SOME RHYMING FOR SCROOGE

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 48, 26 February 1938, Page 27

SOME RHYMING FOR SCROOGE

Prizes were offered by the "Manchester Guardian" recently for a verse review of Dickens's "Christmas Carol."'

If ever a book justified the kind of review. that avoids criticism it is "A Christmas Carol," says the judge. The truth in it transcends criticism. Besides, who criticises Christmas carols? And that, after all, is what the book is in nature, as well as in name, as Chesterton has so luminously revealed: "The story sings from end to end like a happy man going home, and, like a happy and good man, when it cannot sing it yells. It is lyric and exclamatory from the first exclamatory words of it. It is strictly a Christmas carol." And because it is that, criticism shall no more prevail against it than the gates of hell shall. To all objections there is an unanswerable answer. Try them. "It is not true to life." Up at once springs Mr. Stephen Leacock with, "It is of no consequence whether the 'Christmas Carol' is true to life. It is better than life." Try another. "A man like Scrooge is unconvertible." Here comes down a still more formidable disposer—Chesterton again. "Whether the Christmas visions would or would not convert Scrooge, they convert us. Whether or no the visions were evoked by real Spirits of the Past, Present, or Future, they were evoked by that truly exalted order of angels who are correctly called High Spirits." And so with its idealism, its didacticism, its sentiment, its use of fantasy, and the supernatural—if there are any whose nature is antipathetic to those things, then, to be sure, the tale is not for them. But with equal certainty Christmas is not for them either. The expansive humanity of the book, with its counterpart, indeed, in nature, whose Christmas brewing of everything, fog included, was on a large scale, and whose very snow, hail, and sleet rebuked Scrooge by coming down handexpansive humanity alone covers the widest tract of incorrecti-

tude that purists or counsellors of perfection could spread for it.

A vividly traced Sheffield review concentrated on the story's dynamic and pointed its universal application. Scrooge's Second Chance is also everyone's:

Tremble and shako and clutch your chair. For the ghost of Jacob Marley's there. With clanking chains and glassy stare. Then as the bell tolls one prepare, The Spirit of Christmas Past is here. Watch the figures which now appear And turn away and heave a sigh As the scenes of Scrooge's boyhood die. But once again be filled with mirth When Christmas Present walks the earth: Yet shed for Tiny Tim a tear Ere once more you shudder in fear While Ihe phantom polnls to the lonely grave. You shall rise at the end of the stave Merrier far and warmer at heart. Resolved, like Scrooge, on a brand-new start. For verses effective in rescuing the story from' the clutch of modern philosophies the first prize went to: No doubt, of course, 'twas indigestion That plagued old Scrooge that Christmas Eve. The man was ill, beyond all question. Such spooky sermons to believe. Some childhood complex, past repression, Stalked from its mental tomb that night And caused his singular obsession. One sees such cases often, quite. And Tiny Tim? And altruism? When Freud has done the dream-analysis. They're Scrooge's infant narcissism. Last symptom of his mind's paralysis. And yet—and yet I Ah, sceptic, pause Befure the hope of all the ages. See! Handling the eternal laws, A Little Child rebukes the sages. The second prize to—. An unusual work, as the name would suggest, And remarkably short, which is all for the best. Though a book you should read. It's not easy to see What the dick—, what the deuce It's Intended to be. As a simple romance its construction is weak. And by any account it is rather a freak. As an ethical treatise it's wordy and loose; As a radical squib it is far too diffuse; As a psychical study it tends to be crude; As 'a knockabout farce it is rather subdued. But another, more serious, charge must _be faced In respect of the thesis on which It is based. For we're asked to believe that the character Scrooge, For his first celebration, presumably huge, Doesn't get his bad dreams when it's over,. in bed. He has had them the previous evening instead I