Introduction
Arthur Machen is often regarded as a mystic. This is a true statement, though I think many commentators are often confused as to the origin of his mysticism. Machen was a Christian gentleman, a faithful adherent of the great mystery religion. The following seasonal article is a snapshot into his spiritual thinking and his approach to the sacramental reality of the world around him. And, he explains it best . . .
The Spirit of Christmas
According to Dickens
by
Arthur Machen
December 24, 1920
It often amuses me, in reading comments on Dickens and, more especially, on Dickens’s conception of Christmas, to see that most illustrious man kindly excused and let down gently, as it were, on account of the things in him which are his chiefest and his rarest merit.
It has dawned on so very few people that the pleasures of the palate rest, ultimately, on exactly the same ground as the pleasures of the palette. This sounds an easy joke, but it is nothing of the sort: it is simply the way of saying that we are creatures of sense, and that we can only approach the higher and the inner things through the lower and outer things.
Dickens did not understand this, but he felt it, which is much more to the point. Dickens was one of the last men to understand that honest mirth is next akin to sanctity, that pork—“don’t he breed nice pork!” as the Fat Boy said of his master—is not remote from poetry; and, finally, that there is a high delight and rapture in all good things of nature.
The darkness and gloom of the wintry sky, the bitter wind shrilling and shivering through the wintry copse: excellent these; excellent and admirable also the good wine that ascends from deep vaulted cellars and brings the sun with it and the savour of hot afternoons on slopes of Gascony and Burgundy, Spain and Portugal.
At Dingley Dell
Listen to the talk about the kitchen hearth of Dingley Dell, as master and guests and men sat about the huge fire of blazing logs, drinking from a “mighty bowl of wassail, something smaller than an ordinary wash-house copper, in which the hot apples were hissing and bubbling with a rich look and jolly sound.” They stirred the logs, the red sparks fled up the chimney in myriads, the fire glowed to a deep red, and then:
“How it snows!” said one of the men in a low tone.
“Snows, does it?” said Wardle.
“Rough, cold night, sir,” replied the man, “and there’s a wind got up, that drifts it across the fields in a thick white cloud.”
See how all things are fused together and enhance one another; the wind that’s piercing cold, rumbling in the chimney, is part of the joy of the flaming logs; the bitter drift of snow on the winter fields is part of the delight of all the honest mirth about the hearth; the bubbling of the wassail is the echo of the blast and the response to it.
Fat farmers, silly Londoners, greedy servants over-drinking, over-eating and over-heating themselves; that is how the scene appears to some to-day; others, who understand the Dickens Christmas will hear an old song about wind and snow, ice and cold, hoar frost and rime, wassail and fire fulfilling His word.
The Weekly Machen
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