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 Another Random Document on
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this word has entirely passed away, while the Athenian custom gives
us a word expressive of social exclusion.
It has been said that there is hardly an institution of ancient times
which has not some memorial in our language. The sacrifices of
Greeks and Romans are commemorated in the word immolate, from
the habit of throwing meal (Latin mola) upon the head of the victim.
The word contemplate was probably used originally of the augurs
who frequented the temples of the gods, temple meaning originally
“a place cut off,” and hence “reserved,” Our word funeral is borrowed
from a Latin word of similar signification, which in its turn is
connected with fumus, smoke, thus giving us an allusion to the
ancient habit of burning the bodies of the dead. Another word
connected with the rites accorded to the dead—that is, dirge—is of
Christian origin. It is a contraction of the first word of the antiphon
in the office for the dead, taken from the eighth verse of the fifth
Psalm: “Dirge, Dominus meus,” etc. (“Lead or direct me, O Lord,”
etc.). From a Roman law-term of Greek origin we have the word
paraphernalia, signifying strictly those articles of personal property,
besides her jointure, which were at the disposal of a woman after
the death of her husband.
From a detail of Roman military life we trace the derivation of the
word subsidy, originally applied only to assistance in arms, but
generalised to signify help of any kind, especially pecuniary aid.
Salary meant originally “salt-money,” or money given to the soldiers
for salt. With the inconsistency frequently found in language, the
name survived after money had taken the place of such rations.
Strictly speaking, the word stipend is liable to the same etymological
objection, since the meaning of the word is a certain quantity of
small coins estimated by weight.
The derivation of the word tragedy has been a fruitful field of
controversy. It is undoubtedly the case that this class of drama was
originally of anything but a mournful and pathetic character, and was
a remnant of the winter festival in honor of the god Dionysus. The
word is coined from the Greek tragos, a goat; but various reasons
have been assigned for this connection. Some assert that a goat was
the prize awarded to the best extempore poem in honor of the god;
others, that the first actors were dressed like satyrs, in goat-skins. A
more likely explanation is that a goat was sacrificed at the singing of
the song.
It is curious to remark how many names applied to persons, in
allusion either to their characters or occupations, can be traced to
some custom of other days. The very word person is an example of
this class of derivatives. It was first applied to the masks which it
was customary for actors to wear. These covered the whole head,
with an opening for the mouth, that the voice might sound through
(Latin personare). The transition was easy from the disguise of the
actor to the character which he represented, and the word was
ultimately extended beyond the scenic language to denote the
human being who has a part to play in the world. Sycophant is
compounded of two Greek words (sycon, phantēs), signifying
literally a “fig-shewer,” that is, one who brings figs to light by
shaking the tree. It has been conjectured, also, that “fig-shewer”
perhaps referred to one who informed against persons exporting figs
from Attica, or plundering sacred fig-trees. Sycophant meant
originally a common informer, and hence a slanderer; but it was
never used in the modern sense of a flatterer. Another word of
somewhat similar meaning, parasite, sprung from no such
contemptible trade. The original bearers of the name were a class of
priests who probably had their meals in common (Latin parasiteo, to
sit beside). But very early with the Greeks the term came to be
applied to one who lives at the expense of the great, gaining this
position by adulation and servility. Also of Greek origin is pedagogue
(paidagōgos), signifying, first, rather the slave who conducted the
child’s steps to the place of instruction, than, as now, the master
who guides his mind in the way of knowledge. In later times, a
chancellor gained his name from the place which it was customary
for him to occupy near the lattice-work screen (cancellus) which
fenced off the judgment-seat from the body of the court. The same
Latin derivation gives us the chancel of a church, from the fact of its
being screened off, and what is more remarkable, the verb to cancel,
that is, to strike out anything which is written by making cross-lines
over it.
Several of the names of different trades will at once occur to our
readers. Thus, a stationer is one who had a “station” or stand in the
market-place for the sale of books, in order to attract the passers-by
as customers. An upholsterer, originally upholdster, was, it would
seem, an auctioneer, who “held up” his wares in order to show them
off. The double -er in this word is superfluous, as in poulter-er. A
haberdasher was so called from his selling a stuff called hapertas in
old French, which is supposed to be from a Scandinavian word
meaning pedlars’ wares, from the haversack in which they were
carried.
Two military terms have curious origins. Sentinel has been traced
through Italian to the Latin sentina, the hold of a ship, and is thus
equivalent to the Latin sentinator, the man who pumps bilge-water
out of a ship. It is curious to mark how the name of a naval official
of whom constant vigilance was required has been wholly
transferred to a post requiring equal watchfulness in the sister
service. The other term to which we would call attention is hussar, a
Hungarian word signifying “twentieth.” In explanation of this
derivation, it is related that when Matthias Corvinus ascended the
Hungarian throne in 1458, the dread of imminent foreign invasion
caused him to command an immediate levy of troops. The cavalry he
raised by a decree ordering that one man should be enrolled out of
“twenty” in every village, who should provide among themselves for
his subsistence and pay.
We may pass now to some words of the same nature of less
honorable significance. Assassin remains in our language as the
dread memorial of the domination of an odious sect in Palestine
which flourished in the thirteenth century, the Hashishin (drinkers of
hashish, an intoxicating drink or decoction of the Cannabis indica, a
kind of hemp). The “Old Man of the Mountain” roused his followers’
spirits by help of this drink, and sent them to stab his enemies,
especially the leading Crusaders. The emissaries of this body waged
for two hundred years a treacherous warfare alike against Jew,
Christian, and orthodox Mohammedan. Among the distinguished
men who fell victims to their murderous daggers were the Marquis
of Monteferrat in 1192, Louis of Bavaria in 1213, and the Kahn of
Tartary some forty years later. The buccaneers, who at a later date
were hardly less dreaded, derived their name from the boucan or
gridiron on which the original settlers at Hayti were accustomed to
broil or smoke for future consumption the flesh of the animals they
had killed for their skins. The word is said to be Caribbean, and to
mean “a place where meat is smoke-dried.”
Some of the contemptuous terms in our language have been
attributed to remarkable origins. In scamp, we have a deserter from
the field of battle (Latin ex, and campus), a parallel word to decamp;
and in scoundrel, “a loathsome fellow,” “one to scunner or be
disgusted at.” The old word scunner, still used as a term of strong
dislike in Lowland Scotch, meant also “to shrink through fear,” so
that scunner-el is equivalent to one who shrinks, a coward. Poltroon
is “one who lies in bed,” instead of bestirring himself.
Several words have passed from a literal to a figurative sense, and
have thus become much wider in signification. Thus, villain originally
meant merely a farm-servant; pagan, a dweller in a village; knave, a
boy; idiot, a private person; heathen, a dweller on a heath; gazette,
a small coin; and brat, a rag or clout, especially a child’s bib or
apron. Treacle meant an antidote against the bites of serpents;
intoxicate, to drug or poison; coward, a bob-tailed hare; and
butcher, a slaughterer merely of he-goats. Brand and stigmatise still
mean to mark with infamy, although the practical significance of the
words is now chiefly a matter of history. Under the Romans, a slave
who had proved dishonest, or had attempted to run away from his
master, was branded with the three letters F U R, a thief or rascal;
while it may not be generally known that in England the custom of
branding the cheek of a felon with an F was only abolished by
statute some sixty years ago.
These examples of a class of words denoting traces of customs of
other days, might easily be largely multiplied; but enough has been
said to remind our readers of one aspect of the historical value of
our language—that is, the impress of the thoughts and practices of
past generations stamped upon the words which are used in the
familiar intercourse of life.—Chambers’s Journal.
 SOCIAL SCIENCE ON THE STAGE.
BY H. SUTHERLAND EDWARDS.

It is certainly not necessary that to every play, as to every fable, a

moral easily deducible from it should be attached; though every play
that presents a true picture of life must almost as a matter of course
teach some lesson. Othello is the drama of jealousy, Macbeth the
drama of ambition, Romeo and Juliet the drama of passionate love;
but it was not to show the danger of jealousy, of ambition, or of
passionate love, that these dramas were written. A picture of the
“green-eyed monster,” in all its hideousness, occurs in the first; a
reflection on the futility of “vaulting ambition” in the second; and a
warning of the “violent ends” produced by “violent delights” in the
third. The moral purpose of the play, supposing such a purpose to
exist, is not, however, in either case made obvious. In numbers of
the most successful plays of modern France, on the other hand, we
find a moral thesis adopted beforehand and deliberately worked out
by dramatic means. This moral thesis does not necessarily embody a
high moral notion. It may be, and often is, paradoxical in character.
The one thing essential is that it shall assert a principle, and present
a case of as dramatic a character as possible in illustration of it. The
moral which, as before remarked, belongs to every incident in life, is
not always an evident one; nor in the finest works of art does the
moral ever lie conspicuously on the surface. But if a vivacious
comedy or a dramatic play is specially intended to teach or rather to
prove something, it is as well that there should be no mistake about
it; and in these cases the audience is generally informed in the first
act of what in the succeeding acts the author proposes to
demonstrate. A French drama of incidents has often no moral
beyond the familiar—not to say vulgar—one that virtue prospers and
vice does not; and though each of Victor Hugo’s dramas teaches
some special lesson it might sometimes be difficult, but for the
preface, to discover it. Numbers of French dramas, however, deal
not only with the facts of life but also in an explicit manner with its
theories, and though often immoral are constructed on what may be
called a moral basis.
In that edifying work, the Pink Dominos, for instance, the
complicated and certainly very ingenious intrigue which forms the
substance of the piece has its origin in an argument between two
ladies, one a thorough Parisian, the other a simple-minded and
rather backward provincial, as to the true nature and appropriate
treatment of husbands. A husband, according to the Parisian lady, is
never perfect; and the wise wife is she who pardons his “slight slips
’gainst bonos mores,” and, to avoid driving him to humiliating
subterfuges and denials, pretends even not to see them. In the long
run a husband will be grateful to such a wife, and she may be sure
in a general way of his fidelity and affection; whereas to a wife too
vigilant and too implacable he will be obliged to behave with a
duplicity which, reacting upon his own sensitive nature, will make
him despise himself and detest her.
A good many modern French plays are in fact pamphlets in dramatic
form; and some of them have suffered as works of art from having
been too evidently written with a purpose. The dramatist who
wishes to prove the truth of a proposition put forward by himself will
of course make his characters act as it is necessary they should act
in order to give the desired result. He must not violate probability in
too flagrant a manner, and his play will scarcely succeed if the
dénouement seems altogether unnatural; but even while observing
these conditions he may, and usually does, so mould his personages
as to make them quite exceptional; though it is with these
exceptional personages that he works towards establishing his
general rule. The interesting thing, however, in connection with the
moral and philosophical plays of modern France is not any lesson
that they teach, but the fact that such plays exist, showing as it does
that the theatre in France is much more than a place of amusement.
It is a place of discussion, in which every question that agitates
society is treated, and often in several different pieces from several
different points of view. Absurdities of the day (such as those of
æstheticism) are satirised no doubt on our own stage. But the social
questions dealt with on the French stage are often of a far graver
character than any connected with dress. This was the case even
with M. Sardou’s Famille Benoiton, notoriously a costume piece, and
dependent in a large measure for its success on its amusing
exaggerations of the exaggerated costumes of the day. But it was
more than that. It touched upon many other follies akin to that of
exaggeration in dress; and was really a stage echo of M. Dupin’s
celebrated pamphlet on Le Luxe effréné des Femmes. M. Sardou’s
exhilarating picture of the unbridled luxury of women called for no
reply, and in fact admitted of none. His eloquent apostrophe to white
muslin, “O sainte mousseline,” was criticised in the press on
economical grounds, the work of “getting up” a muslin dress being
neither so simple nor so inexpensive as M. Sardou had imagined. But
admitting the existence of the evils that he attacked it was
impossible to defend them. Similarly when, in the lively days of
1848, La Propriété c’est le Vol was brought out, and the serpent of
Eden was presented on the stage with the hat and spectacles and
the very physiognomy of M. Proudhon, it was not likely that any
dramatist would take the part of the Socialist and seek to represent
individualism as ridiculous. The “right to labor” is asserted in this
same piece by a dentist without patients, who insists as a matter of
principle on pulling out the teeth of the first person he meets. This
again could be met by no counter-presentation from a socialistic
point of view, nor would the Government have permitted it; for
despite the article in the Constitution of 1830, declaring that “the
censorship is abolished and cannot be re-established,” it has never
been found possible to dispense in France with stage censorship,
which, temporarily set aside as a result of some revolutionary
movement, has always been re-established before long. So
necessary, indeed, had it become under the second French Republic,
to restrain the Aristophanic tendencies of the newly emancipated
dramatists, that the censorship went to extremes, and not content
with prohibiting political subjects interfered with social subjects also.
Thus it was under the second French Republic that the younger
Dumas’ sympathetic picture of the woman who has gone astray (La
Traviata, as she is considerately called in the Italian version of the
play) was objected to by the censorship, nor was it until the Empire
that La Dame aux Camélias could be brought out.
It would probably be a mistake to see in this piece any deliberate
attempt to raise up the fallen woman. The play was only a dramatic
version of a novel by the same author for which the subject had
been furnished by the life and death of a certain Marie Duplessis—
whose story Dickens, becoming acquainted with it during a visit to
Paris, had at one time proposed to treat. La Dame aux Camélias was
in any case destined to achieve such popularity that for a time the
class to which the heroine belongs became invested with unusual
interest. Vice by being represented as consumptive lost all its
grossness; but no sooner had the play attained its maximum of
success than the discovery was made that it rested on a wrong
moral basis. It “rehabilitated the courtesan;” and M. Théodore
Barrière, assisted by the inevitable collaborateur, undertook to set
matters right by exhibiting that objectionable personage in her true
colors. The outcome of this undertaking was Les Filles de Marbre:
too fine a name for them according to Théophile Gautier, who
preferred as a substitute Les Filles de Platre. Instead of dying of
love, complicated by phthisis, with claims to forgiveness based on
her having “loved much,” the leading lady of M. Barrière’s piece
reduced her lover to poverty and despair, unconsciously ruined his
talent, and consciously insulted him when she could no longer extort
money from him. The God this young woman avowedly worshipped
was not love but gold. She was without pity, without remorse; nor
did the author think fit to place in contrast with her a more amiable
specimen of depravity—even as Dumas has placed side by side with
his tender-hearted Marguerite Gauthier, the selfish and ignoble
Prudence. Marco, the chief of the Girls of Marble, is doubtless a
much more common character in the world than Marguerite
Gauthier; and Balzac, who knew the world, had anticipated in only
one of his characters—the unfortunate Coralie—all the best points in
Marguerite Gauthier, whereas he had anticipated in half-a-dozen
different characters, from Madame de Marneffe downward, the worst
points in Marco. But though Marco may have been a good deal truer
to nature than Marguerite Gauthier she was far less interesting; and
the picture of a fallen woman saved by an access of genuine feeling
was much more agreeable than that of a degraded one dragging to
his destruction a miserably weak man.
The Girls of Marble seemed, however, to M. Léon Laya too hard, too
cold; and to show that women might lead irregular lives, and yet be
kind and generous, he wrote Les Cœurs d’Or. Here two young
women, attached by anti-matrimonial ties to two young men, find
that they are preventing them from making suitable marriages in a
decent sphere of life. The young men know what, in a worldly point
of view, they ought to do, but are restrained by good feeling and the
remembrance of past affection from doing it. The young women,
however, resolve to sacrifice themselves. They take the initiative in
breaking off the connection, and by doing so prove that they have
“hearts of gold.” This sentimental piece, written in the style called
“honnête,” did not meet with anything like the success of the highly
emotional Dame aux Camélias, or of the cynical Filles de Marbre; nor
did it close the stage discussion as to the goodness or badness of a
particular class of women—a discussion which, indeed, might have
been carried on for an indefinite time, seeing that the class in
question comprises a great number of different specimens, from
Cleopatra—that “reine entretenue,” as Heine called her—to the
Esther of Balzac’s Splendeurs et Misères d’une Courtisane.
Then arose the question—suggested, no doubt, by M. Laya’s Cœurs
d’Or—whether a woman really possessing a heart of gold ought to
be abandoned whenever it suited the convenience or the caprice of
her lover to get rid of her. M. Léon Gozlan took one view of the
matter and M. Emile Augier the other; the former developing his
ideas on the subject in a single act, the latter in a full-sized drama.
In Léon Gozlan’s charming little piece, La Fin du Roman, ou
Comment on se débarrasse d’une Maîtresse, a young man is
represented as so hopelessly attached to a young woman whom he
has omitted to marry, that his friends, as “men of the world,” think it
necessary to speak to him on the subject. The attachment has lasted
a considerable time, and it is explained to him that it will be mere
weakness on his part to allow it to continue any longer. He is invited
to join a travelling party to Italy, and is mockingly told that he will
want to bring his mistress with him. He repels the taunt, and, in
response to the suggestion of one of his friends, makes a bet on the
subject. The separation having been decided on, a division of
household effects takes place. Difficulties arise about the
appropriation of certain objects to which a sentimental interest
belongs, and which each, from regard for the other, wishes to retain.
A favorite dog is disputed for; and when it is arranged that he shall
be the property of the one he goes to most willingly, the faithful
animal hesitates between the two, and maintains an attitude of strict
but friendly neutrality. Lastly, there is a child’s miniature which
neither will consent to part with; and thus, little by little, the
impossibility of the separation is made manifest. The young man
takes the young woman with him to Italy. But he wins his bet all the
same, for he is accompanied not by his mistress but by his wife.
As a counterpart to this work, in which an immoral situation is
rectified by the simplest means, may be taken M. Emile Augier’s
Mariage d’Olympe, in which a similar situation is, by similar means,
made to yield terrible and tragic results. Only M. Augier’s young
woman happens to be not at all the same sort of person as M.
Gozlan’s young woman; so that whereas to abandon the one would
have been culpable and foolish, to introduce the other into decent
society was reckless and criminal.
Dumas showed before long a disposition to turn, not against his own
views, but of views supposed to be his. Whatever allowances might
be made for a woman in the position of Marguerite Gauthier, a real
wife ought not, according to his very original idea, to deceive her
husband. He exhibited, in Diane de Lys, a lady who took this liberty,
and who was shot in consequence by her justly indignant spouse.
M. Dumas’ Fils Naturel, in which a father disavows his son, until at
last the young man finds himself in such a position that he can in his
turn disavow his father, gave rise to a good many pieces on the
same subject. The half-a-dozen or dozen plays in which it is shown
that irregular relations between men and women are likely to have
awkward consequences, are, as studies of social problems, scarcely
worth dwelling upon. Every one knows that (as in La Fiammina) the
son of a prima donna who has misconducted herself may find
difficulties in his way when he proposes to marry a girl whose
parents are eminently respectable; and we need no sensational
dramatist to teach us (as in Coralie), that an officer whose mother
has amassed a large fortune by the most shameful means may, in
spite of his personal merits, meet with slights and indignities.
M. Emile Augier’s Gendre de M. Poirier started the son-in-law as a
dramatic subject. In this comedy, one of the best of modern times, a
rich bourgeois has married his daughter to a penniless aristocrat,
who directs the household in such a sumptuous style that the father-
in-law finds himself in a fair way of being ruined. To this a sort of
counterpart was furnished by M. Augier himself in Un Beau Mariage;
which, while sparing fathers-in-law, exposes the thoughtlessness of
some mothers-in-law who expect their daughters’ husbands, not
only to take charge of their affairs, but to accompany them to
evening parties and balls. This to a serious-minded young man
would doubtless be a great trial; and in M. Augier’s comedy the end
of the matter is that the husband leaves the house of his rich
mother-in-law, and, followed at a very dramatic crisis by his wife,
supports himself by the exercise of his talents as a chemist,
mechanician, and inventor. The mother-in-law, even when she
possesses the advantage of being rich, is not a popular character on
the French stage; nor, apparently, on the Spanish stage either. There
is, at all events, a modern Spanish comedy, called The Meadow Coat
(the rough coat, that is to say, of the untrained, unclipped horse), in
which, as in Un Beau Mariage, a rustic husband who rises early
meets, on coming down in the morning, his wife and mother
returning from a late ball. In M. Augier’s corresponding scene the
husband has been reading and writing all night when the two ladies
in their ball dresses suddenly burst upon his solitude.
Le Gendre de M. Poirier, too, was the progenitor, or at least the
caller-into-existence, of another son-in-law piece called Les Petites
Mains, in which a son-in-law of fashionable tastes and habits, but
without money of his own, is harshly treated by a father-in-law, who
insists upon his adopting some occupation, and who ultimately, by
dint of persecution and misrepresentation, separates him from his
wife and forces him to become clerk and touter to a house agent.
The moral of this amusing little comedy is not quite apparent to the
unspectacled eye. The semi-burlesque proposition on which it rests
is, however, to the effect that men with large hands are intended by
nature to make money, and men with small hands to spend it. The
piece belongs in any case to the son-in-law series, in which, by its
entertaining qualities, it may claim to hold an honorable place.
The latest social subject dealt with by French dramatists has been
the fertile one of divorce, which M. Sardou has treated both
seriously and comically. Before Odette and Divorçons, he had,
however, written the less known Daniel Rochat, which ends with a
divorce in Switzerland, the divorced persons being of course citizens
of the Helvetian Republic; and though the main subject of Daniel
Rochat is the union, followed immediately afterwards by the
separation, of two persons who are prevented from living together
as husband and wife by incompatibility of religious convictions, it
may all the same be classed with M. Sardou’s other divorce pieces.
The author lets it be seen that the mistake made by Daniel Rochat
can easily be remedied in Switzerland, a country, where divorce is
easy; whereas it would have been without remedy in France, where
divorce was at that time impossible. The case, however, though an
effective one for the dramatist—at least for such a dramatist as M.
Sardou—is of too exceptional a character to merit attention from the
dramatic moralist or legist.
The practice of treating subjects of the day in dramatic form is one
which, from a purely artistic point of view, cannot be commended.
The process involves almost necessarily forced motives and distorted
characters. Works, too, produced on this system must, from the
nature of the case, be of ephemeral interest. Who, for instance, now
that France, like England, Germany, and the United States, has a law
of divorce, can care for pieces in which the interest turns upon the
iniquity of treating as indissoluble every contract, to whatever painful
consequences it may have led, which has once been signed in
presence of Monsieur le Maire? In Shakespeare and Molière so little
are affairs of the day touched upon (without ever being made the
subject of an entire work) that a reader might find it difficult to
determine from internal evidence at what period either of these
writers lived. The characteristic talk of Les Précieuses is about the
only indication in the case of Molière of the time to which the piece
belongs. There is scarcely a work, on the other hand, from the pen
of M. Sardou (who may be taken as the representative comedy
writer of modern France) which does not bear the impress and color
of the time, and which (especially in the case of his later pieces)
does not in a very direct manner reproduce the incidents or reflect
the ideas of the life around him. If immediate and striking success
with a Paris audience be the author’s aim, it must be admitted that
M. Sardou’s method is more effective than that of his predecessor,
Scribe, whose comedies are masterpieces of ingenuity, but are for
the most part independent of place and time. Many of Scribe’s
pieces have been quite as successful in England as in France. This
cannot be said of any of Sardou’s plays, with the solitary exception
of “Les Pattes de Mouche,” one of his earliest works, written at a
time when Scribe was still his model. But so far as Paris at the
present moment is concerned, M. Sardou hits the mark, and hits it
harder than ever Scribe did.
The stage in France would be used for the discussion of political as
well as social questions, did the censorship permit it. Of this we had
a sign in M. Sardou’s Rabagas, produced soon after the Commune,
in various pieces brought out during the revolutionary days of 1848,
and in Les Cosaques, which, after being previously rejected by the
censorship, was authorised for representation just before the
outbreak of the Crimean war, when, as a matter of policy,
antagonism to Russia was encouraged and stimulated by the
Government. As a rule, however, no performance likely to call forth
manifestations of political feeling, or to give offence to a friendly
State, or to its people, is allowed. M. Sardou’s L’oncle Sam was
objected to as calculated to hurt the feelings of the Americans; and
the authors of a little piece called L’Etrangère—not to be confounded
with the five-act comedy of the same name—were required to
change it because (as set forth in a document which figures among
the Papiers secrets de l’Empire) numbers of foreigners visit Paris and
might be annoyed at seeing the leading character of the very
objectionable little piece put forward as a typical lady from abroad!
All social questions of the day have, however, for the last thirty years
been left freely to the dramatist to treat as he may think fit. Or it
may be that such questions have always been left to him, and that it
is only during the last quarter of a century or so that he has thought
fit to occupy himself with them.
The true character of women who have none was the first theme to
be treated controversially, with examples in lieu of arguments; then
the desirability of getting married in certain cases where the
marriage ceremony had been dispensed with; then, in due time, the
rights of natural children and their compromising effect in connection
with mothers proposing to lead a new life. The son-in-law question—
of such slight interest to Englishmen—had meantime sprung up; and
the quiet, studious son-in-law, bullied by his wife’s mother; the
fashionably extravagant son-in-law, devouring the substance of his
wife’s father; the idle but well-meaning son-in-law, misunderstood by
every one, were turn by turn exhibited. Finally, the divorce question
produced a whole crop of pieces, serious and comic; and it may be
that the treatment of this question by a succession of dramatists,
who dwelt on the misery and disgrace resulting from marriages
practically dissolved, but legally indissoluble, had some effect in
hastening the adoption of M. Naquet’s Bill. The cruel position of a
husband chained to a disreputable wife, and unable to set himself
free, has been shown in one of M. Sardou’s most effective pieces,
which, thirty years ago, when England also was without a divorce
law, would have been as effective in England as in France. But it was
difficult for English audiences to realise the situation; and now that
continued wedlock between husbands and wives who hate one
another is no longer enforced by law, the difficulty for French
audiences may soon be equally great. With the passing of M.
Naquet’s Divorce Bill such pieces as the Odette of M. Sardou, the
Diane de Lys of M. Alexandre Dumas the younger, and the Fiammina
of M. Mario Uchard lost all significance. When the pressure of the
matrimonial knot has become quite unbearable it is now no longer
necessary either that the wife should retire to a convent or that the
husband should be shot. The difficulty is solved by the simpler,
though less dramatic, means of a divorce. It is matter of publicity
that immediately after M. Naquet’s Bill became law the author of La
Fiammina took precisely this view of his own matrimonial trouble.
There has been a recent instance, too, in Germany, of a subject of
the day—this time a serious one—being dealt with by a dramatist.
Die Gräfin Lea, a play by Herr Rudolf Lindau, contains a striking
exhibition of that prejudice against everything Jewish, to which in
Germany the high-sounding name of anti-Semiticism has been given.
In a very ingenious succession of scenes he shows that the widow,
who by reason not only of her Jewish faith, but also of her low
origin, is deemed by her husband’s relatives unworthy to succeed to
his nobiliary estate, is an excellent and charming woman, who would
not be out of place even in the very highest position. The tribunal
before which the case is brought takes just this view of the matter,
and the Countess Lea triumphs. But the dramatists argument in
favor of the Jews is somewhat weak; and he leaves us to suppose
that if the Countess Lea had been an ill-bred, commonplace Jewess,
instead of a Jewess of great refinement, the court might equitably
have given judgment against her. A reply to Herr Lindau’s piece,
such as in France it would certainly have elicited, might easily have
been written. But in Germany, as in England and all countries except
France, the stage has not enough hold upon society to cause social
questions to be often discussed in stage pieces. In France, on the
other hand, the public takes such an interest in the theatre that the
“boards” are almost to them what the platform is to the English and
the Americans.
The production of a whole series of pieces on one particular subject
of debate implies a continuous attention on the part of the intelligent
public such as no stage but that of Paris—and the Paris stage only in
modern times—seems ever to have enjoyed. Until the end of the last
century the French dramatist was poorly paid, and as dramatist had
little offered to him in the way of distinction beyond the hollow
applause of the public. It was not until Beaumarchais obtained the
decree fixing the remuneration to dramatic authors at so much per
cent. on the gross receipts that writers of all kinds, and of every
degree of eminence, began to occupy themselves with the stage;
and it was not until all the best literary talent in the country had thus
been attracted to the drama that the French Academy opened its
doors to dramatists as such. Victor Hugo was a poet first and a
dramatist afterwards. The elder Dumas was a dramatist first and a
novelist afterwards—and he was never admitted to the Academy at
all. The election of Scribe, a dramatist, and virtually nothing else,
was quite an event. Since that time, however, the entry of a highly
successful dramatist of long-established reputation into the Academy
has come to be looked upon as a matter of course. The last
dramatist elected as such was a very admirable farce writer, M.
Labiche, author of Un Chapeau de Paille d’Italie, Le Voyage de M.
Perrichon, Les Petites Mains, and other similar pieces, full of humor,
but without the least academical pretensions.—Fortnightly Review.
 A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS.
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD.

It is a long time since I quoted Bishop Wilson, but he is full of

excellent things, and one of his apophthegms came into my mind
the other day as I read an angry and unreasonable expostulation
addressed to myself. Bishop Wilson’s apophthegm is this: Truth
provokes those whom it does not convert. “Miracles,” I was angrily
reproached for saying, “do not happen, and more and more of us
are becoming convinced that they do not happen; nevertheless,
what is really best and most valuable in the Bible is independent of
miracles. For the sake of this I constantly read the Bible myself, and
I advise others to read it also.” One would have thought that at a
time when the French newspapers are attributing all our failures and
misfortunes to our habit of reading the Bible, and when our own
Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal is protesting that the golden rule is a
delusion and a snare for practical men, the friends of the old religion
of Christendom would have had a kindly feeling towards any one—
whether he admitted miracles or not—who maintained that the root
of the matter for all of us was in the Bible, and that to the use of the
Bible we should still cling. But no; Truth provokes those whom it
does not convert; so angry are some good people at being told that
miracles do not happen, that if we say this, they cannot bear to have
us using the Bible at all, or recommending the Bible. Either take it
and recommend it with its miracles, they say, or else leave it alone,
and let its enemies find confronting them none but orthodox
defenders of it like ourselves!
The success of these orthodox champions is not commensurate with
their zeal; and so, in spite of all rebuke, I find myself, as a lover of
the Bible, perpetually tempted to substitute for their line of defence
a different method, however it may provoke them. Christmas comes
round again, and brings the most beautiful and beloved festival of
the Christian year. What is Christmas, and what does it say to us?
Our French friends will reply that Christmas is an exploded legend,
and says to us nothing at all. The Guardian, on the other hand, lays
it down that Christmas commemorates the miracle of the
Incarnation, and that the Incarnation is the fundamental truth for
Christians. Which is right, the Guardian or our French friends? Or are
neither the one nor the other of them right, and is the truth about
Christmas something quite different from what either of them
imagine? The inquiry is profitable; and I kept Christmas, this last
winter, by following it.

Who can ever lose out of his memory the roll and march of those
magnificent words of prophecy, which, ever since we can remember,
we have heard read in church on Christmas-day, and have been
taught to regard as the grand and wonderful prediction of “the
miracle of the Incarnation?” “The Lord himself shall give you a sign:
Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his
name Immanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, until he shall know
to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child shall
know to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land that thou
abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings.” We all know the
orthodox interpretation. Immanuel is Jesus Christ, to be born of the
Virgin Mary; the meaning of the name Immanuel, God with us,
signifies the union of the divine nature and ours in Christ, God and
man in one Person. “Butter and honey shall he eat”—the Christ shall
be very man, he shall have a true human body, he shall be
sustained, while he is growing up, with that ordinary nourishment
wherewith human children are wont to be fed. And the sign that the
promised birth of Immanuel, God and man in one Person, from the
womb of a virgin, shall really happen, is this: the two kings of Syria
and Israel who are now, in the eighth century before Christ,
threatening the kingdom of Judah, shall be overthrown, and their
country devastated. “For before the child shall know”—before this
promised coming of Jesus Christ, and as a sign to guarantee it, the
kings of Syria and Israel shall be conquered and overthrown. And
conquered and overthrown they presently were.
But then comes the turn of criticism. The study of history, and of all
documents on which history is based, is diligently prosecuted; a
number of learned, patient, impartial investigators read and examine
the prophets. It becomes apparent what the prophets really mean to
say. It becomes certain that in the famous words read on Christmas-
day the prophet Isaiah was not meaning to speak of Jesus Christ to
be born more than seven centuries later. It becomes certain that his
Immanuel is a prince of Judah to be born in a year or two’s time. It
becomes certain that there is no question at all of a child
miraculously conceived and born of a virgin; what the prophet says
is that a young woman, a damsel, at that moment unmarried, shall
have time, before certain things happen, to be married and to bear a
son, who shall be called Immanuel. There is no question in the name
Immanuel of a union of the human and divine natures, of God and
man in one Person. “God present with his people and protecting
them” is what the prophet means the name to signify. In “Butter and
honey shall he eat,” there is no question of the Christ’s being very
man, with a true human body. What the prophet intends to say is,
that when the prince Immanuel, presently to be born, reaches adult
age, agriculture shall have ceased in the desolated realm of Judah;
the land, overrun by enemies, shall have returned to a wild state,
the inhabitants shall live on the produce of their herds and on wild
honey. But before this comes to pass, before the visitation of God’s
wrath upon the kingdom of Judah, and while the prince Immanuel is
still but a little child, not as yet able to discern betwixt good and evil,
“to refuse the evil and choose the good,” the present enemies of
Judah, the kings of Syria and Israel, shall be overthrown and their
land made desolate. Finally, this overthrow and desolation are not,
with the prophet, the sign and guarantee of Immanuel’s coming.
Immanuel is himself intended as a sign; all the rest is
accompaniment of this sign, not proof of it.
This, the true and sure sense of those noble words of prophecy
which we hear read on Christmas-day, is obscured by slight errors in
the received translation, and comes out clearer when the errors are
corrected:

“The Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, the damsel shall
conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
Milk-curd and honey shall he eat, when he shall know to refuse
the evil and choose the good.
For before the child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the
good, the land shall be forsaken, whose two kings make thee
afraid.”

Syria and Israel shall be made desolate in Immanuel’s infancy, says

the prophet; but the chastisement and desolation of Judah also shall
follow later, by the time Immanuel is a youth. Further yet, however,
Isaiah carries his prophecy of Immanuel and of the events of his life.
In his manhood, the prophet continues, Immanuel, the promised
child of the royal house of David, shall reign in righteousness over a
restored, far-spreading, prosperous, and peaceful kingdom of the
chosen people. “Of the increase of his government and peace there
shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom.”
This completion of the prophecy, too, we hear read in church on
Christmas-day. Naturally, the received and erroneous interpretation,
which finds, as we have seen, in the first part of the prophecy “the
miracle of the Incarnation,” governs our understanding of the latter
part also. But in the latter part, as well as in the former, the prophet
undoubtedly has in view, not a scion of the house of David to be
born and to reign seven centuries later, but a scion of the house of
David to be born immediately; a scion who in his youth should see
Judah afflicted, in his manhood should reign over it restored and
triumphant.
Well, then, the “miracle of the Incarnation,” the preternatural
conception and birth of Jesus Christ, which the Church celebrates at
Christmas, and which is, says the Guardian, the fundamental truth
for Christians, gets no support at all from the famous prophecy
which is commonly supposed to announce it. Need I add that it gets
no support at all from any single word of Jesus Christ himself, from
any single word in the letters of Paul, Peter, James, or John? The
miraculous conception and birth of Jesus is a legend, a lovely and
attractive legend, which soon formed itself, naturally and irresistibly,
around the origin of the Saviour; a legend which by the end of the
first century had established itself, and which passed into two out of
the four Gospel narratives that in the century following acquired
canonicity. In the same way, a precisely similar legend formed itself
around the origin of Plato, although to the popular imagination Plato
was an object incomparably less fitted to offer stimulus. The father
of Plato, said the Athenian story, was upon his marriage warned by
Apollo in a dream that his wife, Perictiona, was about to bring forth
a babe divinely conceived, and that he was to live apart from her
until the child had been born. Among the students of philosophy,
who were Plato’s disciples, this story, although authorized by his
family, languished and died. Had Plato founded a popular religion the
case would have been very different. Then the legend would have
survived and thriven; and for Plato, too, there would have certainly
been a world-famous “miracle of the Incarnation” investing his
origin. But Plato, as Bossuet says, formed fewer disciples than Paul
formed churches. It was these churches, this multitude, it was the
popular masses with their receptivity, with their native tendencies of
mind, heart, and soul, which made the future of the Christian legend
of the miracle of the Incarnation.
But because the story of the miracle of the Incarnation is a legend,
and because two of the canonical Gospels propound the legend
seriously, basing it upon an evidently fantastic use of the words of
prophecy, and because the festival of Christmas adopts and
consecrates this legend, are we to cast the Gospels aside, and cast
the celebration of Christmas aside; or else to give up our common
sense, and to say that things are not what they are, and that Isaiah
really predicted the preternatural conception and birth of Jesus
Christ, and that the miracle of the Incarnation really happened as
the Guardian supposes, and that Christians, in commemorating it,
commemorates a solid fact of history, and a fact which is the
fundamental truth for Christians? By no means. The solid fact of
history marked by Christmas is the birth of Jesus, the miraculous
circumstances with which that birth is invested and presented are
legendary. The solid fact in itself, the birth of Jesus with its
inexhaustible train of consequences, its “unspeakable riches,” is
foundation enough, and more than enough, for the Christmas
festival; yet even the legend and miracle investing the fact, and now
almost inseparable from it, have, moreover, their virtue of symbol.
Symbol is a dangerous word, and we ought to be very cautious in
employing it. People have a difficulty in owning that a thing is
unhistorical, and often they try to get out of the difficulty by saying
that the thing is symbolical. Thus they think to save the credit of
whoever delivered the thing in question, as if he had himself
intended to deliver it as symbolical and figurative, not as historical.
They save it, however, at the expense of truth. In very many cases,
undoubtedly, when this shift of symbol is resorted to for saving the
credit of a narrator of legend, the narrator had not himself the least
notion that what he propounded was figure, but fully imagined
himself to be propounding historical fact. The Gospel narrators of the
miracle of the Incarnation were in this position of mind; they did not
in the least imagine themselves to be speaking symbolically.
Nevertheless, a thing may have important value as symbol, although
its utterer never told or meant it symbolically. Let us see how this is
so with the Christian legend of the Incarnation.
In times and among minds where science is not a power, and where
the preternatural is daily and familiarly admitted, the pureness and
elevation of a great teacher strike powerfully the popular
imagination, and the natural, simple, reverential explanation of his
superiority is at once that he was born of a virgin. Such a legend is
the people’s genuine translation for the fact of his unique pureness.
In his birth, as well as in his life and teaching, this chosen one has
been pure; has been unlike other men, and above them. Signal and
splendid is the pureness of Plato; noble his serene faith, that “the
conclusion has long been reached that dissoluteness is to be
condemned, in that it brings about the aggrandisement of the lower
side in our nature, and the defeat of the higher.” And this lofty
pureness of Plato impressed the imagination of his contemporaries,
and evoked the legend of his having been born of a virgin. But Plato
was, as I have already said, a philosopher, not the founder of a
religion; his personality survived, but for the intellect mainly, not the
affections and imagination. It influenced and affected the few, not
the many—not the masses which love and foster legend. On the
figure of Jesus also the stamp of a pureness unique and divine was
seen to dwell. The remark has often been made that the pre-
eminent, the winning, the irresistible Christian virtues, were charity
and chastity. Perhaps the chastity was an even more winning virtue
than the charity; it offered to the Pagan world, at any rate, relief
from a more oppressive, a more consuming, a more intolerable
bondage. Chief among the beatitudes shone this pair: Blessed are
the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, and, Blessed
are the pure in heart, for they shall see God; and of these two, the
second blessing may have been even the greater boon. Jesus, then,
the bringer of this precious blessing, Jesus, the high exemplar and
ideal of pureness, was born of a virgin. And what Jesus brought was
not a philosophy, but a religion; he gave not to the few, but to the
masses, to the very recipients whom the tender legend of his being
born of the gracious Virgin, and laid in the humble manger, would
suit best; who might most surely be trusted to seize upon it, not to
let it go, to delight in it and magnify it for ever.
So the legend of the miraculous conception and birth of Jesus, like
the legend of the miraculous conception and birth of Plato, is the
popular homage to a high ideal of pureness, it is the multitude’s way
of expressing for this its reverence. Of such reverence the legend is
a genuine symbol. But the importance of the symbol is proportional
to the scale on which it acts. And even when it acts on a very large
scale, still its virtue will depend on these two things further: the
worth of the idea to which it does homage, and the extent to which
its recipients have succeeded in penetrating through the form of the
legend to this idea.
And first, then, as to the innate truth and worth of that idea of
pureness to which the legend of the miracle of the Incarnation does
homage. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God, says
Jesus. God hath not called us to impureness, but unto holiness, adds
his apostle. Perhaps there is no doctrine of Christianity which is
exposed to more trial amongst us now, certainly there is none which
will be exposed, so far as from present appearances one can judge,
to more trial in the immediate future, than this. Let us return to
nature, is a rising and spreading cry again now, as it was at the
Renascence. And the Christian pureness has so much which seems
to contradict nature, and which is menaced by the growing desire
and determination to return to nature! The virtue has suffered more
than most virtues in the hands of hypocrites; and with hypocrites
and hypocrisy, as a power in English life, there is an increasing
impatience. But the virtue has been mishandled, also, by the
sincere; by the sincere, but who are at the same time over-rigid,
formal, sour, narrow-minded; and these, too, are by no means in the
ascendant among us just now. Evidently, again, it has been
mishandled by many of the so-called saints, and by the asceticism of
the Catholic Church; for these have so managed things, very often,
as to turn and rivet the thoughts upon the very matter from which
pureness would avert them and get them clear, and have to that
extent served to endanger and impair the virtue rather than forward
it. Then, too, with the growing sense that gaiety and pleasure are
legitimate demands of nature, that they add to life and to our sum
of force instead of, as strict people have been wont to say, taking
from it—with this growing sense comes also the multiplication
everywhere of the means of gaiety and pleasure, the spectacle ever
more prominent of them and catching the eye more constantly, an
ever larger number of applicants pressing forward to share in them.
All this solicits the senses, makes them bold, eager and stirring. At
the same time the force of old sanctions of self-restraint diminishes
and gives way. The belief in a magnified and non-natural man, out
of our sight, but proved by miracles to exist and to be all-powerful,
who by his commands has imposed on us the obligation of self-
restraint, and who will punish us after death in endless fire if we
disobey, will reward us in Paradise if we submit—this belief is rapidly
and irrecoverably losing its hold on men’s minds. If pureness or any
other virtue is still to subsist, it must subsist nowadays not by
authority of this kind enforcing it in defiance of nature, but because
nature herself turns out to be really for it.
Mr. Traill has reminded us, in the interesting volume on Coleridge
which he has recently published, how Coleridge’s disciple, Mr. Green,
devoted the last years of his life to elaborating, in a work entitled
“Spiritual Philosophy: founded on the Teaching of the late Samuel
Taylor Coleridge,” the great Coleridgian position “that Christianity,
rightly understood, is identical with the highest philosophy, and that,
apart from all question of historical evidence, the essential doctrines
of Christianity are necessary and eternal truths of reason—truths
which man, by the vouchsafed light of nature and without aid from
documents or tradition, may always and everywhere discover for
himself.” We shall not find this position established or much
elucidated in “Spiritual Philosophy,” We shall not find it established or
much elucidated in the works of Coleridge’s immediate disciples. It
was a position of extreme novelty to take at that time. Firmly to
occupy it, resolutely to establish it, required great boldness and
great lucidity. Coleridge’s position made demands upon his disciples
which at that time it was almost impossible they should fulfil; it
embarrassed them, forced them into vagueness and obscurity. The
most eminent and popular among them, Mr. Maurice, seems never
quite to have himself known what he himself meant, and perhaps
never really quite wished to know. But neither did the master, as I
have already said, establish his own position; there were obstacles in
his own character, as well as in his circumstances, in the time.
Nevertheless it is rightly called the great Coleridgian position. It is at
the bottom of all Coleridge’s thinking and teaching; it is true; it is
deeply important; and by virtue of it Coleridge takes rank, so far as
English thought is concerned, as an initiator and founder. The “great
Coleridgian position,” that apart from all question of the evidence for
miracles, and of the historical quality of the Gospel narratives, the
essential matters of Christianity are necessary and eternal facts of
nature or truths of reason, is henceforth the key to the whole
defence of Christianity. When a Christian virtue is presented to us as
obligatory, the first thing, therefore, to be asked is whether our need
of it is a fact of nature.
Here the appeal is to experience and testimony. His own experience
may in the end be the surest teacher for every man; but meanwhile,
to confirm or deny his instinctive anticipations and to start him on
his way, testimony as to the experience of others, general
experience, is of the most serious weight and value. We have had
the testimony of Plato to the necessity of pureness, that virtue on
which Christianity lays so much stress. Here is yet another testimony
out of the same Greek world—a world so alien to the world in which
Christianity arose; here is the testimony of Sophocles. “Oh that my
lot might lead me in the path of holy pureness of thought and deed,
the path which august laws ordain, laws which in the highest heaven
had their birth;... the power of God is mighty in them, and groweth
not old.” That is the testimony of the poet Sophocles. Coming down
to our own times, we have again a like testimony from the greatest
poet of our times, Goethe; a testimony the more important, because
Goethe, like Sophocles, was in his own life what the world calls by
no means a purist. “May the idea of pureness” says Goethe,
“extending itself even to the very morsel which I take into my
mouth, become ever clearer and more luminous within me!” But let
us consult the testimony not only of people far over our heads, such
as great poets and sages; let us have the testimony of people living,
as the common phrase is, in the world, and living there on an every-
day footing. And let us choose a world the least favorable to purists
possible, the most given to laxity—and where indeed by this time the
reign of the great goddess Lubricity seems, as I have often said, to
be almost established—the world of Paris. Two famous women of
that world of Paris in the seventeenth century, two women not
altogether unlike in spirit, Ninon de l’Enclos and Mme. de Sévigné,
offer, in respect to the virtue with which we are now occupied, the
most striking contrast possible. Both had, in the highest degree,
freedom of spirit and of speech, boldness, gaiety lucidity. Mme. de
Sévigné, married to a worthless husband, then a widow, beautiful,
witty, charming, of extraordinary freedom, easy and broad in her
judgments, fond of enjoyment, not seriously religious; Mme. de
Sévigné, living in a society where almost everybody had a lover,
never took one. The French commentators upon this incomparable
woman are puzzled by this. But really the truth is, that not from
what is called high moral principle, not from religion, but from sheer
elementary soundness of nature and by virtue of her perfect lucidity,
she revolted from the sort of life so common all round her, was
drawn towards regularity, felt antipathy to blemish and disorder.
Ninon, on the other hand, with a like freedom of mind, a like
boldness and breadth in her judgments, a like gaiety and love of
enjoyment, took a different turn, and her irregular life was the talk
of her century. But that lucidity, which even all through her irregular
life was her charm, made her say at the end of it: “All the world tells
me that I have less cause to speak ill of time than other people.
However that may be, could anybody have proposed to me
beforehand the life I have had, I would have hanged myself.” That, I
say, is the testimony of the most lucid children of this world, as the
testimony of Plato, Sophocles and Goethe is the testimony of the
loftiest spirits, to the natural obligation and necessity of the
essentially Christian virtue of pureness. So when legend represents
the founder of Christianity and great exemplar of this virtue as born
of a virgin, thus doing homage to pureness, it does homage to what
has natural worth and necessity.
But we have further to ask to what extent the recipients of the
legend showed themselves afterwards capable, while firmly believing
the legend and delighting in it, of penetrating to that virtue which it
honored, and of showing their sense that accompanying the legend
went the glorification of that virtue. Here the Collects of the Church
which have come down to us from Catholic antiquity—from the times
when all legend was most unhesitatingly received, most fondly
loved, most delighted in for its own sake—are the best testimony.
Jesus was manifested, says one of the Epiphany Collects, “to make
us the sons of God and heirs of eternal life,” and we, having this
hope, are to “purify ourselves even as he is pure.” And the Collect
for Christmas-day itself—that very day on which the miracle of the
Incarnation is commemorated, and on which we might expect the
legend’s miraculous side to be altogether dominant—firmly seizes the
homage to pureness and renovation which is at the heart of the
legend, and holds it steadily before us all Christmas-time. “Almighty
God,” so the Collect runs, “who hast given us thy only-begotten Son
to take our nature upon him, and as at this time to be born of a pure
Virgin, grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by
adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit.” The
miracle is amply and impressively stated, but the stress is laid upon
the work of regeneration and inward renewal, whereby we are to be
made sons of God, like to that supreme Son whose pureness was
expressed through his being born of a pure Virgin. It is as, in
celebrating at Easter the miracle of the Resurrection, the Church,
following here St. Paul, seizes and elevates in the Collect for Easter
Eve that great “secret of Jesus” which underlies the whole
miraculous legend of the Resurrection, and which only through
materializing itself in that legend could arrive at the general heart of
mankind.
It is so manifest that there is that true and grand and profound
doctrine of the necrosis, of “dying to re-live,” underlying all which is
legendary in the presentation of the death and resurrection of Jesus
by our Gospels, it is so manifest that St. Paul seized upon the
doctrine and elevated it, and that the Church has retained it,—that
one can find no difficulty, when the festival of Easter is celebrated, in
fixing one’s thoughts upon the doctrine as a centre, and in receiving
all the miraculous story as poetry naturally investing this and doing
homage to it. And there is hardly a fast or a festival of the Christian
year in which the underlying truth, the beneficent and forwarding
idea, clothed with legend and miracle because mankind could only
appropriate it by materializing it in legend and miracle, is not
apparent. Trinity Sunday is an exception, but then Trinity Sunday
does not really deal with Gospel story and miracle, it deals with
speculation by theologians on the divine nature. Perhaps,
considering the results of their speculation, we ought now rather to
keep Trinity Sunday as a day of penitence for the aberrations of
theological dogmatists. It is, however, in itself admissible and right
enough that in the Christian year one day should be given to
considering the aspects by which the human mind can in any degree
apprehend God. But Trinity Sunday is, as I have said, an exception.
For the most part, in the days and seasons which the Church
observes, there is commemoration of some matter declared in
Scripture, and combined and clothed more or less with miracle. Yet
how near to us, under the accompanying investment of legend, does
the animating and fructifying idea lie!—in Lent, with the miracle of
the temptation, the idea of self-conquest and self-control; in
Whitsuntide, with the miracle of the tongues of fire, the idea of the
spirit and of inspiration.
What Christmas primarily commemorates is the birthday of Jesus—
Jesus, the bringer to the world of the new dispensation contained in
his method and secret, and in his temper of epieikeia, or sweet
reasonableness, for applying them. But the religion of Christendom
has in fact made the prominent thing in Christmas a miracle, a
legend; the miracle of the Incarnation, as it is called, the legend of
Jesus having been born of the Virgin. And to those who cannot bring
themselves to receive miracle and legend as fact, what Christmas,
under this popularly established aspect of it, can have to say, what
significance it can contain, may at first seem doubtful. Christmas
might as first appear to be the one great festival which is concerned
wholly with mere miracle, which fixes our attention upon a miracle
and nothing else. But when we come to look closer, we find that
even in the case of Christmas the thing is not so. That on which
Christmas even in its popular acceptation, fixes our attention, is that
to which the popular instinct, in attributing to Jesus his miraculous
Incarnation, in believing him born of a pure Virgin, did homage—
pureness. And this, to which the popular instinct thus did homage,
was an essential characteristic of Jesus and an essential virtue of
Christianity, the obligation of which, though apt to be questioned
and discredited in the world, is at the same time nevertheless a
necessary fact of nature and eternal truth of reason. And fondly as
the Church has cherished and displayed the Christmas miracle, this,
the true significance of the miraculous legend for religion, has never
been unknown to her, never wholly lost out of sight. As times goes
on, as legend and miracle are less taken seriously as matters of fact,
this worth of the Christmas legend as symbol will more and more
come into view. The legend will still be loved, but as poetry—as
poetry endeared by the associations of some two thousand years;
religious thought will rest upon that which the legend symbolizes.
It is a mistake to suppose that rules for conduct and
recommendations of virtue, presented in a correct scientific
statement, or in a new rhetorical statement from which old errors
are excluded, can have anything like the effect on mankind of old
rules and recommendations to which they have been long,
accustomed, and with which their feelings and affections have
become intertwined. Pedants always suppose that they can, but that
this mistake should be so commonly made proves only how many of
us have a mixture of the pedant in our composition. A correct
scientific statement of rules of virtue has upon the great majority of
mankind simply no effect at all. A new rhetorical statement of them,
appealing, like the old familiar deliverances of Christianity, to the
heart and imagination, can have the effect which those deliverances
had, only when they proceed from a religious genius equal to that
from which those proceeded. To state the requirement is to declare
the impossibility of its being satisfied. The superlative pedantry of
Comte is shown in his vainly imagining that he could satisfy it; the
comparative pedantry of his disciples is shown by the degree in
which they adopt their master’s vain imagination.
The really essential ideas of Christianity have a truth, depth,
necessity, and scope, far beyond anything that either the adherents
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