Mirror of the Months Part 11

All this is true of us under ordinary circ.u.mstances. But the arrival of Christmas-time is _not_ an ordinary circ.u.mstance; and therefore _now_ it is none of it true. We are merry-makers once more, and feel that we can now afford to play the fool for a week, since we have so religiously persisted in playing the philosopher during all the rest of the year. Be it expressly understood, however, by all those "surrounding nations" who may happen to meet with this candid confession of our weakness in the above particular, that we permit ourselves to fall into it in favour of our children alone. They (poor things!) being as yet at so pitiable a distance from "years of discretion," cannot be supposed to have achieved the enviable discovery, that happiness is a thing utterly beneath the attention of a reasoning and reasonable being. Accordingly, they know no medium between happiness and misery; and when they are not enjoying the one, they are suffering the other.

But that English parents, generally speaking, love their children better than themselves, is another national merit which I must claim for them.

The consequence of this is natural and necessary, and brings us safely round to the point from which we started: an English father and mother, rather than their offspring should not be happy at Christmas-time, will consent to be happy at that time themselves! It does not last long; and surely a week or so spent in a state of foolish felicity may hope to be expiated by a whole year of unimpeachable indifference! This, then, is the secret of the Christmas holiday-making, among the "better sort" of English families,--as they are pleased somewhat invidiously to call themselves.

Now, then (to resume our details), "the raven down" of metropolitan darkness is "smoothed" every midnight "till it smiles," by that pleasant relic of past times, "the waits;" which wake us with their low wild music mingling with the ceaseless sealike sound of the streets; or (still better) lull us to sleep with the same; or (best of all) make us dream of music all night long, without waking us at all.

Now, too, the Bellman plies his more profitable but less pleasant parallel with the above; nightly urging his "masters and mistresses" to the practice of every virtue under heaven, and in his own mind prospectively including them all in the pious act of adding an extra sixpence to his accustomed stipend.

Now, during the first week, the Theatres having begun to prepare "the Grand Christmas Pantomime, which has been in active preparation all the Summer," the Carpenter for the time being, among other ingenious changes which he contemplates, looks forward with the most lively satisfaction to that which is to metamorphose _him_ (in the play-bills at least) into a "machinist;" while, pending the said preparations, even the "Stars" of the Company are "shorn of their beams" (at least in making their transit through that part of their hemisphere which is included behind the scenes), and all things give way before the march of that monstrous medley of "inexplicable dumb show and noise," which is to delight the Galleries and Dress-circle, and horrify the more _genteel_ portion of the audience, for the next nine weeks.

Finally, now occur, just before Christmas, those exhibitions which are peculiar to England in the nineteenth century; I mean the Prize-Cattle Shows. "Extremes meet;" and accordingly, one of the most unequivocal evidences we have to offer, of the surpa.s.sing refinement of the age in which we live, consists in these displays of the most surpa.s.sing grossness. The alleged _beauty_ of these unhappy victims of their own appet.i.tes acting with a view to ours, consists in their being unable to perform a single function of their nature, or enjoy a single moment of their lives; and the value of the meat that they make is in exact proportion to the degree in which it is _un_fit to be eaten.

To describe the joys and jollifications attendant on Christmas, is what my confined limits would counsel me not to attempt, even if they were describable matters. But, in fact, there is nothing which affords such truly "lenten entertainment" as a feast at secondhand: the Barmecide's dishes were fattening by comparison with it. In conclusion, therefore, let me say that I shall think it very hard, if the gentle readers of these pen and ink sketches of the Months have not been persuaded, during the perusal of each, that I have fulfilled my promise made at the commencement, of proving each, in its turn, to be better than all the rest. At any rate, if they are not so persuaded, they must, to be consistent, henceforth abandon all pretended _admiration_,--which is an affair of impulse, not of judgment,--and must proceed to _compute_ the value of every thing that comes before them, according to its comparative value in regard to some other thing. In short, they must at once adopt Horace's hateful worldly-minded maxim of "nil admirari" &c.

as rendered still more hateful and worldly-minded by Bolingbroke and Pope's version of it; and must "make up their minds," as the mechanical phrase is, that not merely "not to _wonder_," (which is what Horace meant, if he meant any thing) but

"Not to _admire_, is all the art _they_ know, To make men happy, and to keep them so."

But, in truth, as it is only for the satisfaction of living friends and lovers that people sit for their portraits; not to gratify the spleen of cavilling critics, nor even to convey their effigies to a posterity that will not care a penny about them; so it is only to please the friends and lovers of Nature, that I have painted the merely natural portion of these "pictures in little" of the Months.

As to the artificial portions,--being of no use to any one else, the posterity of a twelve-month hence is welcome to them, as records of the manners of the day, caught, not "_living_ as they _rise_," but dying as they fall: for in the gardens of Fas.h.i.+on and Folly there are happily no perennials; and though the plants which grow there for the most part belong to that species which have winged seeds, and therefore disperse themselves to wheresoever the winds of heaven blow, the same provision causes them to escape from the spot where they sprang up, and make way for those which the chances and changes of the season may have deposited there. Thus each plant in turn has its day; and each parterre has an annual opportunity of priding itself upon an exhibition of specimens, which last year it would have laughed at, and which next year it will despise. And "thus runs the world (of Fas.h.i.+on) away."

But not so with the world of Nature. Here, all as surely returns as it pa.s.ses away; and whatever is true in these papers in regard to that, will be true of it while time shall last. Wis.h.i.+ng my readers, therefore, "many happy returns of the _present_ season" (meaning whichever it may happen to be during which they are favouring these light leaves with a perusal), let me conclude by counselling such of them (if any there be) as have hitherto failed to appreciate and enjoy the good that is every where scattered about them, not to waste themselves away in vain regrets over what cannot be recalled, but hasten to atone to that Nature which they have neglected, by making the Future repay them for the Past, until their reckoning of happiness is even. Of this they may be a.s.sured, that it is rarely if ever too late to do so, and that the human mind never parts with the power of righting itself, so long as "the human heart by which we live" is not wilfully closed against the counsel which comes to it from all external things.

FINISH.