OBSERVING NEW YEAR’S EVE

Greymouth Evening Star, 31 December 1937, Page 4

OBSERVING NEW YEAR’S EVE

SAGE AND SENTIMENTALIST. There must be as many ways of, spending New Year’s Eve as of con-i structing tribal lays, and presumably | “every single one of them is light. So long as choice is free and there aie no sour looks (writes J. B. Firth). . To some —possibly their numbers increase —New Year’s Eve is no more than any other eve. It is for them a mere puntcum temporis. That it is dedicated in the main to jollity makes it more or less attractive according as they love good company. There is a growing tendency, I believe, to keep to oneself such reflections as may be suggested by the departing year, especially if they take on a moralising tinge. The habit of making good resolutions —which we never more than half meant to keep—to mend our faults is distinctly demode. Yet still many of us welcome a quiet five minutes in which to be alone with our thoughts when the company has gone. We have not all taken to the practice of singing Auld Lang Syne among a jazzing crowd of strangers. As a loyal Victorian I rather treasure the sentimentalities attaching to New Year’s Eve, and heartly subscribe to Elia’s doctrine on this head. “No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference,” he says, in one of his most wistful and human essays. “It is the nativity of our common Adam.”

You may have observed that Lamb started moralising before he reached the end of his first paragraph, being the man he was, who had suffered so much, and had lapsed so often. Something snapped in Lamb when he lost a friend by death. So, as he heard the bells ringing out the Old Year he felt that only then did he begin to know its worth. Lamb was of those who prefer to muse on the past rather than anticipate the future. He clung to what had been part of him. The larger hope, he felt, was not for him “In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten I set more count upon their periods and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. . . I am in love with this green earth, the faces of town and country: the unspeakable rural solitude and the sweet security of streets. . . A new state of being staggers me.”

Lamb would have treasured in his heart the exquisite lines which Cory was to write half a century later: “Your chilly stars I can forego,

This warm kind world is all I know.”

I have been glancing through a few Diaries and Journals to see how the writers dealt with their New Year’s Eve reflections when they felt that they had anything to .put down. Often a blank is left, which of course, is no proof that the reflections did not come, but rather an indication that they were too trite to be recorded. I like an entry in Sir Algernon West’s Diary for 1891. He spent New Year’s Eve with Mr. Gladstone at Biarritz, and the talk at dinner and after had been of Income-Tax Administration, Probate and Payment of Members, which Lord Chancelloi’ Herschell—no doubt much bored —had tried to brighten from his repertoire of amusing American stories. The diarist closed his entries for the day with the sentence: “The year passed and I looked out of my window on the blue and starry sky and foaming sea.” He left it at that and his silence was golden. I felt confident that Queen Victoria’s “Journals” would not fail me. Nor did they. The Queen was the truest of all Victorians. Here is a real penitent’s cry on the last day of 1880. “I feel how sadly deficient I am and how oversensitive and unstable and how uncontrollable my temper is when annoyed and hurt. But I am so overdone, so vexed and in such distress about my country that that must be my excuse. I will daily pray for God’s help to improve.” So the very next day the ueen prayed —none too hopefully, I fear —that “Mr. Gladstone may be guided by God to do what is right and just,” and she wished him arid Mrs. Gladstone and the Gladstone family a Happy New Year. Almost always the Queen closed her record for the year with thanks for many “mercies,” and prayers for “continued blessings.” Even that worldly sinner Samuel Pepys used to take stock of himself at the end of the year with his usual candour. Here is Ills entry for 1663: “Myself, blessed be God, in a good way and design and resolution of sticking to my business to get a little money, doing the best service I can to the King also; which God continue. So ends the old year.”

PEPY’S “GOOD PLATE.” There is not much heart-searching here! Three years later Pepy’s chief concern was that his “gettings” were £573 less than the previous year, while his spendings had increased by £644. He finds comfort, however, in the thought that there are two dozen and a-half silver plates in his butler’s pantry. “I come,” he says, “to abound in good plate.’ One of Pepy’s friends, and a much more God-fearing man than Samuel, turned the occasion to better use. Here is John Evelyn’s entry for V 686. “I recollected the passages of the year past and having made up accounts humbly besought Almighty God to pardon those my sins which provoked him to discompose my sorrowful family, that he would accept of my humiliation and in his good time restore comfort to it. I also blessed God for all his undeserved mercies and preservations, begging the continuance of his grace.”

You would expect him to close on that pious note. But no, Evelyn ended with a comment on the weather —“extraordinary wet and mild.” Twenty years later he celebrated his last New Year’s Kve. “I am this day,” he wrote, “arrived to the 85th year of my age. Lord, teach me so to number my days to come that I may apply'them to wisdom.”

In John , Wesley’s “Journals,” one knows exactly what to expect. Here is a typical New Year’s Eve entry: “AVe concluded the old year with a solemn watch night and began the new with praise thanksgiving.” It began for him at 4 a.m. I know no entry in any diary so resonant and inspiring as that with which the old Christian warrior opened his Journal lor 1790:

‘I am now an old man, decayed from head to foot. My eyes are dim. My right hand shakes much. My mouth is hot and dry every morning. I have a lingering fever almost every day. My motion is weak and slow. However, pleased be God, I do not slack my labour. I can preach and work still.” I expected to find Dr. Johnson improve the New Year occasion. But no. He did not like the passage of the years, and each New Year’s Day reminded him piognantly of their accelerating pace. So the pious Doctor chose

another day for his good resolution— Advent Sunday. “I considered this day,” he wrote in 1777, “being the beginning of the ecclesiastical year was a proper time for a new course of life. 1 began, therefore, to read the Greek Testament regularly at 160 verses every Sunday.” He does not explain the particular number. Perhaps it was half an hour’s allowance. He would know it almost by heart. One of the pleasantest mundane ways of spending New Year’s Eve was that of Shirley Brooks, editor of “Punch” after Mark Lemon, in the early ’seventies of last century. Brooks used to gather a company of 20 friends or so for dinner at his house in Regent’s Park, and then toward midnight the host would rise and make a speech, wishing them one by one success in their respective ventures, and lightly sketching their characters with happy phrase and turn of wit.

ROMPS IN RECTORY Back in the eighteenth century, of course, it was a rare event not to be abed long before midnight. So Parson Woodforde writes: “This being the last day of the year we sat up till after 12. We were very merry indeed after supper. Nancy and Betsie Davis locked me into the great parlour and both fell on me and pulled my wig almost to pieces—l paid them for it, however.” If you feel like frowning at these romps in the rectory parlour, remember that the frolic-makers lie sedately enough now. Let me turn lastly to a Bishop whose biography—and especially the plentiful extracts from his private diaries — 1 provided both friends and foes with abundant ammuntion. Dean Wilberforce on New Year’s Eve, 1845, was Bishop Designate to the See of Oxford: “So ends this year—a year greatly marked by God’s mercies if I be faithful in the state to which I am raised. Endeavoured to draw, my family in chapel to praise and thanksgiving. 0 Thou, Who hast been so gracious unto me, bless me and mine in the new residence. A windy, stormy, violent night. So my diocese, all dark and cloudy, but One directs. One is over all. To Him I dare to say, my Father, keep us.” Not very impressive, I think. Nor should it be considered in any way typical of episcopal journalising. I am almost tempted to prefer the irreverence of Samuel Butler, who, remembering that he had neglected too much the feasts of the Church, hung up three pieces of ivy in his rooms one Christmas Eve and—for reward—“got the entail cut off his reversion.’

It is always a joy to hear the bells pealing as the New Year is born, even though one only hears them at a lonely fireside in Tennyson’s familiar lines. But when the music ceases, and the air is still again, back to one’s memory may come Thomas Hardy’s New Year’s Eve poem, where, as a puzzled questioner, he asks the Deity “for reasons why,” only to find that the Deity thinks the questions and the curiosity strange and not in the plan: He sank to raptness as of yore, And opening New Year’s Day Wove it by rote as theretofore, And went on working evermore In his unweeting way. But I think it is the cheerful echo of the bells rather than the teasing torment of the enigma that we shall take to bedward with us as the better “dormitive.” We do not sit up beyond the normal to heave a sigh so much as to breathe a hope.

Even if the ledger account of the years which are gone—and in the famous words of the sundial they are still “imputed”—shows an adverse balance, it is never so bad but that it may yet be redressed. We love our wrinkles no more than did Postumus, nor is it easy for all our gay pretences “to make quick-coming death a little thing.” But whether we look before or after the golden rule for every New Year’s Eve is, like Mr. Edwards of blessed and Johnsonian memory, to give Cheerfulness its chance to break through, and keep a stout heart for whatevei’ may befall.