends. One regards them even with a sort of proprietary
+interest, for, by imagination, one has come into sympathetic possession
+of them. Further, one has for them that tender feeling which always
+follows the conferring of a benefit, especially the secret conferring of
+a benefit. It is the benefactor, not the person benefited, who is
+grateful. The benefit which one has conferred is, of course, the gift of
+oneself. The resulting emotion is independent of any sympathy rendered
+by the other; and where the sympathy is felt to be mutual, friendship
+acquires a new significance. The exercise of sympathetic imagination
+will cause one to look upon even a relative as a friend--a startling
+achievement! It will provide a new excitement and diversion in life.
+
+When the month of December dawns, there need be no sensation of weary
+apprehension about the difficulty of choosing a present that will suit a
+friend. Certainly it will not be necessary, from sheer indifference and
+ignorance, to invite the friend to choose his own present. On the
+contrary, one will be, in secret, so intimate with the friend's
+situation and wants and desires, that sundry rival schemes for
+pleasuring him will at once offer themselves. And when he receives the
+present finally selected, he will have the conviction, always
+delightfully flattering to a donee, that he has been the object of a
+particular attention and insight. * * * And when the cards of greeting
+are despatched, formal phrases will go forth charged, in the
+consciousness of the sender, with a genuine meaning, with the force of a
+climax, as though the sender had written thereon, in invisible ink: "I
+have had you well in mind during the last twelve months; I think I
+understand your difficulties and appreciate your efforts better than I
+did, and so it is with a peculiar sympathetic knowledge that I wish you
+good luck. I have guessed what particular kind of good luck you require,
+and I wish accordingly. My wish is not vague and perfunctory only."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And on the day of festival itself one feels that one really has
+something to celebrate. The occasion has a basis, if it had no basis
+for one before; and if a basis previously existed, then it is widened
+and strengthened. The festival becomes a public culmination to a private
+enterprise. One is not reminded by Christmas of goodwill, because the
+enterprise of imaginative sympathy has been a daily affair throughout
+the year; but Christmas provides an excuse for taking satisfaction in
+the success of the enterprise and new enthusiasm to correct its
+failures. The symbolism of the situation of Christmas, at the turn of
+the year, develops an added impressiveness, and all the Christmas
+customs, apt to produce annoyance in the breasts of the unsentimental,
+are accepted with indulgence, even with eagerness, because their
+symbolism also is shown in a clearer light. Christmas becomes as
+personal as a birthday. One eats and drinks to excess, not because it
+is the custom to eat and drink to excess, but from sheer effervescent
+faith in an idea. And as one sits with one's friends, possessing them in
+the privacy of one's heart, permeated by a sense of the value of
+sympathetic comprehension in this formidable adventure of existence on a
+planet that rushes eternally through the night of space; assured indeed
+that companionship and mutual understanding alone make the adventure
+agreeable,--one sees in a flash that Christmas, whatever else it may be,
+is and must be the Feast of St. Friend, and a day on that account
+supreme among the days of the year.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The third and greatest consequence of the systematic cultivation of
+goodwill now grows blindingly apparent. To state it earlier in all its
+crudity would have been ill-advised; and I purposely refrained from
+doing so. It is the augmentation of one's own happiness. The increase of
+amity, the diminution of resentment and annoyance, the regular
+maintenance of an attitude mildly benevolent towards mankind,--these
+things are the surest way to happiness. And it is because they are the
+surest way to happiness, that the most enlightened go after them. All
+real motives are selfish motives; were it otherwise humanity would be
+utterly different from what it is. A man may perform some act which will
+benefit another while working some striking injury to himself. But his
+reason for doing it is that he prefers the evil of the injury to the
+deeper evil of the fundamental dissatisfaction which would torment him
+if he did not perform the act. Nobody yet sought the good of another
+save as a means to his own good. And it is in accordance with common
+sense that this should be so. There is, however, a lower egotism and a
+higher. It is the latter which we call unselfishness. And it is the
+latter of which Christmas is the celebration. We shall legitimately bear
+in mind, therefore, that Christmas, in addition to being the Feast of
+St. Friend, is even more profoundly the feast of one's own welfare.
+
+
+
+
+
+NINE
+
+THE REACTION
+
+
+A reaction sets in between Christmas and the New Year. It is inevitable;
+and I should be writing basely if I did not devote to it a full chapter.
+In those few dark days of inactivity, between a fete and the resumption
+of the implacable daily round, when the weather is usually cynical, and
+we are paying in our tissues the fair price of excess, we see life and
+the world in a grey and sinister light, which we imagine to be the only
+true light. Take the case of the average successful man of thirty-five.
+What is he thinking as he lounges about on the day after Christmas?
+
+His thoughts probably run thus: "Even if I live to a good old age,
+which is improbable, as many years lie behind me as before me. I have
+lived half my life, and perhaps more than half my life. I have realised
+part of my worldly ambition. I have made many good resolutions, and kept
+one or two of them in k more or less imperfect manner. I cannot, as a
+commonsense person, hope to keep a larger proportion of good resolutions
+in the future than I have kept in the past. I have tried to understand
+and sympathise with my fellow creatures, and though I have not entirely
+failed to do so, I have nearly failed. I am not happy and I am not
+content. And if, after all these years, I am neither happy nor content,
+what chance is there of my being happy and content in the second half
+of my life? The realisation of part of my worldly ambition has not made
+me any happier, and, therefore, it is unlikely that the realisation of
+the whole of my ambition will make me any happier. My strength cannot
+improve; it can only weaken; and my health likewise. I in my turn am
+coming to believe--what as a youth I rejected with disdain--namely, that
+happiness is what one is not, and content is what one has not. Why,
+then, should I go on striving after the impossible? Why should I not let
+things slide?"
+
+Thus reflects the average successful man, and there is not one of us,
+successful or unsuccessful, ambitious or unambitious, whose reflections
+have not often led him to a conclusion equally dissatisfied. Why should
+I or anybody pretend that this is not so?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And yet, in the very moment of his discouragement and of his blackest
+vision of things, that man knows quite well that he will go on striving.
+He knows that his instinct to strive will be stronger than his genuine
+conviction that the desired end cannot be achieved. Positive though he
+may be that a worldly ambition realised will produce the same
+dissatisfaction as Dead Sea fruit in the mouth, he will still continue
+to struggle. * * * Now you cannot argue against facts, and this is a
+fact. It must be accepted. Conduct must be adjusted to it. The struggle
+being inevitable, it must be carried through as well as it can be
+carried through. It will not end brilliantly, but precautions can be
+taken against it ending disgracefully. These precautions consist in the
+devising of a plan of campaign, and the plan of campaign is defined by a
+series of resolutions: which resolutions are generally made at or
+immediately before the beginning of a New Year. Without these the
+struggle would be formless, confused, blind and even more futile than it
+is with them. Organised effort is bound to be less ineffective than
+unorganised effort.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A worldly ambition can be, frequently is, realised: but an ideal cannot
+be attained--if it could, it would not be an ideal. The virtue of an
+ideal is its unattainability. It seems, when it is first formed, just as
+attainable as a worldly ambition which indeed is often schemed as a
+means to it. After twenty-four hours, the ideal is all but attained.
+After forty-eight, it is a little farther off. After a week, it has
+receded still further. After a month it is far away; and towards the end
+of a year even the keen eye of hope has almost lost sight of it; it is
+definitely withdrawn from the practical sphere. And then, such is the
+divine obstinacy of humanity, the turn of the year gives us an excuse
+for starting afresh, and forming a new ideal, and forgetting our shame
+in yet another organised effort. Such is the annual circle of the ideal,
+the effort, the failure and the shame. A rather pitiful history it may
+appear! And yet it is also rather a splendid history! For the failure
+and the shame are due to the splendour of our ideal and to the audacity
+of our faith in ourselves. It is only in comparison with our ideal that
+we have fallen low. We are higher, in our failure and our shame, than we
+should have been if we had not attempted to rise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are those who will say: "At any rate, we might moderate somewhat
+the splendour of our ideal and the audacity of our self-conceit, so that
+there should be a less grotesque disparity between the aim and the
+achievement. Surely such moderation would be more in accord with common
+sense! Surely it would lessen the spiritual fatigue and disappointment
+caused by sterile endeavour!" It would. But just try to moderate the
+ideal and the self-conceit! And you will find, in spite of all your sad
+experiences, that you cannot. If there is the stuff of a man in you, you
+simply cannot! The truth, is that, in the supreme things, a man does
+not act under the rules of earthly common sense. He transcends them,
+because there is a quality in him which compels him to do so. Common
+sense may persuade him to attempt to keep down the ideal, and
+self-conceit may pretend to agree. But all the time, self-conceit will
+be whispering: "I can go one better than that." And lo! the ideal is
+furtively raised again.
+
+A man really has little scientific control over the height of his ideal
+and the intensity of his belief in himself. He is born with them, as he
+is born with a certain pulse and a certain reflex action. He can neglect
+the ideal, so that it almost dissolves, but he cannot change its height.
+He can maim his belief in himself by persistent abandonment to folly,
+but he cannot lower its flame by an effort of the will, as he might
+lower the flame of a gas by a calculated turn of the hand. In the secret
+and inmost constitution of humanity it is ordained that the disparity
+between the aim and the achievement shall seem grotesque; it is ordained
+that there shall be an enormous fuss about pretty nearly nothing; it is
+ordained that the mountain shall bring forth a mouse. But it is also
+ordained that men shall go blithely on just the same, ignoring in
+practice the ridiculousness which they admit in theory, and drawing
+renewed hope and conceit from some magic, exhaustless source. And this
+is the whole philosophy of the New Year's resolution.
+
+
+
+
+
+TEN
+
+ON THE LAST DAY OF THE YEAR
+
+
+There are few people who arrive at a true understanding of life, even in
+the calm and disillusioned hours of reflection that come between the end
+of one annual period and the beginning of another. Nearly everybody has
+an idea at the back of his head that if only he could conquer certain
+difficulties and embarrassments, he might really start to live properly,
+in the full sense of living. And if he has pluck he says to himself: "I
+_will_ smooth things out, and then I'll really live." In the same way,
+nearly everybody, regarding the spectacle of the world, sees therein a
+principle which he calls Evil; and he thinks: "If only we could get rid
+of this Evil, if only we could set things right, how splendid the world
+would be!" Now, in the meaning usually attached to it, there is no such
+positive principle as Evil. Assuming that there is such a positive
+principle in a given phenomenon--such as the character of a particular
+man--you must then admit that there is the same positive principle
+everywhere, for just as the character of no man is so imperfect that you
+could not conceive a worse, so the character of no man is so perfect
+that you could not conceive a better. Do away with Evil from the world,
+and you would not merely abolish certain specially distressing matters,
+you would change everything. You would in fact achieve perfection. And
+when we say that one thing is evil and another good, all that we mean
+is that one thing is less advanced than another in the way of
+perfection. Evil cannot therefore be a positive principle; it signifies
+only the falling short of perfection.
+
+And supposing that the desires of mankind were suddenly fulfilled, and
+the world was rendered perfect! There would be no motive for effort, no
+altercation of conflicting motives in the human heart; nothing to do, no
+one to befriend, no anxiety, no want unsatisfied. Equilibrium would be
+established. A cheerful world! You can see instantly how amusing it
+would be. It would have only one drawback--that of being dead. Its
+reason for being alive would have ceased to operate. Life means change
+through constant development. But you cannot develop the perfect. The
+perfect can merely expire.
+
+That average successful man whom I have previously cited feels all this
+by instinct, though he does not comprehend it by reason. He reaches his
+ambition, and retires from the fight in order to enjoy life,--and what
+does he then do? He immediately creates for himself a new series of
+difficulties and embarrassments, either by undertaking the management of
+a large estate, or by some other device. If he does not maintain for
+himself conditions which necessitate some kind of struggle, he quickly
+dies--spiritually or physically, often both. The proportion of men who,
+having established an equilibrium, proceed to die on the spot, is
+enormous. Continual effort, which means, of course, continual
+disappointment, is the _sine qua non_--without it there is literally
+nothing vital. Its abolition is the abolition of life. Hence, people,
+who, failing to savour the struggle itself, anticipate the end of the
+struggle as the beginning of joy and happiness--these people are simply
+missing life; they are longing to exchange life for death. The hemlock
+would save them a lot of weary waiting.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We shall now perceive, I think, what is wrong with the assumptions of
+the average successful man as set forth in the previous chapter. In
+postulating that happiness is what one is not, he has got hold of a
+mischievous conception of happiness. Let him examine his conception of
+happiness, and he will find that it consists in the enjoyment of love
+and luxury, and in the freedom from enforced effort. He generally wants
+all three ingredients. Now passionate love does not mean happiness; it
+means excitement, apprehension and continually renewed desire. And
+affectionate love, from which the passion has faded, means something
+less than happiness, for, mingled with its gentle tranquility is a
+disturbing regret for the more fiery past. Luxury, according to the
+universal experience of those who have had it, has no connection
+whatever with happiness. And as for freedom from enforced effort, it
+means simply death.
+
+Happiness as it is dreamed of cannot possibly exist save for brief
+periods of self-deception which are followed by terrible periods of
+reaction. Real, practicable happiness is due primarily not to any kind
+of environment, but to an inward state of mind. Real happiness consists
+first in acceptance of the fact that discontent is a condition of life,
+and, second, in an honest endeavour to adjust conduct to an ideal. Real
+happiness is not an affair of the future; it is an affair of the
+present. Such as it is, if it cannot be obtained now, it can never be
+obtained. Real happiness lives in patience, having comprehended that if
+very little is accomplished towards perfection, so a man's existence is
+a very little moment in the vast expanse of the universal life, and
+having also comprehended that it is the struggle which is vital, and
+that the end of the struggle is only another name for death.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Well," I hear you exclaiming, "if this is all we can look forward to,
+if this is all that real, practicable happiness amounts to, is life
+worth living?" That is a question which each person has to answer for
+himself. If he answers it in the negative, no argument, no persuasion,
+no sentimentalisation of the facts of life, will make him alter his
+opinion. Most people, however, answer it in the affirmative. Despite all
+the drawbacks, despite all the endless disappointments, they decide that
+life is worth living. There are two species of phenomena which bring
+them to this view. The first may be called the golden moments of life,
+which seem somehow in their transient brevity to atone for the dull
+exasperation of interminable mediocre hours: moments of triumph in the
+struggle, moments of fierce exultant resolve; moments of joy in
+nature--moments which defy oblivion in the memory, and which, being
+priceless, cannot be too dearly bought.
+
+The second species of compensatory phenomena are all the agreeable
+experiences connected with human friendship; the general feeling, under
+diverse forms, that one is not alone in the world. It is for the
+multiplication and intensification of these phenomena that Christmas,
+the Feast of St. Friend, exists. And, on the last day of the year, on
+the eve of a renewed effort, our thoughts may profitably be centered
+upon a plan of campaign whose execution shall result in a less imperfect
+intercourse.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND***
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Feast of St. Friend, by Arnold Bennett</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: The Feast of St. Friend</p>
+<p>Author: Arnold Bennett</p>
+<p>Release Date: January 10, 2005  [eBook #14653]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland,<br />
+    Project Gutenberg Beginners Projects,<br />
+    Melissa Er-Raqabi,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (https://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h1>THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND</h1>
+
+<h2>A CHRISTMAS BOOK</h2>
+
+<div class="center">
+<a name='image1' id='image1'></a>
+<img src='images/image1.png'
+alt="text decoration" title="text decoration" />
+</div>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>ARNOLD BENNETT</h2>
+<h4>Author of <i>The Old Wives' Tale</i>,
+<i>Buried Alive</i>, etc., etc.</h4>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h6><i>New York</i><br />
+George H. Doran Company</h6>
+
+<h4>1911</h4>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS" />CONTENTS:</h2>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+
+<div style="margin-left: 25%; margin-right: 25%;">
+
+ <a href="#ONE"><b>THE FACT</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#TWO"><b>THE REASON</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#THREE"><b>THE SOLSTICE AND GOODWILL</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#FOUR"><b>THE APPOSITENESS OF CHRISTMAS</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#FIVE"><b>DEFENCE OF FEASTING</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#SIX"><b>TO REVITALIZE THE FESTIVAL</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#SEVEN"><b>THE GIFT OF ONESELF</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#EIGHT"><b>THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#NINE"><b>THE REACTION</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#TEN"><b>ON THE LAST DAY OF THE YEAR</b></a><br />
+
+</div>
+<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h2><a name="ONE" id="ONE" />ONE<a name="Page_1" id="Page_1" /></h2>
+
+<h2>THE FACT</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>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 <a name="Page_2" id="Page_2" />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
+&quot;Christians awake, salute the happy morn.&quot; 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 <a name="Page_3" id="Page_3" />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 <a name="Page_4" id="Page_4" />had our pain's worth, and more. This was the
+past.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>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 <a name="Page_5" id="Page_5" />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 &quot;Christians Awake&quot; 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: &quot;I condescend to this,&quot; and as if I had said: &quot;So do I.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Such a moment comes to most of us <a name="Page_6" id="Page_6" />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 &quot;Auld Lang Syne.&quot; And what a blessing it will be when the
+&quot;festivities&quot; (as they are misleadingly called) are over, and we can
+settle down into commonsense again!</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>I do not mean that our hearts are black with despair on Christmas Day.<a name="Page_7" id="Page_7" />
+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 &quot;Christmas feeling.&quot; We have to remind ourselves that
+&quot;it will never do&quot; to let the heartiness of Christmas be impaired. The
+peculiarity of our attitude towards Christmas, which at worst is a
+vaca<a name="Page_8" id="Page_8" />tion, may be clearly seen by contrasting it with our attitude
+towards another vacation&mdash;the summer holiday. We do not have to brace
+and force ourselves up to the enjoyment of the summer holiday. We
+experience no difficulty in inducing the holiday feeling. There is no
+fear of the institution of the summer holiday losing its heartiness. Nor
+do we need the example of children to aid us in savouring the August
+&quot;festivities.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>If any person here breaks in with the statement that I am deceived and
+the truth is not in me, and that Christmas stands just where it did in
+the esteem of all right-minded people, and that he who casts a doubt on
+the heartiness of Christmas is not right-minded, let that person read no
+more. This <a name="Page_9" id="Page_9" />book is not written for him. And if any other person,
+kindlier, condescendingly protests that there is nothing wrong with
+Christmas except my advancing age, let that person read no more. This
+book is not written for him, either. It is written for persons who can
+look facts cheerfully in the face. That Christmas has lost some of its
+magic is a fact that the common sense of the western hemisphere will not
+dispute. To blink the fact is infantile. To confront it, to try to
+understand it, to reckon with it, and to obviate any evil that may
+attach to it&mdash;this course alone is meet for an honest man.<a name="Page_10" id="Page_10" /><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11" /></p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h2><a name="TWO" id="TWO" /><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12" /><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13" />TWO</h2>
+
+<h2>THE REASON</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>If the decadence of Christmas were a purely subjective phenomenon,
+confined to the breasts of those of us who have ceased to be children
+then it follows that Christmas has always been decadent, because people
+have always been ceasing to be children. It follows also that the
+festival was originally got up by disillusioned adults, for the benefit
+of the children. Which is totally absurd. Adults have never yet invented
+any institution, festival or diversion specially for the benefit of
+children. The egoism of adults makes such an effort impos<a name="Page_14" id="Page_14" />sible, and the
+ingenuity and pliancy of children make it unnecessary. The pantomime,
+for example, which is now pre-eminently a diversion for children, was
+created by adults for the amusement of adults. Children have merely
+accepted it and appropriated it. Children, being helpless, are of course
+fatalists and imitators. They take what comes, and they do the best they
+can with it. And when they have made something their own that was adult,
+they stick to it like leeches.</p>
+
+<p>They are terrific Tories, are children; they are even reactionary! They
+powerfully object to changes. What they most admire in a pantomime is
+the oldest part of it, the only true pantomime&mdash;the harlequinade! Hence
+the very nature of children is a proof that what Christmas is now to
+them, it was <a name="Page_15" id="Page_15" />in the past to their elders. If they now feel and exhibit
+faith and enthusiasm in the practice of the festival, be sure that, at
+one time, adults felt and exhibited the same faith and enthusiasm&mdash;yea,
+and more! For in neither faith nor enthusiasm can a child compete with a
+convinced adult. No child could believe in anything as passionately as
+the modern millionaire believes in money, or as the modern social
+reformer believes in the virtue of Acts of Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>Another and a crowning proof that Christmas has been diminished in our
+hearts lies in the fiery lyrical splendour of the old Christmas hymns.
+Those hymns were not written by people who made-believe at Christmas for
+the pleasure of youngsters. They were <a name="Page_16" id="Page_16" />written by devotees. And this age
+could not have produced them.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>No! The decay of the old Christmas spirit among adults is undeniable,
+and its cause is fairly plain. It is due to the labours of a set of
+idealists&mdash;men who cared not for money, nor for glory, nor for anything
+except their ideal. Their ideal was to find out the truth concerning
+nature and concerning human history; and they sacrificed all&mdash;they
+sacrificed the peace of mind of whole generations&mdash;to the pleasure of
+slaking their ardour for truth. For them the most important thing in the
+world was the satisfaction of their curiosity. They would leave naught
+alone; and they scorned consequences. Useless to cry to them: &quot;That is
+holy. Touch it not!&quot; I mean the great philosophers and men <a name="Page_17" id="Page_17" />of
+science&mdash;especially the geologists&mdash;of the nineteenth century. I mean
+such utterly pure-minded men as Lyell, Spencer, Darwin and Huxley. They
+inaugurated the mighty age of doubt and scepticism. They made it
+impossible to believe all manner of things which before them none had
+questioned. The movement spread until uneasiness was everywhere in the
+realm of thought, and people walked about therein fearsomely, as in a
+land subject to earthquakes. It was as if people had said: &quot;We don't
+know what will topple next. Let's raze everything to the ground, and
+then we shall feel safer.&quot; And there came a moment after which nobody
+could ever look at a picture of the Nativity in the old way. Pictures of
+the Nativity were admired perhaps as much as ever, but for the exquisite
+<a name="Page_18" id="Page_18" />beauty of their naïveté, the charm of their old-world simplicity, not
+as artistic renderings of fact.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>An age of scepticism has its faults, like any other age, though certain
+persons have pretended the contrary. Having been compelled to abandon
+its belief in various statements of alleged fact, it lumps principles
+and ideals with alleged facts, and hastily decides not to believe in
+anything at all. It gives up faith, it despises faith, in spite of the
+warning of its greatest philosophers, including Herbert Spencer, that
+faith of some sort is necessary to a satisfactory existence in a
+universe full of problems which science admits it can never solve. None
+were humbler than the foremost scientists about the narrowness of the
+field of knowledge, as <a name="Page_19" id="Page_19" />compared with the immeasurability of the field
+of faith. But the warning has been ignored, as warnings nearly always
+are. Faith is at a discount. And the qualities which go with faith are
+at a discount; such as enthusiasm, spontaneity, ebullition, lyricism,
+and self-expression in general. Sentimentality is held in such horror
+that people are afraid even of sentiment. Their secret cry is: &quot;Give us
+something in which we can believe.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>They forget, in their confusion, that the great principles, spiritual
+and moral, remain absolutely intact. They forget that, after all the
+shattering discoveries of science and conclusions of philosophy, mankind
+has still to live with dignity amid hostile nature, and in the presence
+of an unknowable <a name="Page_20" id="Page_20" />power and that mankind can only succeed in this
+tremendous feat by the exercise of faith and of that mutual goodwill
+which is based in sincerity and charity. They forget that, while facts
+are nothing, these principles are everything. And so, at that epoch of
+the year which nature herself has ordained for the formal recognition of
+the situation of mankind in the universe and of its resulting duties to
+itself and to the Unknown&mdash;at that epoch, they bewail, sadly or
+impatiently or cynically: &quot;Oh! The bottom has been knocked out of
+Christmas!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>But the bottom has not been knocked out of Christmas. And people know
+it. Somewhere, in the most central and mysterious fastness of their
+hearts, they know it. If they were not, in spite of themselves,
+convinced of it, why <a name="Page_21" id="Page_21" />should they be so pathetically anxious to keep
+alive in themselves, and to foster in their children, the Christmas
+spirit? Obviously, a profound instinct is for ever reminding them that,
+without the Christmas spirit, they are lost. The forms of faith change,
+but the spirit of faith, which is the Christmas spirit, is immortal amid
+its endless vicissitudes. At a crisis of change, faith is weakened for
+the majority; for the majority it may seem to be dead. It is conserved,
+however, in the hearts of the few supremely great and in the hearts of
+the simple. The supremely great are hidden from the majority; but the
+simple are seen of all men, and them we encourage, often without knowing
+why, to be the depositaries of that which we cannot ourselves guard, but
+which we dimly feel to be indispensable to our safety.<a name="Page_22" id="Page_22" /><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23" /></p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h2><a name="THREE" id="THREE" /><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24" /><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25" />THREE</h2>
+
+<h2>THE SOLSTICE AND GOOD WILL</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>In order to see that there is underlying Christmas an idea of faith
+which will at any rate last as long as the planet lasts, it is only
+necessary to ask and answer the question: &quot;Why was the Christmas feast
+fixed for the twenty-fifth of December?&quot; For it is absolutely certain,
+and admitted by everybody of knowledge, that Christ was not born on the
+twenty-fifth of December. Those disturbing impassioned inquirers after
+truth, who will not leave us peaceful in our ignorance, have settled
+that for us, by pointing out, among other things, that the <a name="Page_26" id="Page_26" />twenty-fifth
+of December falls in the very midst of the Palestine rainy season, and
+that, therefore, shepherds were assuredly not on that date watching
+their flocks by night.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Christians were not, at first, united in the celebration of Christmas.
+Some kept Christmas in January, others in April, others in May. It was a
+pre-Christian force which drove them all into agreement upon the
+twenty-fifth of December. Just as they wisely took the Christmas tree
+from the Roman Saturnalia, so they took the date of their festival from
+the universal pre-Christian festival of the winter solstice, Yule, when
+mankind celebrated the triumph of the sun over the powers of darkness,
+when the night begins to decrease and the day to increase, when <a name="Page_27" id="Page_27" />the
+year turns, and hope is born again because the worst is over. No more
+suitably symbolic moment could have been chosen for a festival of faith,
+goodwill and joy. And the appositeness of the moment is just as perfect
+in this era of electric light and central heating, as it was in the era
+of Virgil, who, by the way, described a Christmas tree. We shall say
+this year, with exactly the same accents of relief and hope as our pagan
+ancestors used, and as the woaded savage used: &quot;The days will begin to
+lengthen now!&quot; For, while we often falsely fancy that we have subjugated
+nature to our service, the fact is that we are as irremediably as ever
+at the mercy of nature.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Indeed, the attitude of us moderns towards the forces by which our
+exist<a name="Page_28" id="Page_28" />ence is governed ought to be, and probably is, more reverent and
+awe-struck than that of the earlier world. The discoveries of science
+have at once quickened our imagination and compelled us to admit that
+what we know is the merest trifle. The pagan in his ignorance explained
+everything. Our knowledge has only deepened the mystery, and all that we
+shall learn will but deepen it further. We can explain the solstice. We
+are aware with absolute certitude that the solstice and the equinox and
+the varying phenomena of the seasons are due to the fact that the plane
+of the equator is tilted at a slight angle to the plane of the ecliptic.
+When we put on the first overcoat in autumn, and when we give orders to
+let the furnace out in spring, we know that we are arranging our lives
+in ac<a name="Page_29" id="Page_29" />cordance with that angle. And we are quite duly proud of our
+knowledge. And much good does our knowledge do us!</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Well, it does do us some good, and in a spiritual way, too! For nobody
+can even toy with astronomy without picturing to himself, more clearly
+and startlingly than would be otherwise possible, a revolving globe that
+whizzes through elemental space around a ball of fire: which, in turn,
+is rushing with all its satellites at an inconceivable speed from
+nowhere to nowhere; and to the surface of the revolving, whizzing globe
+a multitude of living things desperately clinging, and these living
+things, in the midst of cataclysmic danger, and between the twin enigmas
+of birth and death, quarrelling and hating and calling themselves kings
+and <a name="Page_30" id="Page_30" />queens and millionaires and beautiful women and aristocrats and
+geniuses and lackeys and superior persons! Perhaps the highest value of
+astronomy is that it renders more vivid the ironical significance of
+such a vision, and thus brings home to us the truth that in spite of all
+the differences which we have invented, mankind is a fellowship of
+brothers, overshadowed by insoluble and fearful mysteries, and dependent
+upon mutual goodwill and trust for the happiness it may hope to achieve.
+* * * Let us remember that Christmas is, among other things, the winter
+solstice, and that the bottom has not yet been knocked out of the winter
+solstice, nor is likely to be in the immediate future!</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>It is a curious fact that the one faith which really does flourish and
+wax in <a name="Page_31" id="Page_31" />these days should be faith in the idea of social justice. For
+social justice simply means the putting into practice of goodwill and
+the recognition of the brotherhood of mankind. Formerly, people were
+enthusiastic and altruistic for a theological idea, for a national idea,
+for a political idea. You could see men on the rack for the sake of a
+dogma; you could see men of a great nation fitting out regiments and
+ruining themselves and going forth to save a small nation from
+destruction. You could see men giving their lives to the aggrandisement
+of an empire. And the men who did these things had the best brains and
+the quickest wits and the warmest hearts of their time. But today,
+whenever you meet a first-class man who is both enthusiastic and
+altruistic, you may be sure that his pet <a name="Page_32" id="Page_32" />scheme is neither theological,
+military nor political; you may be sure that he has got into his head
+the notion that some class of persons somewhere are not being treated
+fairly, are not being treated with fraternal goodwill, and that he is
+determined to put the matter right, or perish.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>In England, nearly all the most interesting people are social reformers:
+and the only circles of society in which you are not bored, in which
+there is real conversation, are the circles of social reform. These
+people alone have an abounding and convincing faith. Their faith has,
+for example, convinced many of the best literary artists of the day,
+with the result that a large proportion of the best modern imaginative
+literature has been inspired by the dream of <a name="Page_33" id="Page_33" />social justice. Take away
+that idea from the works of H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy and George
+Bernard Shaw, and there would be exactly nothing left. Despite any
+appearance to the contrary, therefore, the idea of universal goodwill is
+really alive upon the continents of this planet: more so, indeed, than
+any other idea&mdash;for the vitality of an idea depends far less on the
+numbers of people who hold it than on the quality of the heart and brain
+of the people who hold it. Whether the growth of the idea is due to the
+spiritual awe and humility which are the consequence of increased
+scientific knowledge, I cannot say, and I do not seriously care.<a name="Page_34" id="Page_34" /><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35" /></p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div><br /></div>
+
+
+<h2><a name="FOUR" id="FOUR" /><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36" /><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37" />FOUR</h2>
+
+<h2>THE APPOSITENESS OF CHRISTMAS</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes,&quot; you say, &quot;I am quite at one with you as to the immense importance
+of goodwill in social existence, and I have the same faith in it as you
+have. But why a festival? Why eating and drinking and ceremonies? Surely
+one can have faith without festivals?&quot;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>The answer is that one cannot; or at least that in practice, one never
+does. A disinclination for festivals, a morbid self-conscious fear of
+letting oneself go, is a sure sign of lack of faith. If you have not
+enough enthusiasm for the <a name="Page_38" id="Page_38" />cult of goodwill to make you positively
+desire to celebrate the cult, then your faith is insufficient and needs
+fostering by study and meditation. Why, if you decide to found a
+sailing-club up your creek, your very first thought is to signalise your
+faith in the sailing of those particular waters by a dinner and a
+jollity, and you take care that the event shall be an annual one! * * *
+You have faith in your wife, and in your affection for her. Surely you
+don't need a festival to remind you of that faith, you so superior to
+human weaknesses? But you do! You insist on having it. And, if the
+festival did not happen, you would feel gloomy and discouraged. A
+birthday is a device for recalling to you in a formal and impressive
+manner that a certain person still lives and is in need of <a name="Page_39" id="Page_39" />goodwill. It
+is a device which experience has proved to be both valuable and
+necessary.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Real faith effervesces; it shoots forth in every direction; it
+communicates itself. And the inevitable result is a festival. The
+festival is anticipated with pleasure, and it is remembered with
+pleasure. And thus it reacts stimulatingly on that which gave it birth,
+as the vitality of children reacts stimulatingly on the vitality of
+parents. It provides a concrete symbol of that which is invisible and
+intangible, and mankind is not yet so advanced in the path of spiritual
+perfection that we can afford to dispense with concrete symbols. Now, if
+we maintain festivals and formalities for the healthy continuance and
+honour of a pastime or of a per<a name="Page_40" id="Page_40" />sonal affection, shall we not maintain a
+festival&mdash;and a mighty one&mdash;in behalf of a faith which makes the
+corporate human existence bearable amid the menaces and mysteries that
+for ever threaten it,&mdash;the faith of universal goodwill and mutual
+confidence?</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>If then, there is to be a festival, why should it not be the festival of
+Christmas? It can, indeed, be no other. Christmas is most plainly
+indicated. It is dignified and made precious by traditions which go back
+much further than the Christian era; and it has this tremendous
+advantage&mdash;it exists! In spite of our declining faith, it has been
+preserved to us, and here it is, ready to hand. Not merely does it fall
+at the point which uncounted generations have agreed to consider as the
+turn of <a name="Page_41" id="Page_41" />the solar year and as the rebirth of hope! It falls also
+immediately before the end of the calendar year, and thus prepares us
+for a fresh beginning that shall put the old to shame. It could not be
+better timed. Further, its traditional spirit of peace and goodwill is
+the very spirit which we desire to foster. And finally its customs&mdash;or
+at any rate, its main customs&mdash;are well designed to symbolize that
+spirit. If we have allowed the despatch of Christmas cards to degenerate
+into naught but a tedious shuffling of paste-boards and overwork of
+post-office officials, the fault is not in the custom but in ourselves.
+The custom is a most striking one&mdash;so long as we have sufficient
+imagination to remember vividly that we are all in the same boat&mdash;I
+mean, on the same planet&mdash;and clinging des<a name="Page_42" id="Page_42" />perately to the flying ball,
+and dependent for daily happiness on one another's good will! A
+Christmas card sent by one human being to another human being is more
+than a piece of coloured stationery sent by one log of wood to another
+log of wood: it is an inspiring and reassuring message of high value.
+The mischief is that so many self-styled human beings are just logs of
+wood, rather stylishly dressed.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>And then the custom of present-giving! What better and more convincing
+proof of sympathy than a gift? The gift is one of these obvious
+contrivances&mdash;like the wheel or the lever&mdash;which smooth and simplify
+earthly life, and the charm of whose utility no obviousness can stale.
+But of course any <a name="Page_43" id="Page_43" />contrivance can be rendered futile by clumsiness or
+negligence. There is a sort of Christmas giver who says pettishly: &quot;Oh!
+I don't know what to give to So-and-So this Christmas! What a bother! I
+shall write and tell her to choose something herself, and send the bill
+to me!&quot; And he writes. And though he does not suspect it, what he really
+writes, and what So-and-So reads, is this: &quot;Dear So-and-So. It is
+nothing to me that you and I are alive together on this planet, and in
+various ways mutually dependent. But I am bound by custom to give you a
+present. I do not, however, take sufficient interest in your life to
+know what object it would give you pleasure to possess; and I do not
+want to be put to the trouble of finding out, nor of obtaining the
+object and transmitting it to you. Will you, <a name="Page_44" id="Page_44" />therefore, buy something
+for yourself and send the bill to me. Of course, a sense of social
+decency will prevent you from spending more than a small sum, and I
+shall be spared all exertion beyond signing a cheque. Yours insincerely
+and loggishly * * *.&quot; So managed, the contrivance of present-giving
+becomes positively sinister in its working. But managed with the
+sympathetic imagination which is infallibly produced by real faith in
+goodwill, its efficacy may approach the miraculous.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>The Christmas ceremony of good-wishing by word of mouth has never been
+in any danger of falling into insincerity. Such is the power of
+tradition and virtue of a festival, and such the instinctive
+brotherliness of men, that on this day the mere sight of an
+<a name="Page_45" id="Page_45" />acquaintance will soften the voice and warm the heart of the most
+superior sceptic and curmudgeon that the age of disillusion has
+produced. In spite of himself, faith flickers up in him again, be it
+only for a moment. And, during that moment, he is almost like those
+whose bright faith the age has never tarnished, like the great and like
+the simple, to whom it is quite unnecessary to offer a defence and
+explanation of Christmas or to suggest the basis of a new faith therein.<a name="Page_46" id="Page_46" /><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47" /></p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h2><a name="FIVE" id="FIVE" /><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48" /><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49" />FIVE</h2>
+
+<h2>DEFENCE OF FEASTING</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>And now I can hear the superior sceptic disdainfully questioning: &quot;Yes,
+but what about the orgy of Christmas? What about all the eating and
+drinking?&quot; To which I can only answer that faith causes effervescence,
+expansion, joy, and that joy has always, for excellent reasons, been
+connected with feasting. The very words 'feast' and 'festival' are
+etymologically inseparable. The meal is the most regular and the least
+dispensable of daily events; it happens also to be an event which is in
+itself almost invariably a source of pleasure, or, at worst, <a name="Page_50" id="Page_50" />of
+satisfaction: and it will continue to have this precious quality so long
+as our souls are encased in bodies. What could be more natural,
+therefore, than that it should be employed, with due enlargement and
+ornamentation, as the kernel of the festival? What more logical than
+that the meal should be elevated into a feast?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But,&quot; exclaims the superior sceptic, &quot;this idea involves the idea of
+excess!&quot; What if it does? I would not deny it! Assuredly, a feast means
+more than enough, and more than enough means excess. It is only because
+a feast means excess that it assists in the bringing about of expansion
+and joy. Such is human nature, and it is the case of human nature that
+we are discussing. Of course, excess usually exacts its toll, within
+twenty-<a name="Page_51" id="Page_51" />four hours, especially from the weak. But the benefit is worth
+its price. The body pays no more than the debt which the soul has
+incurred. An occasional change of habit is essential to well-being, and
+every change of habit results in temporary derangement and
+inconvenience.</p>
+
+<p>Do not misunderstand me. Do not push my notion of excess to extremes.
+When I defend the excess inevitably incident to a feast, I am not
+seeking to prove that a man in celebrating Christmas is entitled to
+drink champagne in a public restaurant until he becomes an object of
+scorn and disgust to the waiters who have travelled from Switzerland in
+order to receive his tips. Much less should I be prepared to justify him
+if, in his own home, he sank lower than the hog. Nor would I
+sympathetically <a name="Page_52" id="Page_52" />carry him to bed. There is such a thing as excess in
+moderation and dignity. Every wise man has practised this. And he who
+has not practised it is a fool, and deserves even a harder name. He
+ought indeed to inhabit a planet himself, for all his faith in humanity
+will be exhausted in believing in himself. * * * So much for the feast!</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>But the accompaniments of the feast are also excessive. For example, you
+make a tug-of-war with your neighbour at table, and the rope is a
+fragile packet of tinselled paper, which breaks with a report like a
+pistol. You open your half of the packet, and discover some doggerel
+verse which you read aloud, and also a perfectly idiotic coloured cap,
+which you put on your head <a name="Page_53" id="Page_53" />to the end of looking foolish. And this
+ceremony is continued until the whole table is surrounded by
+preposterous headgear, and doggerel verse is lying by every plate.
+Surely no man in his senses, no woman in hers, would, etc., etc. * * *!
+But one of the spiritual advantages of feasting is that it expands you
+beyond your common sense. One excess induces another, and a finer one.
+This acceptance of the ridiculous is good for you. It is particularly
+good for an Anglo-Saxon, who is so self-contained and self-controlled
+that his soul might stiffen as the unused limb of an Indian fakir
+stiffens, were it not for periodical excitements like that of the
+Christmas feast. Everybody has experienced the self-conscious reluctance
+which precedes the putting on of the cap, and the relief, <a name="Page_54" id="Page_54" />followed by
+further expansion and ecstasy, which ensues after the putting on.
+Everybody who has put on a cap is aware that it is a beneficial thing to
+put on a cap. Quite apart from the fact that the mysterious and fanciful
+race of children are thereby placated and appeased, the soul of the
+capped one is purified by this charming excess.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>And the Tree! What an excess of the fantastic to pretend that all those
+glittering balls, those coloured candles and those variegated parcels
+are the blossoms of the absurd tree! How excessively grotesque to tie
+all those parcels to the branches, in order to take them off again!
+Surely, something less medieval, more ingenious, more modern than this
+could be devised&mdash;if symbolism is to be indulged in at all! Can <a name="Page_55" id="Page_55" />you
+devise it, O sceptical one, revelling in disillusion? Can you invent a
+symbol more natural and graceful than the symbol of the Tree? Perhaps
+you would have a shop-counter, and shelves behind it, so as to instill
+early into the youthful mind that this is a planet of commerce! Perhaps
+you would abolish the doggerel of crackers, and substitute therefor
+extracts from the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin! Perhaps you would
+exchange the caps for blazonry embroidered with chemical formula, your
+object being the advancement of science! Perhaps you would do away with
+the orgiastic eating and drinking, and arrange for a formal conversation
+about astronomy and the idea of human fraternity, upon strictly
+reasonable rations of shredded wheat! You would thus create an <a name="Page_56" id="Page_56" />original
+festival, and eliminate all fear of a dyspeptic morrow. You would
+improve the mind. And you would avoid the ridiculous. But also, in
+avoiding the ridiculous, you would tumble into the ridiculous, deeply
+and hopelessly! And think how your very original festival would delight
+the participators, how they would look forward to it with joy, and back
+upon it with pleasurable regret; how their minds would dwell sweetly
+upon the conception of shredded wheat, and how their faith would be
+encouraged and strengthened by the intellectuality of the formal
+conversation!</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>He who girds at an ancient established festival should reflect upon
+sundry obvious truths before he withers up the said festival by the
+sirocco of his <a name="Page_57" id="Page_57" />contempt. These truths are as follows:&mdash;First, a
+festival, though based upon intelligence, is not an affair of the
+intellect, but an affair of the emotions. Second, the human soul can
+only be reached through the human body. Third, it is impossible to
+replace an ancient festival by a new one. Robespierre, amongst others,
+tried to do so, and achieved the absurd. Reformers, heralds of new
+faiths, and rejuvenators of old faiths, have always, when they
+succeeded, adopted an ancient festival, with all or most of its forms,
+and been content to breathe into it a new spirit to replace the old
+spirit which had vanished or was vanishing. Anybody who, persuaded that
+Christmas is not what it was, feels that a festival must nevertheless be
+preserved, will do well to follow this example. To be <a name="Page_58" id="Page_58" />content with the
+old forms and to vitalize them: that is the problem. Solve it, and the
+forms will soon begin to adapt themselves to the process of
+vitalization. All history is a witness in proof.<a name="Page_59" id="Page_59" /></p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h2><a name="SIX" id="SIX" /><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60" /><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61" />SIX</h2>
+
+<h2>TO REVITALIZE THE FESTIVAL</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>It being agreed, then, that the Christmas festival has lost a great deal
+of its old vitality, and that, to many people, it is a source of tedium
+and the cause of insincerity; and it being further agreed that the
+difficulty cannot be got over by simply abolishing the festival, as no
+one really wants it to be abolished; the question remains&mdash;what should
+be done to vitalize it? The former spirit of faith, the spirit which
+made the great Christmas of the golden days, has been weakened; but one
+element of it&mdash;that which is founded on the conviction that goodwill
+among <a name="Page_62" id="Page_62" />men is a prime necessity of reasonable living&mdash;survives with a
+certain vigour, though even it has not escaped the general scepticism of
+the age. This element unites in agreement all the pugnacious sectaries
+who join battle over the other elements of the former faith. This
+element has no enemies. None will deny its lasting virtue. Obviously,
+therefore, the right course is to concentrate on the cultivation of
+goodwill. If goodwill can be consciously increased, the festival of
+Christmas will cease to be perfunctory. It will acquire a fresh and more
+genuine significance, which, however, will not in any way inconvenience
+those who have never let go of the older significance. No tradition will
+be overthrown, no shock administered, and nobody will be able to croak
+about iconoclasm and <a name="Page_63" id="Page_63" />new-fangled notions and the sudden end of the
+world, and so on.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>The fancy of some people will at once run to the formation of a grand
+international Society for the revivifying of Christmas by the
+cultivation of goodwill, with branches in all the chief cities of Europe
+and America, and headquarters&mdash;of course at the Hague; and committees
+and subcommittees, and presidents and vice-presidents; and honorary
+secretaries and secretaries paid; and quarterly and annual meetings, and
+triennial congresses! And a literary organ or two! And a
+badge&mdash;naturally a badge, designed by a famous artist in harmonious
+tints!</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>But my fancy does not run at all in this direction. I am convinced that
+we <a name="Page_64" id="Page_64" />have already far too many societies for the furtherance of our ends.
+To my mind, most societies with a moral aim are merely clumsy machines
+for doing simple jobs with the maximum of friction, expense and
+inefficiency. I should define the majority of these societies as a group
+of persons each of whom expects the others to do something very
+wonderful. Why create a society in order to help you to perform some act
+which nobody can perform but yourself? No society can cultivate goodwill
+in you. You might as well create a society for shaving or for saying
+your prayers. And further, goodwill is far less a process of performing
+acts than a process of thinking thoughts. To think, is it necessary to
+involve yourself in the cog-wheels of a society? Moreover, a society
+means fuss and <a name="Page_65" id="Page_65" />shouting: two species of disturbance which are both
+futile and deleterious, particularly in an intimate affair of morals.</p>
+
+<p>You can best help the general cultivation of goodwill along by
+cultivating goodwill in your own heart. Until you have started the task
+of personal cultivation, you will probably assume that there will be
+time left over for superintending the cultivation of goodwill in other
+people's hearts. But a very little experience ought to show you that
+this is a delusion. You will perceive, if not at once, later, that you
+have bitten off just about as much as you can chew. And you will
+appreciate also the wisdom of not advertising your enterprise. Why,
+indeed, should you breathe a word to a single soul concerning your
+admirable intentions? Rest assured <a name="Page_66" id="Page_66" />that any unusual sprouting of the
+desired crop will be instantly noticed by the persons interested.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>The next point is: Towards whom are you to cultivate goodwill?
+Naturally, one would answer: Towards the whole of humanity. But the
+whole of humanity, as far as you are concerned, amounts to naught but a
+magnificent abstract conception. And it is very difficult to cultivate
+goodwill towards a magnificent abstract conception. The object of
+goodwill ought to be clearly defined, and very visible to the physical
+eye, especially in the case of people, such as us, who are only just
+beginning to give to the cultivation of goodwill, perhaps, as much
+attention as we give to our clothes or our tobacco. If a novice sets out
+to embrace the whole of <a name="Page_67" id="Page_67" />humanity in his goodwill, he will have even
+less success than a young man endeavouring to fall in love with four
+sisters at once; and his daily companions&mdash;those who see him eat his
+bacon and lace his boots and earn his living&mdash;will most certainly have a
+rough time of it. * * * No! It will be best for you to centre your
+efforts on quite a small group of persons, and let the rest of humanity
+struggle on as well as it can, with no more of your goodwill than it has
+hitherto had.</p>
+
+<p>In choosing the small group of people, it will be unnecessary for you to
+go to Timbuktu, or into the next street or into the next house. And, in
+this group of people you will be wise, while neglecting no member of the
+group, to specialise on one member. Your wife, if you have one, or your
+husband? Not <a name="Page_68" id="Page_68" />necessarily. I was meaning simply that one who most
+frequently annoys you. He may be your husband, or she may be your wife.
+These things happen. He may be your butler. Or you may be his butler.
+She may be your daughter, or he may be your father, and you a charming
+omniscient girl of seventeen wiser than anybody else. Whoever he or she
+may be who oftenest inspires you with a feeling of irritated
+superiority, aim at that person in particular.</p>
+
+<p>The frequency of your early failures with him or her will show you how
+prudent you were not to make an attempt on the whole of humanity at
+once. And also you will see that you did well not to publish your
+excellent intentions. If nobody is aware of your striving, nobody will
+be aware that you have failed <a name="Page_69" id="Page_69" />in striving. Your successes will appear
+effortless, and most important of all, you will be free from the horrid
+curse of self-consciousness. Herein is one of the main advantages of not
+wearing a badge. Lastly, you will have the satisfaction of feeling that,
+if everybody else is doing as you are, the whole of humanity is being
+attended to after all. And the comforting thought is that very probably,
+almost certainly, quite a considerable number of people are in fact
+doing as you are; some of them&mdash;make no doubt&mdash;are doing a shade better.
+I now come to the actual method of cultivating goodwill.<a name="Page_70" id="Page_70" /><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71" /></p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h2><a name="SEVEN" id="SEVEN" /><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72" /><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73" />SEVEN</h2>
+
+<h2>THE GIFT OF ONESELF</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>Children divide their adult acquaintances into two categories&mdash;those who
+sympathise with them in the bizarre and trying adventure called life;
+and those who don't. The second category is much the larger of the two.
+Very many people belong to it who think that they belong to the first.
+They may deceive themselves, but they cannot deceive a child. Although
+you may easily practise upon the credulity of a child in matters of
+fact, you cannot cheat his moral and social judgment. He will add you
+up, and he will add anybody up, and he will estimate con<a name="Page_74" id="Page_74" />duct, upon
+principles of his own and in a manner terribly impartial. Parents have
+no sterner nor more discerning critics than their own children.</p>
+
+<p>And so you may be polite to a child, and pretend to appreciate his point
+of view; but, unless you really do put yourself to the trouble of
+understanding him, unless you throw yourself, by the exercise of
+imagination, into his world, you will not succeed in being his friend.
+To be his friend means an effort on your part, it means that you must
+divest yourself of your own mental habit, and, for the time being, adopt
+his. And no nice phrases, no gifts of money, sweets or toys, can take
+the place of this effort, and this sacrifice of self. With five minutes
+of genuine surrender to him, you can win more of his esteem and
+gratitude than five hun<a name="Page_75" id="Page_75" />dred pounds would buy. His notion of real
+goodwill is the imaginative sharing of his feelings, a convinced
+participation in his pains and pleasures. He is well aware that, if you
+honestly do this, you will be on his side.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Now, adults, of course, are tremendously clever and accomplished persons
+and children are no match for them; but still, with all their talents
+and omniscience and power, adults seem to lack important pieces of
+knowledge which children possess; they seem to forget, and to fail to
+profit by, their infantile experience. Else why should adults in general
+be so extraordinarily ignorant of the great truth that the secret of
+goodwill lies in the sympathetic exercise of the imagination? Since
+goodwill is the secret of human happi<a name="Page_76" id="Page_76" />ness, it follows that the secret
+of goodwill must be one of the most precious aids to sensible living;
+and yet adults, though they once knew it, have gone and forgotten it!
+Children may well be excused for concluding that the ways of the adult,
+in their capricious irrationality, are past finding out.</p>
+
+<p>To increase your goodwill for a fellow creature, it is necessary to
+imagine that you are he: and nothing else is necessary. This feat is not
+easy; but it can be done. Some people have less of the divine faculty of
+imagination than others, but nobody is without it, and, like all other
+faculties, it improves with use, just as it deteriorates with neglect.
+Imagination is a function of the brain. In order to cultivate goodwill
+for a person, you must think frequently about that person. You must
+in<a name="Page_77" id="Page_77" />form yourself about all his activities. You must be able in your
+mind's eye to follow him hour by hour throughout the day, and you must
+ascertain if he sleeps well at night&mdash;because this is not a trifle. And
+you must reflect upon his existence with the same partiality as you
+reflect upon your own. (Why not?) That is to say, you must lay the
+fullest stress on his difficulties, disappointments and unhappinesses,
+and you must minimise his good fortune. You must magnify his efforts
+after righteousness, and forget his failures. You must ever remember
+that, after all, he is not to blame for the faults of his character,
+which faults, in his case as in yours, are due partly to heredity and
+partly to environment. And beyond everything you must always give him
+credit for good intentions. Do not you, <a name="Page_78" id="Page_78" />though sometimes mistakenly,
+always act for the best? You know you do! And are you alone among
+mortals in rectitude?</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>This mental exercise in relation to another person takes time, and it
+involves a fatiguing effort. I repeat that it is not easy. Nor is it
+invariably agreeable. You may, indeed, find it tedious, for example, to
+picture in vivid detail all the worries that have brought about your
+wife's exacerbation&mdash;negligent maid, dishonest tradesman, milk in a
+thunder storm, hypercritical husband, dirt in the wrong place&mdash;but, when
+you have faithfully done so, I absolutely defy you to speak to her in
+the same tone as you used to employ, and to cherish resentment against
+her as you used to do. And I absolutely <a name="Page_79" id="Page_79" />defy you not to feel less
+discontented with yourself than in the past. It is impossible that the
+exercise of imagination about a person should not result in goodwill
+towards that person. The exercise may put a strain upon you; but its
+effect is a scientific certainty. It is the supreme social exercise, for
+it is the giving of oneself in the most intimate and complete sense. It
+is the suspension of one's individuality in favour of another. It
+establishes a new attitude of mind, which, though it may well lead to
+specific social acts, is more valuable than any specific act, for it is
+ceaselessly translating itself into demeanour.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>The critic with that terrible English trait, an exaggerated sense of the
+ridiculous, will at this point probably re<a name="Page_80" id="Page_80" />mark to himself, smiling: &quot;I
+suppose the time will come, when by dint of regular daily practice, I
+shall have achieved perfect goodwill towards the first object of my
+attentions. I can then regard that person as 'done.' I can put him on a
+shelf, and turn to the next; and, in the end, all my relations, friends
+and acquaintances will be 'done' and I can stare at them in a row on the
+shelf of my mind, with pride and satisfaction * * *.&quot; Except that no
+person will ever be quite &quot;done,&quot; human nature, still being human, in
+spite of the recent advances of civilisation, I do not deprecate this
+manner of stating the case.</p>
+
+<p>The ambitious and resolute man, with an exaggerated sense of the
+ridiculous, would see nothing ridiculous in ticking off a number of
+different ob<a name="Page_81" id="Page_81" />jects as they were successively achieved. If for example it
+was part of his scheme to learn various foreign languages, he would know
+that he could only succeed by regular application of the brain, by
+concentration of thought daily; he would also know that he could never
+acquire any foreign language in absolute perfection. Still, he would
+reach a certain stage in a language, and then he would put it aside and
+turn to the next one on his programme, and so on. Assuredly, he would
+not be ashamed of employing method to reach his end.</p>
+
+<p>Now all that can be said of the acquirement of foreign languages can be
+said of the acquirement of goodwill. In remedying the deficiences of the
+heart and character, as in remedying the deficiences of mere knowledge,
+the brain is the sole possible instrument, <a name="Page_82" id="Page_82" />and the best results will be
+obtained by using it regularly and scientifically, according to an
+arranged method. Why, therefore, if a man be proud of method in
+improving his knowledge, should he see something ridiculous in a
+deliberate plan for improving his heart&mdash;the affair of his heart being
+immensely more important, more urgent and more difficult? The reader who
+has found even one good answer to the above question, need read no more
+of this book, for he will have confounded me and it.<a name="Page_83" id="Page_83" /></p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h2><a name="EIGHT" id="EIGHT" /><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84" /><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85" />EIGHT</h2>
+
+<h2>THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>The consequences of the social self-discipline which I have outlined
+will be various. A fairly early result will be the gradual decline, and
+ultimately the death, of the superior person in oneself. It is true that
+the superior person in oneself has nine lives, and is capable of rising
+from the dead after even the most fatal blows. But, at worst, the
+superior person&mdash;(and who among us does not shelter that sinister
+inhabitant in his soul?)&mdash;will have a very poor time in the soul of him
+who steadily practises the imaginative understanding of other people. In
+the first place, <a name="Page_86" id="Page_86" />the mere exercise of the imagination on others
+absolutely scotches egotism as long as it lasts, and leaves it weakened
+afterwards. And, in the second and more important place, an improved
+comprehension of others (which means an intensified sympathy with them)
+must destroy the illusion, so widespread, that one's own case is unique.
+The amicable study of one's neighbours on the planet inevitably shows
+that the same troubles, the same fortitudes, the same
+feats of intelligence, the same successes and failures, are constantly
+happening everywhere. One can, indeed, see oneself in nearly everybody
+else, and, in particular, one is struck by the fact that the quality in
+which one took most pride is simply spread abroad throughout humanity in
+heaps! It is only in sympathetically contemplating others that one can
+get <a name="Page_87" id="Page_87" />oneself in a true perspective. Yet probably the majority of human
+beings never do contemplate others, save with the abstracted gaze which
+proves that the gazer sees nothing but his own dream.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Another result of the discipline is an immensely increased interest in
+one's friends. One regards them even with a sort of proprietary
+interest, for, by imagination, one has come into sympathetic possession
+of them. Further, one has for them that tender feeling which always
+follows the conferring of a benefit, especially the secret conferring of
+a benefit. It is the benefactor, not the person benefited, who is
+grateful. The benefit which one has conferred is, of course, the gift of
+oneself. The resulting emotion is independent of any sympathy rendered
+by the other; <a name="Page_88" id="Page_88" />and where the sympathy is felt to be mutual, friendship
+acquires a new significance. The exercise of sympathetic imagination
+will cause one to look upon even a relative as a friend&mdash;a startling
+achievement! It will provide a new excitement and diversion in life.</p>
+
+<p>When the month of December dawns, there need be no sensation of weary
+apprehension about the difficulty of choosing a present that will suit a
+friend. Certainly it will not be necessary, from sheer indifference and
+ignorance, to invite the friend to choose his own present. On the
+contrary, one will be, in secret, so intimate with the friend's
+situation and wants and desires, that sundry rival schemes for
+pleasuring him will at once offer themselves. And when he receives the
+present finally selected, he will have the conviction, always
+delightfully flattering <a name="Page_89" id="Page_89" />to a donee, that he has been the object of a
+particular attention and insight. * * * And when the cards of greeting
+are despatched, formal phrases will go forth charged, in the
+consciousness of the sender, with a genuine meaning, with the force of a
+climax, as though the sender had written thereon, in invisible ink: &quot;I
+have had you well in mind during the last twelve months; I think I
+understand your difficulties and appreciate your efforts better than I
+did, and so it is with a peculiar sympathetic knowledge that I wish you
+good luck. I have guessed what particular kind of good luck you require,
+and I wish accordingly. My wish is not vague and perfunctory only.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>And on the day of festival itself one feels that one really has
+something to <a name="Page_90" id="Page_90" />celebrate. The occasion has a basis, if it had no basis
+for one before; and if a basis previously existed, then it is widened
+and strengthened. The festival becomes a public culmination to a private
+enterprise. One is not reminded by Christmas of goodwill, because the
+enterprise of imaginative sympathy has been a daily affair throughout
+the year; but Christmas provides an excuse for taking satisfaction in
+the success of the enterprise and new enthusiasm to correct its
+failures. The symbolism of the situation of Christmas, at the turn of
+the year, develops an added impressiveness, and all the Christmas
+customs, apt to produce annoyance in the breasts of the unsentimental,
+are accepted with indulgence, even with eagerness, because their
+symbolism also is shown in a clearer light. Christmas becomes as
+<a name="Page_91" id="Page_91" />personal as a birthday. One eats and drinks to excess, not because it
+is the custom to eat and drink to excess, but from sheer effervescent
+faith in an idea. And as one sits with one's friends, possessing them in
+the privacy of one's heart, permeated by a sense of the value of
+sympathetic comprehension in this formidable adventure of existence on a
+planet that rushes eternally through the night of space; assured indeed
+that companionship and mutual understanding alone make the adventure
+agreeable,&mdash;one sees in a flash that Christmas, whatever else it may be,
+is and must be the Feast of St. Friend, and a day on that account
+supreme among the days of the year.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>The third and greatest consequence of the systematic cultivation of
+<a name="Page_92" id="Page_92" />goodwill now grows blindingly apparent. To state it earlier in all its
+crudity would have been ill-advised; and I purposely refrained from
+doing so. It is the augmentation of one's own happiness. The increase of
+amity, the diminution of resentment and annoyance, the regular
+maintenance of an attitude mildly benevolent towards mankind,&mdash;these
+things are the surest way to happiness. And it is because they are the
+surest way to happiness, that the most enlightened go after them. All
+real motives are selfish motives; were it otherwise humanity would be
+utterly different from what it is. A man may perform some act which will
+benefit another while working some striking injury to himself. But his
+reason for doing it is that he prefers the evil of the injury to the
+deeper evil of the <a name="Page_93" id="Page_93" />fundamental dissatisfaction which would torment him
+if he did not perform the act. Nobody yet sought the good of another
+save as a means to his own good. And it is in accordance with common
+sense that this should be so. There is, however, a lower egotism and a
+higher. It is the latter which we call unselfishness. And it is the
+latter of which Christmas is the celebration. We shall legitimately bear
+in mind, therefore, that Christmas, in addition to being the Feast of
+St. Friend, is even more profoundly the feast of one's own welfare.<a name="Page_94" id="Page_94" /><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95" /></p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div><br /></div>
+
+
+<h2><a name="NINE" id="NINE" /><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96" /><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97" />NINE</h2>
+
+<h2>THE REACTION</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>A reaction sets in between Christmas and the New Year. It is inevitable;
+and I should be writing basely if I did not devote to it a full chapter.
+In those few dark days of inactivity, between a fete and the resumption
+of the implacable daily round, when the weather is usually cynical, and
+we are paying in our tissues the fair price of excess, we see life and
+the world in a grey and sinister light, which we imagine to be the only
+true light. Take the case of the average successful man of thirty-five.
+What is he thinking as he lounges about on the day after Christmas?</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98" />His thoughts probably run thus: &quot;Even if I live to a good old age,
+which is improbable, as many years lie behind me as before me. I have
+lived half my life, and perhaps more than half my life. I have realised
+part of my worldly ambition. I have made many good resolutions, and kept
+one or two of them in k more or less imperfect manner. I cannot, as a
+commonsense person, hope to keep a larger proportion of good resolutions
+in the future than I have kept in the past. I have tried to understand
+and sympathise with my fellow creatures, and though I have not entirely
+failed to do so, I have nearly failed. I am not happy and I am not
+content. And if, after all these years, I am neither happy nor content,
+what chance is there of my being happy and <a name="Page_99" id="Page_99" />content in the second half
+of my life? The realisation of part of my worldly ambition has not made
+me any happier, and, therefore, it is unlikely that the realisation of
+the whole of my ambition will make me any happier. My strength cannot
+improve; it can only weaken; and my health likewise. I in my turn am
+coming to believe&mdash;what as a youth I rejected with disdain&mdash;namely, that
+happiness is what one is not, and content is what one has not. Why,
+then, should I go on striving after the impossible? Why should I not let
+things slide?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Thus reflects the average successful man, and there is not one of us,
+successful or unsuccessful, ambitious or unambitious, whose reflections
+have not often led him to a conclusion equally dis<a name="Page_100" id="Page_100" />satisfied. Why should
+I or anybody pretend that this is not so?</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>And yet, in the very moment of his discouragement and of his blackest
+vision of things, that man knows quite well that he will go on striving.
+He knows that his instinct to strive will be stronger than his genuine
+conviction that the desired end cannot be achieved. Positive though he
+may be that a worldly ambition realised will produce the same
+dissatisfaction as Dead Sea fruit in the mouth, he will still continue
+to struggle. * * * Now you cannot argue against facts, and this is a
+fact. It must be accepted. Conduct must be adjusted to it. The struggle
+being inevitable, it must be carried through as well as it can be
+carried through. It will not end brilliantly, but precautions <a name="Page_101" id="Page_101" />can be
+taken against it ending disgracefully. These precautions consist in the
+devising of a plan of campaign, and the plan of campaign is defined by a
+series of resolutions: which resolutions are generally made at or
+immediately before the beginning of a New Year. Without these the
+struggle would be formless, confused, blind and even more futile than it
+is with them. Organised effort is bound to be less ineffective than
+unorganised effort.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>A worldly ambition can be, frequently is, realised: but an ideal cannot
+be attained&mdash;if it could, it would not be an ideal. The virtue of an
+ideal is its unattainability. It seems, when it is first formed, just as
+attainable as a worldly ambition which indeed is often schemed as a
+means to it. After twen<a name="Page_102" id="Page_102" />ty-four hours, the ideal is all but attained.
+After forty-eight, it is a little farther off. After a week, it has
+receded still further. After a month it is far away; and towards the end
+of a year even the keen eye of hope has almost lost sight of it; it is
+definitely withdrawn from the practical sphere. And then, such is the
+divine obstinacy of humanity, the turn of the year gives us an excuse
+for starting afresh, and forming a new ideal, and forgetting our shame
+in yet another organised effort. Such is the annual circle of the ideal,
+the effort, the failure and the shame. A rather pitiful history it may
+appear! And yet it is also rather a splendid history! For the failure
+and the shame are due to the splendour of our ideal and to the audacity
+of our faith in ourselves. It is only in com<a name="Page_103" id="Page_103" />parison with our ideal that
+we have fallen low. We are higher, in our failure and our shame, than we
+should have been if we had not attempted to rise.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>There are those who will say: &quot;At any rate, we might moderate somewhat
+the splendour of our ideal and the audacity of our self-conceit, so that
+there should be a less grotesque disparity between the aim and the
+achievement. Surely such moderation would be more in accord with common
+sense! Surely it would lessen the spiritual fatigue and disappointment
+caused by sterile endeavour!&quot; It would. But just try to moderate the
+ideal and the self-conceit! And you will find, in spite of all your sad
+experiences, that you cannot. If there is the stuff of a man in you, you
+<a name="Page_104" id="Page_104" />simply cannot! The truth, is that, in the supreme things, a man does
+not act under the rules of earthly common sense. He transcends them,
+because there is a quality in him which compels him to do so. Common
+sense may persuade him to attempt to keep down the ideal, and
+self-conceit may pretend to agree. But all the time, self-conceit will
+be whispering: &quot;I can go one better than that.&quot; And lo! the ideal is
+furtively raised again.</p>
+
+<p>A man really has little scientific control over the height of his ideal
+and the intensity of his belief in himself. He is born with them, as he
+is born with a certain pulse and a certain reflex action. He can neglect
+the ideal, so that it almost dissolves, but he cannot change its height.
+He can maim his belief in himself by persistent abandon<a name="Page_105" id="Page_105" />ment to folly,
+but he cannot lower its flame by an effort of the will, as he might
+lower the flame of a gas by a calculated turn of the hand. In the secret
+and inmost constitution of humanity it is ordained that the disparity
+between the aim and the achievement shall seem grotesque; it is ordained
+that there shall be an enormous fuss about pretty nearly nothing; it is
+ordained that the mountain shall bring forth a mouse. But it is also
+ordained that men shall go blithely on just the same, ignoring in
+practice the ridiculousness which they admit in theory, and drawing
+renewed hope and conceit from some magic, exhaustless source. And this
+is the whole philosophy of the New Year's resolution.<a name="Page_106" id="Page_106" /><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107" /></p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<h2><a name="TEN" id="TEN" /><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108" /><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109" />TEN</h2>
+
+<h2>ON THE LAST DAY OF THE YEAR</h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>There are few people who arrive at a true understanding of life, even in
+the calm and disillusioned hours of reflection that come between the end
+of one annual period and the beginning of another. Nearly everybody has
+an idea at the back of his head that if only he could conquer certain
+difficulties and embarrassments, he might really start to live properly,
+in the full sense of living. And if he has pluck he says to himself: &quot;I
+<i>will</i> smooth things out, and then I'll really live.&quot; In the same way,
+nearly everybody, regarding the spectacle of the world, sees therein a
+<a name="Page_110" id="Page_110" />principle which he calls Evil; and he thinks: &quot;If only we could get rid
+of this Evil, if only we could set things right, how splendid the world
+would be!&quot; Now, in the meaning usually attached to it, there is no such
+positive principle as Evil. Assuming that there is such a positive
+principle in a given phenomenon&mdash;such as the character of a particular
+man&mdash;you must then admit that there is the same positive principle
+everywhere, for just as the character of no man is so imperfect that you
+could not conceive a worse, so the character of no man is so perfect
+that you could not conceive a better. Do away with Evil from the world,
+and you would not merely abolish certain specially distressing matters,
+you would change everything. You would in fact achieve perfection. And
+when we say <a name="Page_111" id="Page_111" />that one thing is evil and another good, all that we mean
+is that one thing is less advanced than another in the way of
+perfection. Evil cannot therefore be a positive principle; it signifies
+only the falling short of perfection.</p>
+
+<p>And supposing that the desires of mankind were suddenly fulfilled, and
+the world was rendered perfect! There would be no motive for effort, no
+altercation of conflicting motives in the human heart; nothing to do, no
+one to befriend, no anxiety, no want unsatisfied. Equilibrium would be
+established. A cheerful world! You can see instantly how amusing it
+would be. It would have only one drawback&mdash;that of being dead. Its
+reason for being alive would have ceased to operate. Life means change
+through constant development. But you cannot develop the perfect. The
+perfect can merely expire.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112" />That average successful man whom I have previously cited feels all this
+by instinct, though he does not comprehend it by reason. He reaches his
+ambition, and retires from the fight in order to enjoy life,&mdash;and what
+does he then do? He immediately creates for himself a new series of
+difficulties and embarrassments, either by undertaking the management of
+a large estate, or by some other device. If he does not maintain for
+himself conditions which necessitate some kind of struggle, he quickly
+dies&mdash;spiritually or physically, often both. The proportion of men who,
+having established an equilibrium, proceed to die on the spot, is
+enormous. Continual effort, which means, of course, continual
+disappointment, is the <i>sine qua non</i>&mdash;without it there is literally
+nothing vital. Its abolition is the abol<a name="Page_113" id="Page_113" />ition of life. Hence, people,
+who, failing to savour the struggle itself, anticipate the end of the
+struggle as the beginning of joy and happiness&mdash;these people are simply
+missing life; they are longing to exchange life for death. The hemlock
+would save them a lot of weary waiting.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>We shall now perceive, I think, what is wrong with the assumptions of
+the average successful man as set forth in the previous chapter. In
+postulating that happiness is what one is not, he has got hold of a
+mischievous conception of happiness. Let him examine his conception of
+happiness, and he will find that it consists in the enjoyment of love
+and luxury, and in the freedom from enforced effort. He generally wants
+all three ingredients. Now pas<a name="Page_114" id="Page_114" />sionate love does not mean happiness; it
+means excitement, apprehension and continually renewed desire. And
+affectionate love, from which the passion has faded, means something
+less than happiness, for, mingled with its gentle tranquility is a
+disturbing regret for the more fiery past. Luxury, according to the
+universal experience of those who have had it, has no connection
+whatever with happiness. And as for freedom from enforced effort, it
+means simply death.</p>
+
+<p>Happiness as it is dreamed of cannot possibly exist save for brief
+periods of self-deception which are followed by terrible periods of
+reaction. Real, practicable happiness is due primarily not to any kind
+of environment, but to an inward state of mind. Real happiness consists
+first in acceptance of the <a name="Page_115" id="Page_115" />fact that discontent is a condition of life,
+and, second, in an honest endeavour to adjust conduct to an ideal. Real
+happiness is not an affair of the future; it is an affair of the
+present. Such as it is, if it cannot be obtained now, it can never be
+obtained. Real happiness lives in patience, having comprehended that if
+very little is accomplished towards perfection, so a man's existence is
+a very little moment in the vast expanse of the universal life, and
+having also comprehended that it is the struggle which is vital, and
+that the end of the struggle is only another name for death.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>&quot;Well,&quot; I hear you exclaiming, &quot;if this is all we can look forward to,
+if this is all that real, practicable happiness amounts to, is life
+worth living?&quot; That <a name="Page_116" id="Page_116" />is a question which each person has to answer for
+himself. If he answers it in the negative, no argument, no persuasion,
+no sentimentalisation of the facts of life, will make him alter his
+opinion. Most people, however, answer it in the affirmative. Despite all
+the drawbacks, despite all the endless disappointments, they decide that
+life is worth living. There are two species of phenomena which bring
+them to this view. The first may be called the golden moments of life,
+which seem somehow in their transient brevity to atone for the dull
+exasperation of interminable mediocre hours: moments of triumph in the
+struggle, moments of fierce exultant resolve; moments of joy in
+nature&mdash;moments which defy oblivion in the memory, and which, being
+priceless, cannot be too dearly bought.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117" />The second species of compensatory phenomena are all the agreeable
+experiences connected with human friendship; the general feeling, under
+diverse forms, that one is not alone in the world. It is for the
+multiplication and intensification of these phenomena that Christmas,
+the Feast of St. Friend, exists. And, on the last day of the year, on
+the eve of a renewed effort, our thoughts may profitably be centered
+upon a plan of campaign whose execution shall result in a less imperfect
+intercourse.</p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND***</p>
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+</pre>
+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Feast of St. Friend, by Arnold Bennett
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Feast of St. Friend
+
+Author: Arnold Bennett
+
+Release Date: January 10, 2005  [eBook #14653]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Project Gutenberg Beginners
+Projects, Melissa Er-Raqabi, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+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
+
+CHAPTER
+
+   I. THE FACT
+  II. THE REASON
+ III. THE SOLSTICE AND GOODWILL
+  IV. THE APPOSITENESS OF CHRISTMAS
+   V. DEFENCE OF FEASTING
+  VI. TO REVITALIZE THE FESTIVAL
+ VII. THE GIFT OF ONESELF
+VIII. THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND
+  IX. THE REACTION
+   X. ON THE LAST DAY OF THE YEAR
+
+
+
+
+
+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 enjoyment of the summer holiday. We
+experience no difficulty in inducing the holiday feeling. There is no
+fear of the institution of the summer holiday losing its heartiness. Nor
+do we need the example of children to aid us in savouring the August
+"festivities."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If any person here breaks in with the statement that I am deceived and
+the truth is not in me, and that Christmas stands just where it did in
+the esteem of all right-minded people, and that he who casts a doubt on
+the heartiness of Christmas is not right-minded, let that person read no
+more. This book is not written for him. And if any other person,
+kindlier, condescendingly protests that there is nothing wrong with
+Christmas except my advancing age, let that person read no more. This
+book is not written for him, either. It is written for persons who can
+look facts cheerfully in the face. That Christmas has lost some of its
+magic is a fact that the common sense of the western hemisphere will not
+dispute. To blink the fact is infantile. To confront it, to try to
+understand it, to reckon with it, and to obviate any evil that may
+attach to it--this course alone is meet for an honest man.
+
+
+
+
+
+TWO
+
+THE REASON
+
+
+If the decadence of Christmas were a purely subjective phenomenon,
+confined to the breasts of those of us who have ceased to be children
+then it follows that Christmas has always been decadent, because people
+have always been ceasing to be children. It follows also that the
+festival was originally got up by disillusioned adults, for the benefit
+of the children. Which is totally absurd. Adults have never yet invented
+any institution, festival or diversion specially for the benefit of
+children. The egoism of adults makes such an effort impossible, and the
+ingenuity and pliancy of children make it unnecessary. The pantomime,
+for example, which is now pre-eminently a diversion for children, was
+created by adults for the amusement of adults. Children have merely
+accepted it and appropriated it. Children, being helpless, are of course
+fatalists and imitators. They take what comes, and they do the best they
+can with it. And when they have made something their own that was adult,
+they stick to it like leeches.
+
+They are terrific Tories, are children; they are even reactionary! They
+powerfully object to changes. What they most admire in a pantomime is
+the oldest part of it, the only true pantomime--the harlequinade! Hence
+the very nature of children is a proof that what Christmas is now to
+them, it was in the past to their elders. If they now feel and exhibit
+faith and enthusiasm in the practice of the festival, be sure that, at
+one time, adults felt and exhibited the same faith and enthusiasm--yea,
+and more! For in neither faith nor enthusiasm can a child compete with a
+convinced adult. No child could believe in anything as passionately as
+the modern millionaire believes in money, or as the modern social
+reformer believes in the virtue of Acts of Parliament.
+
+Another and a crowning proof that Christmas has been diminished in our
+hearts lies in the fiery lyrical splendour of the old Christmas hymns.
+Those hymns were not written by people who made-believe at Christmas for
+the pleasure of youngsters. They were written by devotees. And this age
+could not have produced them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No! The decay of the old Christmas spirit among adults is undeniable,
+and its cause is fairly plain. It is due to the labours of a set of
+idealists--men who cared not for money, nor for glory, nor for anything
+except their ideal. Their ideal was to find out the truth concerning
+nature and concerning human history; and they sacrificed all--they
+sacrificed the peace of mind of whole generations--to the pleasure of
+slaking their ardour for truth. For them the most important thing in the
+world was the satisfaction of their curiosity. They would leave naught
+alone; and they scorned consequences. Useless to cry to them: "That is
+holy. Touch it not!" I mean the great philosophers and men of
+science--especially the geologists--of the nineteenth century. I mean
+such utterly pure-minded men as Lyell, Spencer, Darwin and Huxley. They
+inaugurated the mighty age of doubt and scepticism. They made it
+impossible to believe all manner of things which before them none had
+questioned. The movement spread until uneasiness was everywhere in the
+realm of thought, and people walked about therein fearsomely, as in a
+land subject to earthquakes. It was as if people had said: "We don't
+know what will topple next. Let's raze everything to the ground, and
+then we shall feel safer." And there came a moment after which nobody
+could ever look at a picture of the Nativity in the old way. Pictures of
+the Nativity were admired perhaps as much as ever, but for the exquisite
+beauty of their naivete, the charm of their old-world simplicity, not
+as artistic renderings of fact.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An age of scepticism has its faults, like any other age, though certain
+persons have pretended the contrary. Having been compelled to abandon
+its belief in various statements of alleged fact, it lumps principles
+and ideals with alleged facts, and hastily decides not to believe in
+anything at all. It gives up faith, it despises faith, in spite of the
+warning of its greatest philosophers, including Herbert Spencer, that
+faith of some sort is necessary to a satisfactory existence in a
+universe full of problems which science admits it can never solve. None
+were humbler than the foremost scientists about the narrowness of the
+field of knowledge, as compared with the immeasurability of the field
+of faith. But the warning has been ignored, as warnings nearly always
+are. Faith is at a discount. And the qualities which go with faith are
+at a discount; such as enthusiasm, spontaneity, ebullition, lyricism,
+and self-expression in general. Sentimentality is held in such horror
+that people are afraid even of sentiment. Their secret cry is: "Give us
+something in which we can believe."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They forget, in their confusion, that the great principles, spiritual
+and moral, remain absolutely intact. They forget that, after all the
+shattering discoveries of science and conclusions of philosophy, mankind
+has still to live with dignity amid hostile nature, and in the presence
+of an unknowable power and that mankind can only succeed in this
+tremendous feat by the exercise of faith and of that mutual goodwill
+which is based in sincerity and charity. They forget that, while facts
+are nothing, these principles are everything. And so, at that epoch of
+the year which nature herself has ordained for the formal recognition of
+the situation of mankind in the universe and of its resulting duties to
+itself and to the Unknown--at that epoch, they bewail, sadly or
+impatiently or cynically: "Oh! The bottom has been knocked out of
+Christmas!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the bottom has not been knocked out of Christmas. And people know
+it. Somewhere, in the most central and mysterious fastness of their
+hearts, they know it. If they were not, in spite of themselves,
+convinced of it, why should they be so pathetically anxious to keep
+alive in themselves, and to foster in their children, the Christmas
+spirit? Obviously, a profound instinct is for ever reminding them that,
+without the Christmas spirit, they are lost. The forms of faith change,
+but the spirit of faith, which is the Christmas spirit, is immortal amid
+its endless vicissitudes. At a crisis of change, faith is weakened for
+the majority; for the majority it may seem to be dead. It is conserved,
+however, in the hearts of the few supremely great and in the hearts of
+the simple. The supremely great are hidden from the majority; but the
+simple are seen of all men, and them we encourage, often without knowing
+why, to be the depositaries of that which we cannot ourselves guard, but
+which we dimly feel to be indispensable to our safety.
+
+
+
+
+
+THREE
+
+THE SOLSTICE AND GOOD WILL
+
+
+In order to see that there is underlying Christmas an idea of faith
+which will at any rate last as long as the planet lasts, it is only
+necessary to ask and answer the question: "Why was the Christmas feast
+fixed for the twenty-fifth of December?" For it is absolutely certain,
+and admitted by everybody of knowledge, that Christ was not born on the
+twenty-fifth of December. Those disturbing impassioned inquirers after
+truth, who will not leave us peaceful in our ignorance, have settled
+that for us, by pointing out, among other things, that the twenty-fifth
+of December falls in the very midst of the Palestine rainy season, and
+that, therefore, shepherds were assuredly not on that date watching
+their flocks by night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Christians were not, at first, united in the celebration of Christmas.
+Some kept Christmas in January, others in April, others in May. It was a
+pre-Christian force which drove them all into agreement upon the
+twenty-fifth of December. Just as they wisely took the Christmas tree
+from the Roman Saturnalia, so they took the date of their festival from
+the universal pre-Christian festival of the winter solstice, Yule, when
+mankind celebrated the triumph of the sun over the powers of darkness,
+when the night begins to decrease and the day to increase, when the
+year turns, and hope is born again because the worst is over. No more
+suitably symbolic moment could have been chosen for a festival of faith,
+goodwill and joy. And the appositeness of the moment is just as perfect
+in this era of electric light and central heating, as it was in the era
+of Virgil, who, by the way, described a Christmas tree. We shall say
+this year, with exactly the same accents of relief and hope as our pagan
+ancestors used, and as the woaded savage used: "The days will begin to
+lengthen now!" For, while we often falsely fancy that we have subjugated
+nature to our service, the fact is that we are as irremediably as ever
+at the mercy of nature.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Indeed, the attitude of us moderns towards the forces by which our
+existence is governed ought to be, and probably is, more reverent and
+awe-struck than that of the earlier world. The discoveries of science
+have at once quickened our imagination and compelled us to admit that
+what we know is the merest trifle. The pagan in his ignorance explained
+everything. Our knowledge has only deepened the mystery, and all that we
+shall learn will but deepen it further. We can explain the solstice. We
+are aware with absolute certitude that the solstice and the equinox and
+the varying phenomena of the seasons are due to the fact that the plane
+of the equator is tilted at a slight angle to the plane of the ecliptic.
+When we put on the first overcoat in autumn, and when we give orders to
+let the furnace out in spring, we know that we are arranging our lives
+in accordance with that angle. And we are quite duly proud of our
+knowledge. And much good does our knowledge do us!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, it does do us some good, and in a spiritual way, too! For nobody
+can even toy with astronomy without picturing to himself, more clearly
+and startlingly than would be otherwise possible, a revolving globe that
+whizzes through elemental space around a ball of fire: which, in turn,
+is rushing with all its satellites at an inconceivable speed from
+nowhere to nowhere; and to the surface of the revolving, whizzing globe
+a multitude of living things desperately clinging, and these living
+things, in the midst of cataclysmic danger, and between the twin enigmas
+of birth and death, quarrelling and hating and calling themselves kings
+and queens and millionaires and beautiful women and aristocrats and
+geniuses and lackeys and superior persons! Perhaps the highest value of
+astronomy is that it renders more vivid the ironical significance of
+such a vision, and thus brings home to us the truth that in spite of all
+the differences which we have invented, mankind is a fellowship of
+brothers, overshadowed by insoluble and fearful mysteries, and dependent
+upon mutual goodwill and trust for the happiness it may hope to achieve.
+* * * Let us remember that Christmas is, among other things, the winter
+solstice, and that the bottom has not yet been knocked out of the winter
+solstice, nor is likely to be in the immediate future!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is a curious fact that the one faith which really does flourish and
+wax in these days should be faith in the idea of social justice. For
+social justice simply means the putting into practice of goodwill and
+the recognition of the brotherhood of mankind. Formerly, people were
+enthusiastic and altruistic for a theological idea, for a national idea,
+for a political idea. You could see men on the rack for the sake of a
+dogma; you could see men of a great nation fitting out regiments and
+ruining themselves and going forth to save a small nation from
+destruction. You could see men giving their lives to the aggrandisement
+of an empire. And the men who did these things had the best brains and
+the quickest wits and the warmest hearts of their time. But today,
+whenever you meet a first-class man who is both enthusiastic and
+altruistic, you may be sure that his pet scheme is neither theological,
+military nor political; you may be sure that he has got into his head
+the notion that some class of persons somewhere are not being treated
+fairly, are not being treated with fraternal goodwill, and that he is
+determined to put the matter right, or perish.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In England, nearly all the most interesting people are social reformers:
+and the only circles of society in which you are not bored, in which
+there is real conversation, are the circles of social reform. These
+people alone have an abounding and convincing faith. Their faith has,
+for example, convinced many of the best literary artists of the day,
+with the result that a large proportion of the best modern imaginative
+literature has been inspired by the dream of social justice. Take away
+that idea from the works of H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy and George
+Bernard Shaw, and there would be exactly nothing left. Despite any
+appearance to the contrary, therefore, the idea of universal goodwill is
+really alive upon the continents of this planet: more so, indeed, than
+any other idea--for the vitality of an idea depends far less on the
+numbers of people who hold it than on the quality of the heart and brain
+of the people who hold it. Whether the growth of the idea is due to the
+spiritual awe and humility which are the consequence of increased
+scientific knowledge, I cannot say, and I do not seriously care.
+
+
+
+
+
+FOUR
+
+THE APPOSITENESS OF CHRISTMAS
+
+
+"Yes," you say, "I am quite at one with you as to the immense importance
+of goodwill in social existence, and I have the same faith in it as you
+have. But why a festival? Why eating and drinking and ceremonies? Surely
+one can have faith without festivals?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The answer is that one cannot; or at least that in practice, one never
+does. A disinclination for festivals, a morbid self-conscious fear of
+letting oneself go, is a sure sign of lack of faith. If you have not
+enough enthusiasm for the cult of goodwill to make you positively
+desire to celebrate the cult, then your faith is insufficient and needs
+fostering by study and meditation. Why, if you decide to found a
+sailing-club up your creek, your very first thought is to signalise your
+faith in the sailing of those particular waters by a dinner and a
+jollity, and you take care that the event shall be an annual one! * * *
+You have faith in your wife, and in your affection for her. Surely you
+don't need a festival to remind you of that faith, you so superior to
+human weaknesses? But you do! You insist on having it. And, if the
+festival did not happen, you would feel gloomy and discouraged. A
+birthday is a device for recalling to you in a formal and impressive
+manner that a certain person still lives and is in need of goodwill. It
+is a device which experience has proved to be both valuable and
+necessary.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Real faith effervesces; it shoots forth in every direction; it
+communicates itself. And the inevitable result is a festival. The
+festival is anticipated with pleasure, and it is remembered with
+pleasure. And thus it reacts stimulatingly on that which gave it birth,
+as the vitality of children reacts stimulatingly on the vitality of
+parents. It provides a concrete symbol of that which is invisible and
+intangible, and mankind is not yet so advanced in the path of spiritual
+perfection that we can afford to dispense with concrete symbols. Now, if
+we maintain festivals and formalities for the healthy continuance and
+honour of a pastime or of a personal affection, shall we not maintain a
+festival--and a mighty one--in behalf of a faith which makes the
+corporate human existence bearable amid the menaces and mysteries that
+for ever threaten it,--the faith of universal goodwill and mutual
+confidence?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If then, there is to be a festival, why should it not be the festival of
+Christmas? It can, indeed, be no other. Christmas is most plainly
+indicated. It is dignified and made precious by traditions which go back
+much further than the Christian era; and it has this tremendous
+advantage--it exists! In spite of our declining faith, it has been
+preserved to us, and here it is, ready to hand. Not merely does it fall
+at the point which uncounted generations have agreed to consider as the
+turn of the solar year and as the rebirth of hope! It falls also
+immediately before the end of the calendar year, and thus prepares us
+for a fresh beginning that shall put the old to shame. It could not be
+better timed. Further, its traditional spirit of peace and goodwill is
+the very spirit which we desire to foster. And finally its customs--or
+at any rate, its main customs--are well designed to symbolize that
+spirit. If we have allowed the despatch of Christmas cards to degenerate
+into naught but a tedious shuffling of paste-boards and overwork of
+post-office officials, the fault is not in the custom but in ourselves.
+The custom is a most striking one--so long as we have sufficient
+imagination to remember vividly that we are all in the same boat--I
+mean, on the same planet--and clinging desperately to the flying ball,
+and dependent for daily happiness on one another's good will! A
+Christmas card sent by one human being to another human being is more
+than a piece of coloured stationery sent by one log of wood to another
+log of wood: it is an inspiring and reassuring message of high value.
+The mischief is that so many self-styled human beings are just logs of
+wood, rather stylishly dressed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And then the custom of present-giving! What better and more convincing
+proof of sympathy than a gift? The gift is one of these obvious
+contrivances--like the wheel or the lever--which smooth and simplify
+earthly life, and the charm of whose utility no obviousness can stale.
+But of course any contrivance can be rendered futile by clumsiness or
+negligence. There is a sort of Christmas giver who says pettishly: "Oh!
+I don't know what to give to So-and-So this Christmas! What a bother! I
+shall write and tell her to choose something herself, and send the bill
+to me!" And he writes. And though he does not suspect it, what he really
+writes, and what So-and-So reads, is this: "Dear So-and-So. It is
+nothing to me that you and I are alive together on this planet, and in
+various ways mutually dependent. But I am bound by custom to give you a
+present. I do not, however, take sufficient interest in your life to
+know what object it would give you pleasure to possess; and I do not
+want to be put to the trouble of finding out, nor of obtaining the
+object and transmitting it to you. Will you, therefore, buy something
+for yourself and send the bill to me. Of course, a sense of social
+decency will prevent you from spending more than a small sum, and I
+shall be spared all exertion beyond signing a cheque. Yours insincerely
+and loggishly * * *." So managed, the contrivance of present-giving
+becomes positively sinister in its working. But managed with the
+sympathetic imagination which is infallibly produced by real faith in
+goodwill, its efficacy may approach the miraculous.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Christmas ceremony of good-wishing by word of mouth has never been
+in any danger of falling into insincerity. Such is the power of
+tradition and virtue of a festival, and such the instinctive
+brotherliness of men, that on this day the mere sight of an
+acquaintance will soften the voice and warm the heart of the most
+superior sceptic and curmudgeon that the age of disillusion has
+produced. In spite of himself, faith flickers up in him again, be it
+only for a moment. And, during that moment, he is almost like those
+whose bright faith the age has never tarnished, like the great and like
+the simple, to whom it is quite unnecessary to offer a defence and
+explanation of Christmas or to suggest the basis of a new faith therein.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FIVE
+
+DEFENCE OF FEASTING
+
+
+And now I can hear the superior sceptic disdainfully questioning: "Yes,
+but what about the orgy of Christmas? What about all the eating and
+drinking?" To which I can only answer that faith causes effervescence,
+expansion, joy, and that joy has always, for excellent reasons, been
+connected with feasting. The very words 'feast' and 'festival' are
+etymologically inseparable. The meal is the most regular and the least
+dispensable of daily events; it happens also to be an event which is in
+itself almost invariably a source of pleasure, or, at worst, of
+satisfaction: and it will continue to have this precious quality so long
+as our souls are encased in bodies. What could be more natural,
+therefore, than that it should be employed, with due enlargement and
+ornamentation, as the kernel of the festival? What more logical than
+that the meal should be elevated into a feast?
+
+"But," exclaims the superior sceptic, "this idea involves the idea of
+excess!" What if it does? I would not deny it! Assuredly, a feast means
+more than enough, and more than enough means excess. It is only because
+a feast means excess that it assists in the bringing about of expansion
+and joy. Such is human nature, and it is the case of human nature that
+we are discussing. Of course, excess usually exacts its toll, within
+twenty-four hours, especially from the weak. But the benefit is worth
+its price. The body pays no more than the debt which the soul has
+incurred. An occasional change of habit is essential to well-being, and
+every change of habit results in temporary derangement and
+inconvenience.
+
+Do not misunderstand me. Do not push my notion of excess to extremes.
+When I defend the excess inevitably incident to a feast, I am not
+seeking to prove that a man in celebrating Christmas is entitled to
+drink champagne in a public restaurant until he becomes an object of
+scorn and disgust to the waiters who have travelled from Switzerland in
+order to receive his tips. Much less should I be prepared to justify him
+if, in his own home, he sank lower than the hog. Nor would I
+sympathetically carry him to bed. There is such a thing as excess in
+moderation and dignity. Every wise man has practised this. And he who
+has not practised it is a fool, and deserves even a harder name. He
+ought indeed to inhabit a planet himself, for all his faith in humanity
+will be exhausted in believing in himself. * * * So much for the feast!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the accompaniments of the feast are also excessive. For example, you
+make a tug-of-war with your neighbour at table, and the rope is a
+fragile packet of tinselled paper, which breaks with a report like a
+pistol. You open your half of the packet, and discover some doggerel
+verse which you read aloud, and also a perfectly idiotic coloured cap,
+which you put on your head to the end of looking foolish. And this
+ceremony is continued until the whole table is surrounded by
+preposterous headgear, and doggerel verse is lying by every plate.
+Surely no man in his senses, no woman in hers, would, etc., etc. * * *!
+But one of the spiritual advantages of feasting is that it expands you
+beyond your common sense. One excess induces another, and a finer one.
+This acceptance of the ridiculous is good for you. It is particularly
+good for an Anglo-Saxon, who is so self-contained and self-controlled
+that his soul might stiffen as the unused limb of an Indian fakir
+stiffens, were it not for periodical excitements like that of the
+Christmas feast. Everybody has experienced the self-conscious reluctance
+which precedes the putting on of the cap, and the relief, followed by
+further expansion and ecstasy, which ensues after the putting on.
+Everybody who has put on a cap is aware that it is a beneficial thing to
+put on a cap. Quite apart from the fact that the mysterious and fanciful
+race of children are thereby placated and appeased, the soul of the
+capped one is purified by this charming excess.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And the Tree! What an excess of the fantastic to pretend that all those
+glittering balls, those coloured candles and those variegated parcels
+are the blossoms of the absurd tree! How excessively grotesque to tie
+all those parcels to the branches, in order to take them off again!
+Surely, something less medieval, more ingenious, more modern than this
+could be devised--if symbolism is to be indulged in at all! Can you
+devise it, O sceptical one, revelling in disillusion? Can you invent a
+symbol more natural and graceful than the symbol of the Tree? Perhaps
+you would have a shop-counter, and shelves behind it, so as to instill
+early into the youthful mind that this is a planet of commerce! Perhaps
+you would abolish the doggerel of crackers, and substitute therefor
+extracts from the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin! Perhaps you would
+exchange the caps for blazonry embroidered with chemical formula, your
+object being the advancement of science! Perhaps you would do away with
+the orgiastic eating and drinking, and arrange for a formal conversation
+about astronomy and the idea of human fraternity, upon strictly
+reasonable rations of shredded wheat! You would thus create an original
+festival, and eliminate all fear of a dyspeptic morrow. You would
+improve the mind. And you would avoid the ridiculous. But also, in
+avoiding the ridiculous, you would tumble into the ridiculous, deeply
+and hopelessly! And think how your very original festival would delight
+the participators, how they would look forward to it with joy, and back
+upon it with pleasurable regret; how their minds would dwell sweetly
+upon the conception of shredded wheat, and how their faith would be
+encouraged and strengthened by the intellectuality of the formal
+conversation!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He who girds at an ancient established festival should reflect upon
+sundry obvious truths before he withers up the said festival by the
+sirocco of his contempt. These truths are as follows:--First, a
+festival, though based upon intelligence, is not an affair of the
+intellect, but an affair of the emotions. Second, the human soul can
+only be reached through the human body. Third, it is impossible to
+replace an ancient festival by a new one. Robespierre, amongst others,
+tried to do so, and achieved the absurd. Reformers, heralds of new
+faiths, and rejuvenators of old faiths, have always, when they
+succeeded, adopted an ancient festival, with all or most of its forms,
+and been content to breathe into it a new spirit to replace the old
+spirit which had vanished or was vanishing. Anybody who, persuaded that
+Christmas is not what it was, feels that a festival must nevertheless be
+preserved, will do well to follow this example. To be content with the
+old forms and to vitalize them: that is the problem. Solve it, and the
+forms will soon begin to adapt themselves to the process of
+vitalization. All history is a witness in proof.
+
+
+
+
+
+SIX
+
+TO REVITALIZE THE FESTIVAL
+
+
+It being agreed, then, that the Christmas festival has lost a great deal
+of its old vitality, and that, to many people, it is a source of tedium
+and the cause of insincerity; and it being further agreed that the
+difficulty cannot be got over by simply abolishing the festival, as no
+one really wants it to be abolished; the question remains--what should
+be done to vitalize it? The former spirit of faith, the spirit which
+made the great Christmas of the golden days, has been weakened; but one
+element of it--that which is founded on the conviction that goodwill
+among men is a prime necessity of reasonable living--survives with a
+certain vigour, though even it has not escaped the general scepticism of
+the age. This element unites in agreement all the pugnacious sectaries
+who join battle over the other elements of the former faith. This
+element has no enemies. None will deny its lasting virtue. Obviously,
+therefore, the right course is to concentrate on the cultivation of
+goodwill. If goodwill can be consciously increased, the festival of
+Christmas will cease to be perfunctory. It will acquire a fresh and more
+genuine significance, which, however, will not in any way inconvenience
+those who have never let go of the older significance. No tradition will
+be overthrown, no shock administered, and nobody will be able to croak
+about iconoclasm and new-fangled notions and the sudden end of the
+world, and so on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The fancy of some people will at once run to the formation of a grand
+international Society for the revivifying of Christmas by the
+cultivation of goodwill, with branches in all the chief cities of Europe
+and America, and headquarters--of course at the Hague; and committees
+and subcommittees, and presidents and vice-presidents; and honorary
+secretaries and secretaries paid; and quarterly and annual meetings, and
+triennial congresses! And a literary organ or two! And a
+badge--naturally a badge, designed by a famous artist in harmonious
+tints!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But my fancy does not run at all in this direction. I am convinced that
+we have already far too many societies for the furtherance of our ends.
+To my mind, most societies with a moral aim are merely clumsy machines
+for doing simple jobs with the maximum of friction, expense and
+inefficiency. I should define the majority of these societies as a group
+of persons each of whom expects the others to do something very
+wonderful. Why create a society in order to help you to perform some act
+which nobody can perform but yourself? No society can cultivate goodwill
+in you. You might as well create a society for shaving or for saying
+your prayers. And further, goodwill is far less a process of performing
+acts than a process of thinking thoughts. To think, is it necessary to
+involve yourself in the cog-wheels of a society? Moreover, a society
+means fuss and shouting: two species of disturbance which are both
+futile and deleterious, particularly in an intimate affair of morals.
+
+You can best help the general cultivation of goodwill along by
+cultivating goodwill in your own heart. Until you have started the task
+of personal cultivation, you will probably assume that there will be
+time left over for superintending the cultivation of goodwill in other
+people's hearts. But a very little experience ought to show you that
+this is a delusion. You will perceive, if not at once, later, that you
+have bitten off just about as much as you can chew. And you will
+appreciate also the wisdom of not advertising your enterprise. Why,
+indeed, should you breathe a word to a single soul concerning your
+admirable intentions? Rest assured that any unusual sprouting of the
+desired crop will be instantly noticed by the persons interested.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next point is: Towards whom are you to cultivate goodwill?
+Naturally, one would answer: Towards the whole of humanity. But the
+whole of humanity, as far as you are concerned, amounts to naught but a
+magnificent abstract conception. And it is very difficult to cultivate
+goodwill towards a magnificent abstract conception. The object of
+goodwill ought to be clearly defined, and very visible to the physical
+eye, especially in the case of people, such as us, who are only just
+beginning to give to the cultivation of goodwill, perhaps, as much
+attention as we give to our clothes or our tobacco. If a novice sets out
+to embrace the whole of humanity in his goodwill, he will have even
+less success than a young man endeavouring to fall in love with four
+sisters at once; and his daily companions--those who see him eat his
+bacon and lace his boots and earn his living--will most certainly have a
+rough time of it. * * * No! It will be best for you to centre your
+efforts on quite a small group of persons, and let the rest of humanity
+struggle on as well as it can, with no more of your goodwill than it has
+hitherto had.
+
+In choosing the small group of people, it will be unnecessary for you to
+go to Timbuktu, or into the next street or into the next house. And, in
+this group of people you will be wise, while neglecting no member of the
+group, to specialise on one member. Your wife, if you have one, or your
+husband? Not necessarily. I was meaning simply that one who most
+frequently annoys you. He may be your husband, or she may be your wife.
+These things happen. He may be your butler. Or you may be his butler.
+She may be your daughter, or he may be your father, and you a charming
+omniscient girl of seventeen wiser than anybody else. Whoever he or she
+may be who oftenest inspires you with a feeling of irritated
+superiority, aim at that person in particular.
+
+The frequency of your early failures with him or her will show you how
+prudent you were not to make an attempt on the whole of humanity at
+once. And also you will see that you did well not to publish your
+excellent intentions. If nobody is aware of your striving, nobody will
+be aware that you have failed in striving. Your successes will appear
+effortless, and most important of all, you will be free from the horrid
+curse of self-consciousness. Herein is one of the main advantages of not
+wearing a badge. Lastly, you will have the satisfaction of feeling that,
+if everybody else is doing as you are, the whole of humanity is being
+attended to after all. And the comforting thought is that very probably,
+almost certainly, quite a considerable number of people are in fact
+doing as you are; some of them--make no doubt--are doing a shade better.
+I now come to the actual method of cultivating goodwill.
+
+
+
+
+
+SEVEN
+
+THE GIFT OF ONESELF
+
+
+Children divide their adult acquaintances into two categories--those who
+sympathise with them in the bizarre and trying adventure called life;
+and those who don't. The second category is much the larger of the two.
+Very many people belong to it who think that they belong to the first.
+They may deceive themselves, but they cannot deceive a child. Although
+you may easily practise upon the credulity of a child in matters of
+fact, you cannot cheat his moral and social judgment. He will add you
+up, and he will add anybody up, and he will estimate conduct, upon
+principles of his own and in a manner terribly impartial. Parents have
+no sterner nor more discerning critics than their own children.
+
+And so you may be polite to a child, and pretend to appreciate his point
+of view; but, unless you really do put yourself to the trouble of
+understanding him, unless you throw yourself, by the exercise of
+imagination, into his world, you will not succeed in being his friend.
+To be his friend means an effort on your part, it means that you must
+divest yourself of your own mental habit, and, for the time being, adopt
+his. And no nice phrases, no gifts of money, sweets or toys, can take
+the place of this effort, and this sacrifice of self. With five minutes
+of genuine surrender to him, you can win more of his esteem and
+gratitude than five hundred pounds would buy. His notion of real
+goodwill is the imaginative sharing of his feelings, a convinced
+participation in his pains and pleasures. He is well aware that, if you
+honestly do this, you will be on his side.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now, adults, of course, are tremendously clever and accomplished persons
+and children are no match for them; but still, with all their talents
+and omniscience and power, adults seem to lack important pieces of
+knowledge which children possess; they seem to forget, and to fail to
+profit by, their infantile experience. Else why should adults in general
+be so extraordinarily ignorant of the great truth that the secret of
+goodwill lies in the sympathetic exercise of the imagination? Since
+goodwill is the secret of human happiness, it follows that the secret
+of goodwill must be one of the most precious aids to sensible living;
+and yet adults, though they once knew it, have gone and forgotten it!
+Children may well be excused for concluding that the ways of the adult,
+in their capricious irrationality, are past finding out.
+
+To increase your goodwill for a fellow creature, it is necessary to
+imagine that you are he: and nothing else is necessary. This feat is not
+easy; but it can be done. Some people have less of the divine faculty of
+imagination than others, but nobody is without it, and, like all other
+faculties, it improves with use, just as it deteriorates with neglect.
+Imagination is a function of the brain. In order to cultivate goodwill
+for a person, you must think frequently about that person. You must
+inform yourself about all his activities. You must be able in your
+mind's eye to follow him hour by hour throughout the day, and you must
+ascertain if he sleeps well at night--because this is not a trifle. And
+you must reflect upon his existence with the same partiality as you
+reflect upon your own. (Why not?) That is to say, you must lay the
+fullest stress on his difficulties, disappointments and unhappinesses,
+and you must minimise his good fortune. You must magnify his efforts
+after righteousness, and forget his failures. You must ever remember
+that, after all, he is not to blame for the faults of his character,
+which faults, in his case as in yours, are due partly to heredity and
+partly to environment. And beyond everything you must always give him
+credit for good intentions. Do not you, though sometimes mistakenly,
+always act for the best? You know you do! And are you alone among
+mortals in rectitude?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This mental exercise in relation to another person takes time, and it
+involves a fatiguing effort. I repeat that it is not easy. Nor is it
+invariably agreeable. You may, indeed, find it tedious, for example, to
+picture in vivid detail all the worries that have brought about your
+wife's exacerbation--negligent maid, dishonest tradesman, milk in a
+thunder storm, hypercritical husband, dirt in the wrong place--but, when
+you have faithfully done so, I absolutely defy you to speak to her in
+the same tone as you used to employ, and to cherish resentment against
+her as you used to do. And I absolutely defy you not to feel less
+discontented with yourself than in the past. It is impossible that the
+exercise of imagination about a person should not result in goodwill
+towards that person. The exercise may put a strain upon you; but its
+effect is a scientific certainty. It is the supreme social exercise, for
+it is the giving of oneself in the most intimate and complete sense. It
+is the suspension of one's individuality in favour of another. It
+establishes a new attitude of mind, which, though it may well lead to
+specific social acts, is more valuable than any specific act, for it is
+ceaselessly translating itself into demeanour.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The critic with that terrible English trait, an exaggerated sense of the
+ridiculous, will at this point probably remark to himself, smiling: "I
+suppose the time will come, when by dint of regular daily practice, I
+shall have achieved perfect goodwill towards the first object of my
+attentions. I can then regard that person as 'done.' I can put him on a
+shelf, and turn to the next; and, in the end, all my relations, friends
+and acquaintances will be 'done' and I can stare at them in a row on the
+shelf of my mind, with pride and satisfaction * * *." Except that no
+person will ever be quite "done," human nature, still being human, in
+spite of the recent advances of civilisation, I do not deprecate this
+manner of stating the case.
+
+The ambitious and resolute man, with an exaggerated sense of the
+ridiculous, would see nothing ridiculous in ticking off a number of
+different objects as they were successively achieved. If for example it
+was part of his scheme to learn various foreign languages, he would know
+that he could only succeed by regular application of the brain, by
+concentration of thought daily; he would also know that he could never
+acquire any foreign language in absolute perfection. Still, he would
+reach a certain stage in a language, and then he would put it aside and
+turn to the next one on his programme, and so on. Assuredly, he would
+not be ashamed of employing method to reach his end.
+
+Now all that can be said of the acquirement of foreign languages can be
+said of the acquirement of goodwill. In remedying the deficiences of the
+heart and character, as in remedying the deficiences of mere knowledge,
+the brain is the sole possible instrument, and the best results will be
+obtained by using it regularly and scientifically, according to an
+arranged method. Why, therefore, if a man be proud of method in
+improving his knowledge, should he see something ridiculous in a
+deliberate plan for improving his heart--the affair of his heart being
+immensely more important, more urgent and more difficult? The reader who
+has found even one good answer to the above question, need read no more
+of this book, for he will have confounded me and it.
+
+
+
+
+
+EIGHT
+
+THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND
+
+
+The consequences of the social self-discipline which I have outlined
+will be various. A fairly early result will be the gradual decline, and
+ultimately the death, of the superior person in oneself. It is true
+that the superior person in oneself has nine lives, and is capable of
+rising from the dead after even the most fatal blows. But, at worst,
+the superior person--(and who among us does not shelter that sinister
+inhabitant in his soul?)--will have a very poor time in the soul of him
+who steadily practises the imaginative understanding of other people.
+In the first place, the mere exercise of the imagination on others
+absolutely scotches egotism as long as it lasts, and leaves it weakened
+afterwards. And, in the second and more important place, an improved
+comprehension of others (which means an intensified sympathy with them)
+must destroy the illusion, so widespread, that one's own case is
+unique. The amicable study of one's neighbours on the planet inevitably
+shows that the same troubles, the same fortitudes, the same feats of
+intelligence, the same successes and failures, are constantly happening
+everywhere. One can, indeed, see oneself in nearly everybody else, and,
+in particular, one is struck by the fact that the quality in which one
+took most pride is simply spread abroad throughout humanity in heaps!
+It is only in sympathetically contemplating others that one can get
+oneself in a true perspective. Yet probably the majority of human
+beings never do contemplate others, save with the abstracted gaze which
+proves that the gazer sees nothing but his own dream.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Another result of the discipline is an immensely increased interest in
+one's friends. One regards them even with a sort of proprietary
+interest, for, by imagination, one has come into sympathetic possession
+of them. Further, one has for them that tender feeling which always
+follows the conferring of a benefit, especially the secret conferring of
+a benefit. It is the benefactor, not the person benefited, who is
+grateful. The benefit which one has conferred is, of course, the gift of
+oneself. The resulting emotion is independent of any sympathy rendered
+by the other; and where the sympathy is felt to be mutual, friendship
+acquires a new significance. The exercise of sympathetic imagination
+will cause one to look upon even a relative as a friend--a startling
+achievement! It will provide a new excitement and diversion in life.
+
+When the month of December dawns, there need be no sensation of weary
+apprehension about the difficulty of choosing a present that will suit a
+friend. Certainly it will not be necessary, from sheer indifference and
+ignorance, to invite the friend to choose his own present. On the
+contrary, one will be, in secret, so intimate with the friend's
+situation and wants and desires, that sundry rival schemes for
+pleasuring him will at once offer themselves. And when he receives the
+present finally selected, he will have the conviction, always
+delightfully flattering to a donee, that he has been the object of a
+particular attention and insight. * * * And when the cards of greeting
+are despatched, formal phrases will go forth charged, in the
+consciousness of the sender, with a genuine meaning, with the force of a
+climax, as though the sender had written thereon, in invisible ink: "I
+have had you well in mind during the last twelve months; I think I
+understand your difficulties and appreciate your efforts better than I
+did, and so it is with a peculiar sympathetic knowledge that I wish you
+good luck. I have guessed what particular kind of good luck you require,
+and I wish accordingly. My wish is not vague and perfunctory only."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And on the day of festival itself one feels that one really has
+something to celebrate. The occasion has a basis, if it had no basis
+for one before; and if a basis previously existed, then it is widened
+and strengthened. The festival becomes a public culmination to a private
+enterprise. One is not reminded by Christmas of goodwill, because the
+enterprise of imaginative sympathy has been a daily affair throughout
+the year; but Christmas provides an excuse for taking satisfaction in
+the success of the enterprise and new enthusiasm to correct its
+failures. The symbolism of the situation of Christmas, at the turn of
+the year, develops an added impressiveness, and all the Christmas
+customs, apt to produce annoyance in the breasts of the unsentimental,
+are accepted with indulgence, even with eagerness, because their
+symbolism also is shown in a clearer light. Christmas becomes as
+personal as a birthday. One eats and drinks to excess, not because it
+is the custom to eat and drink to excess, but from sheer effervescent
+faith in an idea. And as one sits with one's friends, possessing them in
+the privacy of one's heart, permeated by a sense of the value of
+sympathetic comprehension in this formidable adventure of existence on a
+planet that rushes eternally through the night of space; assured indeed
+that companionship and mutual understanding alone make the adventure
+agreeable,--one sees in a flash that Christmas, whatever else it may be,
+is and must be the Feast of St. Friend, and a day on that account
+supreme among the days of the year.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The third and greatest consequence of the systematic cultivation of
+goodwill now grows blindingly apparent. To state it earlier in all its
+crudity would have been ill-advised; and I purposely refrained from
+doing so. It is the augmentation of one's own happiness. The increase of
+amity, the diminution of resentment and annoyance, the regular
+maintenance of an attitude mildly benevolent towards mankind,--these
+things are the surest way to happiness. And it is because they are the
+surest way to happiness, that the most enlightened go after them. All
+real motives are selfish motives; were it otherwise humanity would be
+utterly different from what it is. A man may perform some act which will
+benefit another while working some striking injury to himself. But his
+reason for doing it is that he prefers the evil of the injury to the
+deeper evil of the fundamental dissatisfaction which would torment him
+if he did not perform the act. Nobody yet sought the good of another
+save as a means to his own good. And it is in accordance with common
+sense that this should be so. There is, however, a lower egotism and a
+higher. It is the latter which we call unselfishness. And it is the
+latter of which Christmas is the celebration. We shall legitimately bear
+in mind, therefore, that Christmas, in addition to being the Feast of
+St. Friend, is even more profoundly the feast of one's own welfare.
+
+
+
+
+
+NINE
+
+THE REACTION
+
+
+A reaction sets in between Christmas and the New Year. It is inevitable;
+and I should be writing basely if I did not devote to it a full chapter.
+In those few dark days of inactivity, between a fete and the resumption
+of the implacable daily round, when the weather is usually cynical, and
+we are paying in our tissues the fair price of excess, we see life and
+the world in a grey and sinister light, which we imagine to be the only
+true light. Take the case of the average successful man of thirty-five.
+What is he thinking as he lounges about on the day after Christmas?
+
+His thoughts probably run thus: "Even if I live to a good old age,
+which is improbable, as many years lie behind me as before me. I have
+lived half my life, and perhaps more than half my life. I have realised
+part of my worldly ambition. I have made many good resolutions, and kept
+one or two of them in k more or less imperfect manner. I cannot, as a
+commonsense person, hope to keep a larger proportion of good resolutions
+in the future than I have kept in the past. I have tried to understand
+and sympathise with my fellow creatures, and though I have not entirely
+failed to do so, I have nearly failed. I am not happy and I am not
+content. And if, after all these years, I am neither happy nor content,
+what chance is there of my being happy and content in the second half
+of my life? The realisation of part of my worldly ambition has not made
+me any happier, and, therefore, it is unlikely that the realisation of
+the whole of my ambition will make me any happier. My strength cannot
+improve; it can only weaken; and my health likewise. I in my turn am
+coming to believe--what as a youth I rejected with disdain--namely, that
+happiness is what one is not, and content is what one has not. Why,
+then, should I go on striving after the impossible? Why should I not let
+things slide?"
+
+Thus reflects the average successful man, and there is not one of us,
+successful or unsuccessful, ambitious or unambitious, whose reflections
+have not often led him to a conclusion equally dissatisfied. Why should
+I or anybody pretend that this is not so?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And yet, in the very moment of his discouragement and of his blackest
+vision of things, that man knows quite well that he will go on striving.
+He knows that his instinct to strive will be stronger than his genuine
+conviction that the desired end cannot be achieved. Positive though he
+may be that a worldly ambition realised will produce the same
+dissatisfaction as Dead Sea fruit in the mouth, he will still continue
+to struggle. * * * Now you cannot argue against facts, and this is a
+fact. It must be accepted. Conduct must be adjusted to it. The struggle
+being inevitable, it must be carried through as well as it can be
+carried through. It will not end brilliantly, but precautions can be
+taken against it ending disgracefully. These precautions consist in the
+devising of a plan of campaign, and the plan of campaign is defined by a
+series of resolutions: which resolutions are generally made at or
+immediately before the beginning of a New Year. Without these the
+struggle would be formless, confused, blind and even more futile than it
+is with them. Organised effort is bound to be less ineffective than
+unorganised effort.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A worldly ambition can be, frequently is, realised: but an ideal cannot
+be attained--if it could, it would not be an ideal. The virtue of an
+ideal is its unattainability. It seems, when it is first formed, just as
+attainable as a worldly ambition which indeed is often schemed as a
+means to it. After twenty-four hours, the ideal is all but attained.
+After forty-eight, it is a little farther off. After a week, it has
+receded still further. After a month it is far away; and towards the end
+of a year even the keen eye of hope has almost lost sight of it; it is
+definitely withdrawn from the practical sphere. And then, such is the
+divine obstinacy of humanity, the turn of the year gives us an excuse
+for starting afresh, and forming a new ideal, and forgetting our shame
+in yet another organised effort. Such is the annual circle of the ideal,
+the effort, the failure and the shame. A rather pitiful history it may
+appear! And yet it is also rather a splendid history! For the failure
+and the shame are due to the splendour of our ideal and to the audacity
+of our faith in ourselves. It is only in comparison with our ideal that
+we have fallen low. We are higher, in our failure and our shame, than we
+should have been if we had not attempted to rise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are those who will say: "At any rate, we might moderate somewhat
+the splendour of our ideal and the audacity of our self-conceit, so that
+there should be a less grotesque disparity between the aim and the
+achievement. Surely such moderation would be more in accord with common
+sense! Surely it would lessen the spiritual fatigue and disappointment
+caused by sterile endeavour!" It would. But just try to moderate the
+ideal and the self-conceit! And you will find, in spite of all your sad
+experiences, that you cannot. If there is the stuff of a man in you, you
+simply cannot! The truth, is that, in the supreme things, a man does
+not act under the rules of earthly common sense. He transcends them,
+because there is a quality in him which compels him to do so. Common
+sense may persuade him to attempt to keep down the ideal, and
+self-conceit may pretend to agree. But all the time, self-conceit will
+be whispering: "I can go one better than that." And lo! the ideal is
+furtively raised again.
+
+A man really has little scientific control over the height of his ideal
+and the intensity of his belief in himself. He is born with them, as he
+is born with a certain pulse and a certain reflex action. He can neglect
+the ideal, so that it almost dissolves, but he cannot change its height.
+He can maim his belief in himself by persistent abandonment to folly,
+but he cannot lower its flame by an effort of the will, as he might
+lower the flame of a gas by a calculated turn of the hand. In the secret
+and inmost constitution of humanity it is ordained that the disparity
+between the aim and the achievement shall seem grotesque; it is ordained
+that there shall be an enormous fuss about pretty nearly nothing; it is
+ordained that the mountain shall bring forth a mouse. But it is also
+ordained that men shall go blithely on just the same, ignoring in
+practice the ridiculousness which they admit in theory, and drawing
+renewed hope and conceit from some magic, exhaustless source. And this
+is the whole philosophy of the New Year's resolution.
+
+
+
+
+
+TEN
+
+ON THE LAST DAY OF THE YEAR
+
+
+There are few people who arrive at a true understanding of life, even in
+the calm and disillusioned hours of reflection that come between the end
+of one annual period and the beginning of another. Nearly everybody has
+an idea at the back of his head that if only he could conquer certain
+difficulties and embarrassments, he might really start to live properly,
+in the full sense of living. And if he has pluck he says to himself: "I
+_will_ smooth things out, and then I'll really live." In the same way,
+nearly everybody, regarding the spectacle of the world, sees therein a
+principle which he calls Evil; and he thinks: "If only we could get rid
+of this Evil, if only we could set things right, how splendid the world
+would be!" Now, in the meaning usually attached to it, there is no such
+positive principle as Evil. Assuming that there is such a positive
+principle in a given phenomenon--such as the character of a particular
+man--you must then admit that there is the same positive principle
+everywhere, for just as the character of no man is so imperfect that you
+could not conceive a worse, so the character of no man is so perfect
+that you could not conceive a better. Do away with Evil from the world,
+and you would not merely abolish certain specially distressing matters,
+you would change everything. You would in fact achieve perfection. And
+when we say that one thing is evil and another good, all that we mean
+is that one thing is less advanced than another in the way of
+perfection. Evil cannot therefore be a positive principle; it signifies
+only the falling short of perfection.
+
+And supposing that the desires of mankind were suddenly fulfilled, and
+the world was rendered perfect! There would be no motive for effort, no
+altercation of conflicting motives in the human heart; nothing to do, no
+one to befriend, no anxiety, no want unsatisfied. Equilibrium would be
+established. A cheerful world! You can see instantly how amusing it
+would be. It would have only one drawback--that of being dead. Its
+reason for being alive would have ceased to operate. Life means change
+through constant development. But you cannot develop the perfect. The
+perfect can merely expire.
+
+That average successful man whom I have previously cited feels all this
+by instinct, though he does not comprehend it by reason. He reaches his
+ambition, and retires from the fight in order to enjoy life,--and what
+does he then do? He immediately creates for himself a new series of
+difficulties and embarrassments, either by undertaking the management of
+a large estate, or by some other device. If he does not maintain for
+himself conditions which necessitate some kind of struggle, he quickly
+dies--spiritually or physically, often both. The proportion of men who,
+having established an equilibrium, proceed to die on the spot, is
+enormous. Continual effort, which means, of course, continual
+disappointment, is the _sine qua non_--without it there is literally
+nothing vital. Its abolition is the abolition of life. Hence, people,
+who, failing to savour the struggle itself, anticipate the end of the
+struggle as the beginning of joy and happiness--these people are simply
+missing life; they are longing to exchange life for death. The hemlock
+would save them a lot of weary waiting.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We shall now perceive, I think, what is wrong with the assumptions of
+the average successful man as set forth in the previous chapter. In
+postulating that happiness is what one is not, he has got hold of a
+mischievous conception of happiness. Let him examine his conception of
+happiness, and he will find that it consists in the enjoyment of love
+and luxury, and in the freedom from enforced effort. He generally wants
+all three ingredients. Now passionate love does not mean happiness; it
+means excitement, apprehension and continually renewed desire. And
+affectionate love, from which the passion has faded, means something
+less than happiness, for, mingled with its gentle tranquility is a
+disturbing regret for the more fiery past. Luxury, according to the
+universal experience of those who have had it, has no connection
+whatever with happiness. And as for freedom from enforced effort, it
+means simply death.
+
+Happiness as it is dreamed of cannot possibly exist save for brief
+periods of self-deception which are followed by terrible periods of
+reaction. Real, practicable happiness is due primarily not to any kind
+of environment, but to an inward state of mind. Real happiness consists
+first in acceptance of the fact that discontent is a condition of life,
+and, second, in an honest endeavour to adjust conduct to an ideal. Real
+happiness is not an affair of the future; it is an affair of the
+present. Such as it is, if it cannot be obtained now, it can never be
+obtained. Real happiness lives in patience, having comprehended that if
+very little is accomplished towards perfection, so a man's existence is
+a very little moment in the vast expanse of the universal life, and
+having also comprehended that it is the struggle which is vital, and
+that the end of the struggle is only another name for death.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Well," I hear you exclaiming, "if this is all we can look forward to,
+if this is all that real, practicable happiness amounts to, is life
+worth living?" That is a question which each person has to answer for
+himself. If he answers it in the negative, no argument, no persuasion,
+no sentimentalisation of the facts of life, will make him alter his
+opinion. Most people, however, answer it in the affirmative. Despite all
+the drawbacks, despite all the endless disappointments, they decide that
+life is worth living. There are two species of phenomena which bring
+them to this view. The first may be called the golden moments of life,
+which seem somehow in their transient brevity to atone for the dull
+exasperation of interminable mediocre hours: moments of triumph in the
+struggle, moments of fierce exultant resolve; moments of joy in
+nature--moments which defy oblivion in the memory, and which, being
+priceless, cannot be too dearly bought.
+
+The second species of compensatory phenomena are all the agreeable
+experiences connected with human friendship; the general feeling, under
+diverse forms, that one is not alone in the world. It is for the
+multiplication and intensification of these phenomena that Christmas,
+the Feast of St. Friend, exists. And, on the last day of the year, on
+the eve of a renewed effort, our thoughts may profitably be centered
+upon a plan of campaign whose execution shall result in a less imperfect
+intercourse.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND***
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