Sorrows of Santa Scrooge

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVI, Issue 11, 24 December 1925, Page 9

Sorrows of Santa Scrooge

(By

JAMES DOUGLAS)

J HAVE been reading “A Christmas Carol” in order to recapture the magic of Dickens. The spell has worked ano i am in a Dickensian mood. I have been transfigured, transformed, and transmogrified like Mr. Scrooge. I am bubbling and brimming over with benevolence, jollity, joviality, geniality, and sentiment. My tearducts are all working like burst water-pipes. My heart is as soft as a plum pudding. I am eager to wring every hand and smile into every face. I long to bombard every hungry home with turkeys and geese and mince pies, and to post Christmas hampers to every empty larder in the land. SCROOGEMAST! DE As for remorse and repentance, I am more remorseful and more repentant than any Scrooge in Christmasdom A few hours ago 1 was at war with myself and everybody else. I was head over ears in bleakness and bitterness of Scroogemastide. T doubt whether Mr. Scrooge was ever so disgruntled, so curmudgeonish, so ill-humoured, so irritable, and so sour. Most of his I ' avarice, his asperity, and his sei- ■ I fishness was only a literary artifice I | needed to provide a gloriously | ' extravagant antithesis to his sud- ' den conversion. But I was a real ; I Scrooge with a genuinely hard | heart. The humour of it resided in ' the astonishing fact that T did not • suspect myself of being a Scrooge, i and that T did not guess that 1 was I turning Christmas into Scroogemas. ! There was not a sprig of holly or I mistletoe in my miserable soul. 1 positively and emphatically detested Christmas, and wished ilia! i I could abolish it and demolish it ' with all its false festivity and sham

generosity and meretriciom good nature and Login cheerfulness.

THE WAND OF DICKENS Even at this moment 1 am charged with bile and rancour and snarlishness, for it is not easy to collect enough good ghosts to terrify me out of my bad temper, my stupidity, my vinegarish viciousness, and my grumpy desire to be left alone in my misanthropy and misogyny. Dickons could wave his wand over human vitriol and turn it into honey. He could change a horrible character into a lovable one with a few strokes of the pen. But although I wave my wand over my wicked head I know that the hobgoblin inside il will go on being callous and cruel and. selfish alter il has recovered from its melting mood. With an effort I may be able to keep up my brans mogrification till Christmas Eve. 1 may even succeed in maintaining it on Christmas Dav and on Boxing Day. But the cylinder of Christmas oxygen will not last till the end of the year, and early in January I shall become a Scrooge once more. I am able to make this forecast, because every Christmas I go through Ihe same process of conversion and backsliding. I am a Dickensian for a few splendid and sublime days, and then I slip and slither back into my natural state.

Perhaps in this respect I am not altogether unique. 1 have noticed symptoms of a similar reversion to type in other human beings. The world is not in the least like a Christinas carol. Its hard, cold heart may thaw a little on’ the surface during, the mad, glad delirium of Christmas tide, but it freezes over again, ami for the rest of the year it is a worm of Scrooges. Why should it be so ' Is it not possible to prolong the magical miracle of Christmas Al hy must we all relapse into icy common sense and chilly shrewdness and frosty calculation I What a jolly world it would be if every evening were a Christmas Eve and every day were a Christmas Day 1 Let us all face this dreadful riddle and try to read il together with the magnifying glass of Dickens. In the first place, wo must acknowledge that it makes us unusually happy to discover ourselves being cajoled or coerced into trying to make other people happy even for one hilarious and fantastic day. We may not be able to write largo cheques or to buy expensive Christmas presents for our poor relations. We maj not be rich enough to afford fat tips for boys and girls, for postmen and policemen. for the butcher’s boy and the

grocer’s boy, for the dustman and the bandsman. But we can all squeeze out a few drops of the milk of human kindness from our steely hearts. LOVABLE VILLAINS. It is realy rather heartrending to find that kindness is not easily extracted from your normal character. It costs nothing to be kind to your wife or your husband, to your son or your daughter, to your brother or your sister, to your nephew or your niece. Kindness is not a purchasable commodity. You cannot buy it over any counter. There are no wholesale or retail merchants of kindness. It is not grown in the fields or made in the factories. It is the cheapest thing on earth and the rarest. Now one of the qualities that is abundant in Dickens is kindness. It is the fount of his genius. His humour is only a by-product of his kindness. There is much kind-

I ness in his books that it becomes a gloriously exaggerated gargoyle. I Its smile is so broad that it turns I into a wild and monstrous grin. • The very dregs of his kindness are i rushing rivers of sentiment and I sentimentalism. But he had such ! an ocean of kindness in his great I heart that he could not keep it out !of his villains. That is why the villainy of his vinams is more lovable than it ought to be. I can hate lago but I cannot hate Uriah Heep. I can hate Tartuffe, but T cannot hate Pecksniff. AFRAID OF KINDNESS. It may be said that Dickensian kindness is a literary device, and that it bears no relation to the real

I kindness of real life. There is some | truth in this accusation, for kinci- : ness when it runs to seed in fiction becomes grotesque. But the immense and gigantic good humour of Dickens is far more than a trick of the writing trade. If it were only a literary dodge, there would be dozens of Dickenses. But just as you cannot produce an artificial imitation of sunshine, so you cannot produce a counterfeit of Dickensian kindness. It must be in you before it comes out, and no man of genius has ever had so much of it in him with the exception of Shakespeare, who was a whole continent of kindness. Living as we do in a world of Scrooges, we are morbidly afraid of being overcharged with kindness, and we hoard the small store of kindness in our hearts. We dole it out doubtfully and warily because we are afraid of being i cheated and exploited. But there is no need to be niggardly with the kindness that is not convertible | into hard cash. After all. money :is not the only thing the world | needs. In our daily life it is seldom I that we are. asked to sell all we i have and give it to the poor. We

are, however, asked every day to give the kindness that is not kept in banks, the kind of kindness which even your dog begs for and delights in.

FAMISHED AFFECTION. This the kind of kindness that every human being hungers for. Lack of it makes a home desolate. The want of it blights a marriage. It is marvellous how long love can exist in a state of chronic starvation. It can keep itself alive on the crumbs of memory and the scraps of reminiscence. But it is very dangerous to reckon upon the almost boundless power of love to live without visible means of support. That is why Christmastide is a time of tragedy for many a

famished affection. The sudden attempt to recreate the atmosphere of kindness is sometimes an agony for dead hearts who have lived without it from one end of the year to the other. The soul often finds it less painful to slumber in neglect and isolation than to be rudely and roughly awakened for a few sad moments.

Therefore we ought to make kindness a daily and not a yearly event. I. pity the wife or the hus

,t band who has for months schooled 1 I herself or himself to bear indiffe- ' I rence, who has found a numb peace ■ lin oblivion, and who is without i I warning expected to emerge like a i ! hibernating animal from a dreamJ ; less sleep. The shock may be too | sharp to endure. It is not safe to | feed a starving creature too i abruptly and too lavishly. It is far i better to give it its daily ration of i • tenderness and solicitude and then I ' to increase its allowance at ChristI mastide.

THE SOFT HEART. But in order to be kind we must keep our heart in good working order. We must teach it to be vigilant and energetic in the little trifles of life, and not to reserve its beneficence and benignity for feasts and festivals. This is wisdom for all our contacts with all our fellow-creatures. In particular it is wisdom for the relations between parents and children. We do not always realise that children need more affection than those who have learned the language of life. They, too, can exist without the enchantment of kindness, but they suffer infinitely without being able to understand their privation. I pity the young beings who are scrooged all the year and surfeited with sentiment at Christinastide. Be sure that youth receives all the love it needs to live on, for its life is brief.

Bless my hard heart, I feel that I have almost wrought the miracle of Scrooge in its flinty recesses. 11 is now so soft that I defy it to ossify and atrophy itself for at least a week. I wonder whether I have spread the good contagion. But it is fatally easy to melt your heart in the furnace ot the printer’s foundry, and therefore I warn you not to mistake impulse for action. Go away now and be kind to somebody before the magic of Dickens oozes out of your heart!