last century upon no point
was it more persistently and brilliantly attacked than upon that of its
alleged enmity to human joy. Shelley and Swinburne and all their armies
have passed again and again over the ground, but they have not altered
it. They have not set up a single new trophy or ensign for the world's
merriment to rally to. They have not given a name or a new occasion of
gaiety. Mr. Swinburne does not hang up his stocking on the eve of the
birthday of Victor Hugo. Mr. William Archer does not sing carols
descriptive of the infancy of Ibsen outside people's doors in the snow.
In the round of our rational and mournful year one festival remains out
of all those ancient gaieties that once covered the whole earth.
Christmas remains to remind us of those ages, whether Pagan or
Christian, when the many acted poetry instead of the few writing it. In
all the winter in our woods there is no tree in glow but the holly.

The strange truth about the matter is told in the very word "holiday."
A bank holiday means presumably a day which bankers regard as holy. A
half-holiday means, I suppose, a day on which a schoolboy is only
partially holy. It is hard to see at first sight why so human a thing
as leisure and larkiness should always have a religious origin.
Rationally there appears no reason why we should not sing and give each
other presents in honour of anything--the birth of Michael Angelo or
the opening of Euston Station. But it does not work. As a fact, men
only become greedily and gloriously material about something
spiritualistic. Take away the Nicene Creed and similar things, and you
do some strange wrong to the sellers of sausages. Take away the strange
beauty of the saints, and what has remained to us is the far stranger
ugliness of Wandsworth. Take away the supernatural, and what remains is
the unnatural.

And now I have to touch upon a very sad matter. There are in the
modern world an admirable class of persons who really make protest on
behalf of that antiqua pulchritudo of which Augustine spoke, who do
long for the old feasts and formalities of the childhood of the world.
William Morris and his followers showed how much brighter were the dark
ages than the age of Manchester. Mr. W. B. Yeats frames his steps in
prehistoric dances, but no man knows and joins his voice to forgotten
choruses that no one but he can hear. Mr. George Moore collects every
fragment of Irish paganism that the forgetfulness of th