op and the Lord of Misrule, I am not sure that Dickens (though
he was one of the readiest and most rapid masters of reply in history)
would have found it very easy upon his own principles to answer. It was
by a great ancestral instinct that he defended Christmas; by that sacred
sub-consciousness which is called tradition, which some have called a
dead thing, but which is really a thing far more living than the
intellect. There is a dark kinship and brotherhood of all mankind which
is much too deep to be called heredity or to be in any way explained in
scientific formulae; blood is thicker than water and is especially very
much thicker than water on the brain. But this unconscious and even
automatic quality in Dickens's defence of the Christmas feast, this fact
that his defence might almost be called animal rather than mental,
though in proper language it should be called merely virile; all this
brings us back to the fact that we must begin with the atmosphere of the
subject itself. We must not ask Dickens what Christmas is, for with all
his heat and eloquence he does not know. Rather we must ask Christmas
what Dickens is--ask how this strange child of Christmas came to be born
out of due time.

Dickens devoted his genius in a somewhat special sense to the
description of happiness. No other literary man of his eminence has made
this central human aim so specially his subject matter. Happiness is a
mystery--generally a momentary mystery--which seldom stops long enough
to submit itself to artistic observation, and which, even when it is
habitual, has something about it which renders artistic description
almost impossible. There are twenty tiny minor poets who can describe
fairly impressively an eternity of agony; there are very few even of the
eternal poets who can describe ten minutes of satisfaction.
Nevertheless, mankind being half divine is always in love with the
impossible, and numberless attempts have been made from the beginning of
human literature to describe a real state of felicity. Upon the whole, I
think, the most successful have been the most frankly physical and
symbolic; the flowers of Eden or the jewels of the New Jerusalem. Many
writers, for instance, have called the gold and chrysolite of the Holy
City a vulgar lump of jewellery. But when these critics themselves
attempt to describe their conceptions of future happiness, it is always
some priggish nonsense about "planes," about "cycles of fulfilment," or