ed an
antiquity and might easily have called a superstition? Christmas has
indeed been celebrated before in English literature; but it had, in the
most noticeable cases, been celebrated in connection with that kind of
feudalism with which Dickens would have severed his connection with an
ignorant and even excessive scorn. Sir Roger de Coverley kept Christmas;
but it was a feudal Christmas. Sir Walter Scott sang in praise of
Christmas; but it was a feudal Christmas. And Dickens was not only
indifferent to the dignity of the old country gentleman or to the genial
archaeology of Scott; he was even harshly and insolently hostile to it.
If Dickens had lived in the neighbourhood of Sir Roger de Coverley he
would undoubtedly, like Tom Touchy, have been always "having the law of
him." If Dickens had stumbled in among the old armour and quaint folios
of Scott's study he would certainly have read his brother novelist a
lesson in no measured terms about the futility of thus fumbling in the
dust-bins of old oppression and error. So far from Dickens being one of
those who like a thing because it is old, he was one of those cruder
kind of reformers, in theory at least, who actually dislike a thing
because it is old. He was not merely the more righteous kind of Radical
who tries to uproot abuses; he was partly also that more suicidal kind
of Radical who tries to uproot himself. In theory at any rate, he had no
adequate conception of the importance of human tradition; in his time it
had been twisted and falsified into the form of an opposition to
democracy. In truth, of course, tradition is the most democratic of all
things, for tradition is merely a democracy of the dead as well as the
living. But Dickens and his special group or generation had no grasp of
this permanent position; they had been called to a special war for the
righting of special wrongs. In so far as such an institution as
Christmas was old, Dickens would even have tended to despise it. He
could never have put the matter to himself in the correct way--that
while there are some things whose antiquity does prove that they are
dying, there are some other things whose antiquity only proves that they
cannot die. If some Radical contemporary and friend of Dickens had
happened to say to him that in defending the mince-pies and the
mummeries of Christmas he was defending a piece of barbaric and brutal
ritualism, doomed to disappear in the light of reason along with the
Boy-Bish