The Weekly Machen
Below, Arthur Machen’s voice rings clearly and vibrantly from a Christmas season long ago, one amidst troubled times. Of the dozens of articles I’ve read, this ranks among my favorites, so I won’t tarry you. The conclusion is pure gold.
How Should We Spend Christmas?
“Cheerful and Cheap” the Watchword
by
Arthur Machen
November 8, 1915
We are now counting the weeks to Christmas; and wondering what it will be like; what it should be like.
Really; it will be our first war-Christmas. Last year preparations for the usual festal buying had been made long in advance by merchants and by shops; the presents had been ordered before the thunderbolt fell upon us. Moreover, even in last December we did not really know what had happened. In September 1914, I met a cheerful fool who told me that everything would be over by Christmas; as December wore on, May became a popular date for the triumphant ending of the war; “we can break through whenever we like; we are only waiting for a little dry weather so that we can do it easily”—almost with our hands in our pockets, it was suggested. Decidedly; the iron of the war had not entered into our hearts a year ago.
Now most of us, the experts always excepted, know better. Tho most awful terror that the world has ever experienced is upon us and upon the world. It is an immeasurable terror. We are to conquer and destroy the enemy; but at the cost of what anguish: even now we have not plumbed the sea of woe and blood through which we are to pass to victory. But I believe we know enough to make us consider seriously that this coming Christmas is to be like no other Christmas that England has ever known.
How, then, is it to be spent; rather, how much is to be spent in the consecrated celebration called Christmas presents? I think that the agreeable alliteration, “cheerful but cheap,” should be the watchword. No diamonds, but a buckle or a miniature-frame in eighteenth-century paste; no emeralds certainly, but the stones called precious—which are not so very precious—are of very beautiful colours.
And can we not give a helping hand to a class of shopman that has, I believe, been heavily hit by the war; I mean the curiosity shop keeper? I am not referring to the great dealers, to the folks who bargain with millionaires over undoubted Boule or Ming vases. These folks, I think, are able to look after themselves; in any case, good Britons can have nothing to say to them during the present troubles. I speak of the little men and of the minor branches of curiosity dealing. Let no man presume to give me a Sheraton sideboard or an armchair (with pedigree) on which the fourteenth Louis might have sat, for a Christmas present; but if anybody should come across an everyday chair similar to that occupied by Mr. Pickwick in Phiz’s frontispiece; well, I think I could accept it with an easy conscience. And I am ready to receive gratefully any quantity of that odd 1820-40 papier-maché ware, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. I believe it is going cheap.
But we grown-ups, like the wealthy dealers, can look after ourselves in this matter of presents. It is the children that we should think of chiefly, and we should determine that no shadow of the war shall be allowed to spoil their Christmas. Let us above all be unlike that wretched “Board of Guardians”—Guardians of the Poor, so strangely named—who cut off, or threatened to cut off the breakfast egg of the Workhouse children on Christmas Day last year, to help the children, as they said, to realise the gravity of the situation. By all means let us conceal the gravity of the situation from the children; we are no flaming angels to shut out little Adam and little Eve from Paradise.
And here, and chiefly, the motto that I propose, “cheerful and cheap” is the best guide. The poor children with the expensive toys! I have pitied them for years. It is four or five years ago, I think, since I made a tour of the Christmas toy-shops; and in one of them, I renumber, I saw a Doll’s House—which I should have liked to smash. It was about eight feet high. It had twelve rooms, all beautifully furnished. Hot and cold water were laid on the bathrooms. There was electric light throughout. Its price was, if I remember, twenty-five guineas. And how heartily the child who got it hated it! Children loathe these elaborations and costly fooleries; they are bored to tears by them. I believe they are, in reality, bribes to the children’s parents; I feel certain that that beastly twenty-five guinea doll’s house was given to a little girl by a gentleman who wished to be “in on the ground floor”—not of the doll’s house but of a financial scheme engineered by the little girl’s father. I hope no such costly, sinful tiresome nonsense will be on sale this Christmas; I hope there will be no toy calves in real calfskin, three feet high. This, I would say by the way, is the supreme outrage on the laws of the true toy world. The last thing that a toy-calf should be is to exactly resemble an actual calf. What any decent child wants is a real calf, not an actual calf. And a real calf is of wood, painted in the brightest green, scarlet or blue that the palette can furnish.
There is a man staying with me now who has just had a present that he thoroughly values and appreciates. He has nearly arrived at the ripe age of four, and has been so unfortunate as to form injudicious friendships; I am afraid that I must plead guilty here. But these flattering friends have given him at various times things that wind up which bore him, and a rocking-horse in some kind of “natural” skin, of which he is, not unjustly, alarmed. But the other day a lady friend of his gave him a stout wooden engine, painted in the most brilliant green and red—a true, good medieval colour scheme. It cost two shilling and threepence halfpenny, and he loves it dearly. Its wheels make a horrible noise as they revolve. The anguish on my countenance as he starts this machine is balm to his spirit.
And then I have thought of a toy, which there is yet time to make for Christmas. I am sure it can be done, though I don’t pretend to say how. You have a lot of pieces of wood, oddly painted, which you shake up in a box. And as you shake them, somehow they join together, and you never know when you empty the box on the table whether a spotty crocodile, a bulldog, or a dragon will come out. It is the kaleidoscope principle; and what a famous toy is the old kaleidoscope!
And then; how about games and puzzles for the winter evenings? We are going to spend a good many of the winter evenings by the fire this Christmastide. I wish the people who think of these things would send me any original game or puzzle they may have invented. I want something difficult, for there is no fun without difficulty; something mysterious like the the jigsaw puzzle—or the Universe.
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Machen’s remarks about toys reminded me of similar remarks in A. C. Harwood’s The Recovery of Man in Childhood. Harwood advised against toys that were overly “finished” and elaborate and that didn’t really invite the child’s exercise of imagination. It was what he said about vacations, though, that struck me particularly, although I don’t remember it precisely. He illustrated the difference in a child’s consciousness vs. an adult’s by describing a family going to some place with a famous beautiful vista; and the little child is happily playing with his toy as he sits on the ground, his back to the vista — something like that. In any event, CSL thought well of the book, though not doubt he would have disagreed with its specifically anthroposophical notions. I’ve not read it through, but I read enough of it at the right time in the family history that it influenced me.
Dale Nelson
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Harwood is an interesting figure. I have not read the book you cited, but I have a copy of “The Voice of Cecil Harwood,” edited by Barfield. I enjoyed the fiction it collected. I also find value in Barfield’s fiction, but in both cases, I can do without the anthroposophy.
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Barfield is like Tertullian or Origen — he may be read with profit but must be read with discernment; which may God grant us.
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Agreed. Good analogy.
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At the Feast of St. Nicholas the other day, I encountered a little Dutch newsreel item on YouTube entitled “St Nicholaas 1936” (an uncharacteristic upload on a channel called Biggest Trailer Database), and was struck by its including, 21 years after Machen’s article, something very like the “toy calves in real calfskin, three feet high” – as well as lots of elaborate mechanical toys and fancy dolls In comparison and contrast with his observation “Children loathe these elaborations and costly fooleries; they are bored to tears by them”, the viewer may conclude in how far the children are as interested and favorably impressed as the newsreel folk want us to think them, or not. Curiously, the item ends with children (including one dressed – and made up – as St. Nicholas’s Moorish assistant) singing a St. Martin song!
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Here it is:
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