It
preserves everything that was best in the merely primitive or pagan view
of such ceremonies or such banquets. If we are carousing, at least we
are warriors carousing. We hang above us, as it were, the shields and
battle-axes with which we must do battle with the giants of the snow and
hail. All comfort must be based on discomfort. Man chooses when he
wishes to be most joyful the very moment when the whole material
universe is most sad. It is this contradiction and mystical defiance
which gives a quality of manliness and reality to the old winter feasts
which is not characteristic of the sunny felicities of the Earthly
Paradise. And this curious element has been carried out even in all the
trivial jokes and tasks that have always surrounded such occasions as
these. The object of the jovial customs was not to make everything
artificially easy: on the contrary, it was rather to make everything
artificially difficult. Idealism is not only expressed by shooting an
arrow at the stars; the fundamental principle of idealism is also
expressed by putting a leg of mutton at the top of a greasy pole. There
is in all such observances a quality which can be called only the
quality of divine obstruction. For instance, in the game of snapdragon
(that admirable occupation) the conception is that raisins taste much
nicer if they are brands saved from the burning. About all Christmas
things there is something a little nobler, if only nobler in form and
theory, than mere comfort; even holly is prickly. It is not hard to see
the connection of this kind of historic instinct with a romantic writer
like Dickens. The healthy novelist must always play snapdragon with his
principal characters; he must always be snatching the hero and heroine
like raisins out of the fire.

The third great Christmas element is the element of the grotesque. The
grotesque is the natural expression of joy; and all the Utopias and new
Edens of the poets fail to give a real impression of enjoyment, very
largely because they leave out the grotesque. A man in most modern
Utopias cannot really be happy; he is too dignified. A man in Morris's
Earthly Paradise cannot really be enjoying himself; he is too
decorative. When real human beings have real delights they tend to
express them entirely in grotesques--I might almost say entirely in
goblins. On Christmas Eve one may talk about ghosts so long as they are
turnip ghosts. But one would not be allowed (I hope, in any decen