, shepherds, and all, and danced till
supper-time."{60} Here the religious drama has sunk to little more than
a "Society" game.

[Illustration:

THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI. MASACCIO

(_Berlin: Kaiser Friedrich Museum_)]

|155|

POSTSCRIPT

Before we pass on to the pagan aspects of Christmas, let us gather up our
thoughts in an attempt to realize the peculiar appeal of the Feast of the
Nativity, as it has been felt in the past, as it is felt to-day even by
moderns who have no belief in the historical truth of the story it
commemorates.

This appeal of Christmas seems to lie in the union of two modes of
feeling which may be called the _carol spirit_ and the _mystical spirit_.
The _carol spirit_--by this we may understand the simple, human
joyousness, the tender and graceful imagination, the kindly, intimate
affection, which have gathered round the cradle of the Christ Child. The
folk-tune, the secular song adapted to a sacred theme--such is the carol.
What a sense of kindliness, not of sentimentality, but of genuine human
feeling, these old songs give us, as though the folk who first sang them
were more truly comrades, more closely knit together than we under modern
industrialism.

One element in the carol spirit is the rustic note that finds its
sanction as regards Christmas in St. Luke's story of the shepherds
keeping watch over their flocks by night. One thinks of the stillness
over the fields, of the hinds with their rough talk, "simply chatting in
a rustic row," of the keen air, and the great burst of light and song
that dazes their simple wits, of their journey to Bethlehem where "the
heaven-born Child all meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies," of the ox
and ass linking the beasts of the field to the Christmas adoration of
mankind.[80]

For many people, indeed, the charm of Christmas is inseparably associated
with the country; it is lost in London--the city is too vast, too modern,
too sophisticated. It is bound up with the thought of frosty fields, of
bells heard far away, of bare trees |156| against the starlit sky, of
carols sung not by trained choirs but by rustic folk with rough accent,
irregular time, and tunes learnt by ear and not by book.

Again, without the idea of winter half the charm of Christmas would be
gone. Transplanted in the imagination of western Christendom from an
undefined season in the hot East to Europe at midwinter, the Nativity
scenes have taken on a new pathos with th