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family) to talk on Christmas Eve about astral bodies. The boar's head of
old Yule-time was as grotesque as the donkey's head of Bottom the
Weaver. But there is only one set of goblins quite wild enough to
express the wild goodwill of Christmas. Those goblins are the characters
of Dickens.

Arcadian poets and Arcadian painters have striven to express happiness
by means of beautiful figures. Dickens understood that happiness is best
expressed by ugly figures. In beauty, perhaps, there is something allied
to sadness; certainly there is something akin to joy in the grotesque,
nay, in the uncouth. There is something mysteriously associated with
happiness not only in the corpulence of Falstaff and the corpulence of
Tony Weller, but even in the red nose of Bardolph or the red nose of Mr.
Stiggins. A thing of beauty is an inspiration for ever--a matter of
meditation for ever. It is rather a thing of ugliness that is strictly a
joy for ever.

All Dickens's books are Christmas books. But this is still truest of his
two or three famous Yuletide tales--The _Christmas Carol_ and _The
Chimes_ and _The Cricket on the Hearth_. Of these _The Christmas Carol_
is beyond comparison the best as well as the most popular. Indeed,
Dickens is in so profound and spiritual a sense a popular author that in
his case, unlike most others, it can generally be said that the best
work is the most popular. It is for _Pickwick_ that he is best known;
and upon the whole it is for Pickwick that he is best worth knowing. In
any case this superiority of _The Christmas Carol_ makes it convenient
for us to take it as an example of the generalisations already made. If
we study the very real atmosphere of rejoicing and of riotous charity in
_The Christmas Carol_ we shall find that all the three marks I have
mentioned are unmistakably visible. _The Christmas Carol_ is a happy
story first, because it describes an abrupt and dramatic change. It is
not only the story of a conversion, but of a sudden conversion; as
sudden as the conversion of a man at a Salvation Army meeting. Popular
religion is quite right in insisting on the fact of a crisis in most
things. It is true that the man at the Salvation Army meeting would
probably be converted from the punch bowl; whereas Scrooge was converted
to it. That only means that Scrooge and Dickens represented a higher and
more historic Christianity.

Again, _The Christmas Carol_ owes much of its hilarity to our second
sou