6 thoughts on “The Festival Continues”

  1. On the Ninth day of Christmas Arthur Machen gave to us this jolly (if also variously ‘dark’) article – 98 years ago, the coming Ninth Day of Christmas…

    He presumably knew the Burning Bush as a Type of the Blessed Virgin bearing God the Son Incarnate – a reproduction travel ikon of which I have at my bedside.

    In saying “generally, we may say that the candles of the English Church were put out for the next three hundred years” he seems to be sharply playing with the words attributed to Bishop Hugh Latimer in various editions of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments speaking to Bishop Nicholas Ridley on their way to being burnt at the stake: “Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out” – two examples of what he calls “certain candles of an infernal rather than a celestial nature” kindled by Queen Mary (with a glance at Nero) – though he was probably aware that more people were similarly killed under Elizabeth than Mary.

    Mrs. Pardiggle is from Bleak House – but someone better read than I must tell us more finely why she and Elizabeth resemble one another.

    That Collect is taking more looking into than I expected…

    The English Wikipedia “Plygain” article, as “last edited on 13 September 2024”, suggests the tradition is still going strong.

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    1. Merry 9th Day of Christmas to you! Thank you for these observations. I was unaware of the Bishop Latimer history. Plygain seems a a wonderful service to attend, but Alas! I will probably never see one!

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      1. I helped revivify the Welsh society in Cincinnati back in the day – with a delightful Welshman who worked for Berlitz (with whom I also acted in Shakespeare in the Park) and a lively local university professor – and enjoyed attending activities of the Boston area one when I was at Harvard, but have slothfully lost contact with both…

        Now it occurs to me to wonder if any Welsh immigrants and/or their descendants in various parts of the world have Plygain services! (I enjoyed the St. David’s Day services at Jesus College Chapel in Oxford, but never heard of any Plygain ones, there…)

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  2. Still none the wiser about the Collect, but I have encountered various and changing discussions of “the Mass in the Night, commonly called Midnight Mass” by two priests – one later a bishop – of the Church of England actively concerned with history and practice in books first published when Machen was in his thirties or forties and appearing in new editions the year after this article. Percy Dearmer’s The Parson’s Handbook first appeared in 1899. If in the 1902 edition he wrote (p. 437) “According to the old custom, there should be three Communions on Christmas Day, the first at midnight” by 1907 this had become (p. 507) “Experience leads one to doubt whether the revival of the Midnight Mass is desirable under modem conditions of life” – still there in the 1928 “Eleventh Edition” (p. 446). In 1907 he included a quotation from the second book I encountered, Walter Frere’s The Principles of Religious Ceremonial (1906): “It may, or may not, be desirable that Christians should begin their Christmas Day at midnight with a Eucharist. It was natural at any rate to do so in former days, though it may be questioned whether it is equally natural now” (p. 276) – words preserved unchanged in Frere’s 1928 “New Edition” (pp. 198-99). Dearmer’s observation in the 1899 “Second Edition” (p. 205) that “Care should be taken that there is one very early Celebration on all the great feasts, for the benefit of servants and others” is there unchanged in 1928 (p. 446). Scans of copies of all the editions of both books mentioned here – and more – can be found in the Internet Archive.

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  3. I found myself having an even more ‘Machen Christmas’ when I went looking at LibriVox for any short Machen works as audiobooks to enjoy during lunch as a sort of ‘secular hieroglyphic refectory’ and ended up first with “Scrooge 1920” – and then “The Happy Children” just in time for the Feast of the Holy Innocents.

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    1. Both stories are good, but “The Happy Children” is a sublime piece of war fiction. It is one of my favorite stories by AM.

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