If we cannot claim with all the patriotic10 confidence we should like to feel that it was Irving who set Christmas in that light in which Dickens saw its aesthetic11 capabilities12, it is perhaps because all origins are obscure. For anything that we positively13 know to the contrary, the Druidic rites14 from which English Christmas borrowed the inviting15 mistletoe, if not the decorative16 holly17, may have been accompanied by the recitations of holiday triads. But it is certain that several plays of Shakespeare were produced, if not written, for the celebration of the holidays, and that then the black tide of Puritanism which swept over men's souls blotted18 out all such observance of Christmas with the festival itself. It came in again, by a natural reaction, with the returning Stuarts, and throughout the period of the Restoration it enjoyed a perfunctory favor. There is mention of it; often enough in the eighteenth-century essayists, in the Spectators and Idlers and Tatlers; but the world about the middle of the last century laments19 the neglect into which it had fallen. Irving seems to have been the first to observe its surviving rites lovingly, and Dickens divined its immense advantage as a literary occasion. He made it in some sort entirely20 his for a time, and there can be no question but it was he who again endeared it to the whole English-speaking world, and gave it a wider and deeper hold than it had ever had before upon the fancies and affections of our race.
The might of that great talent no one can gainsay21, though in the light of the truer work which has since been done his literary principles seem almost as grotesque22 as his theories of political economy. In no one direction was his erring23 force more felt than in the creation of holiday literature as we have known it for the last half-century. Creation, of course, is the wrong word; it says too much; but in default of a better word, it may stand. He did not make something out of nothing; the material was there before him; the mood and even the need of his time contributed immensely to his success, as the volition24 of the subject helps on the mesmerist; but it is within bounds to say that he was the chief agency in the development of holiday literature as we have known it, as he was the chief agency in universalizing the great Christian25 holiday as we now have it. Other agencies wrought26 with him and after him; but it was he who rescued Christmas from Puritan distrust, and humanized it and consecrated27 it to the hearts and homes of all.
Very rough magic, as it now seems, he used in working his miracle, but there is no doubt about his working it. One opens his Christmas stories in this later day—'The Carol, The Chimes, The Haunted Man, The Cricket on the Hearth,' and all the rest—and with "a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed," asks himself for the preternatural virtue28 that they once had. The pathos29 appears false and strained; the humor largely horseplay; the character theatrical30; the joviality31 pumped; the psychology32 commonplace; the sociology alone funny. It is a world of real clothes, earth, air, water, and the rest; the people often speak the language of life, but their motives33 are as disproportioned and improbable, and their passions and purposes as overcharged, as those of the worst of Balzac's people. Yet all these monstrosities, as they now appear, seem to have once had symmetry and verity34; they moved the most cultivated intelligences of the time; they touched true hearts; they made everybody laugh and cry.
This was perhaps because the imagination, from having been fed mostly upon gross unrealities, always responds readily to fantastic appeals. There has been an amusing sort of awe35 of it, as if it were the channel of inspired thought, and were somehow sacred. The most preposterous36 inventions of its activity have been regarded in their time as the greatest feats37 of the human mind, and in its receptive form it has been nursed into an imbecility to which the truth is repugnant, and the fact that the beautiful resides nowhere else is inconceivable. It has been flattered out of all sufferance in its toyings with the mere38 elements of character, and its attempts to present these in combinations foreign to experience are still praised by the poorer sort of critics as masterpieces of creative work.
In the day of Dickens's early Christmas stories it was thought admirable for the author to take types of humanity which everybody knew, and to add to them from his imagination till they were as strange as beasts and birds talking. Now we begin to feel that human nature is quite enough, and that the best an author can do is to show it as it is. But in those stories of his Dickens said to his readers, Let us make believe so-and- so; and the result was a joint39 juggle40, a child's-play, in which the wholesome41 allegiance to life was lost. Artistically42, therefore, the scheme was false, and artistically, therefore, it must perish. It did not perish, however, before it had propagated itself in a whole school of unrealities so ghastly that one can hardly recall without a shudder43 those sentimentalities at secondhand to which holiday literature was abandoned long after the original conjurer had wearied of his performance.
Under his own eye and of conscious purpose a circle of imitators grew up in the fabrication of Christmas stories. They obviously formed themselves upon his sobered ideals; they collaborated44 with him, and it was often hard to know whether it was Dickens or Sala or Collins who was writing. The Christmas book had by that time lost its direct application to Christmas. It dealt with shipwrecks45 a good deal, and with perilous46 adventures of all kinds, and with unmerited suffering, and with ghosts and mysteries, because human nature, secure from storm and danger in a well-lighted room before a cheerful fire, likes to have these things imaged for it, and its long-puerilized fancy will bear an endless repetition of them. The wizards who wrought their spells with them contented47 themselves with the lasting48 efficacy of these simple means; and the apprentice-wizards and journeyman-wizards who have succeeded them practise the same arts at the old stand; but the ethical49 intention which gave dignity to Dickens's Christmas stories of still earlier date has almost wholly disappeared. It was a quality which could not be worked so long as the phantoms50 and hair-breadth escapes. People always knew that character is not changed by a dream in a series of tableaux51; that a ghost cannot do much towards reforming an inordinately52 selfish person; that a life cannot be turned white, like a head of hair, in a single night, by the most allegorical apparition53; that want and sin and shame cannot be cured by kettles singing on the hob; and gradually they ceased to make believe that there was virtue in these devices and appliances. Yet the ethical intention was not fruitless, crude as it now appears.
It was well once a year, if not oftener, to remind men by parable54 of the old, simple truths; to teach them that forgiveness, and charity, and the endeavor for life better and purer than each has lived, are the principles upon which alone the world holds together and gets forward. It was well for the comfortable and the refined to be put in mind of the savagery55 and suffering all round them, and to be taught, as Dickens was always teaching, that certain feelings which grace human nature, as tenderness for the sick and helpless, self-sacrifice and generosity56, self-respect and manliness57 and womanliness, are the common heritage of the race; the direct gift of Heaven, shared equally by the rich and poor. It did not necessarily detract from the value of the lesson that, with the imperfect art of the time, he made his paupers58 and porters not only human, but superhuman, and too altogether virtuous59; and it remained true that home life may be lovely under the lowliest roof, although he liked to paint it without a shadow on its beauty there. It is still a fact that the sick are very often saintly, although he put no peevishness60 into their patience with their ills. His ethical intention told for manhood and fraternity and tolerance61, and when this intention disappeared from the better holiday literature, that literature was sensibly the poorer for the loss.
点击收听单词发音
1 horrid | |
adj.可怕的;令人惊恐的;恐怖的;极讨厌的 | |
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2 picturesque | |
adj.美丽如画的,(语言)生动的,绘声绘色的 | |
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3 chivalrous | |
adj.武士精神的;对女人彬彬有礼的 | |
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4 redeemed | |
adj. 可赎回的,可救赎的 动词redeem的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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5 foliage | |
n.叶子,树叶,簇叶 | |
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6 preoccupied | |
adj.全神贯注的,入神的;被抢先占有的;心事重重的v.占据(某人)思想,使对…全神贯注,使专心于( preoccupy的过去式) | |
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7 inscribed | |
v.写,刻( inscribe的过去式和过去分词 );内接 | |
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8 distinctively | |
adv.特殊地,区别地 | |
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9 robust | |
adj.强壮的,强健的,粗野的,需要体力的,浓的 | |
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10 patriotic | |
adj.爱国的,有爱国心的 | |
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11 aesthetic | |
adj.美学的,审美的,有美感 | |
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12 capabilities | |
n.能力( capability的名词复数 );可能;容量;[复数]潜在能力 | |
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13 positively | |
adv.明确地,断然,坚决地;实在,确实 | |
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14 rites | |
仪式,典礼( rite的名词复数 ) | |
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15 inviting | |
adj.诱人的,引人注目的 | |
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16 decorative | |
adj.装饰的,可作装饰的 | |
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17 holly | |
n.[植]冬青属灌木 | |
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18 blotted | |
涂污( blot的过去式和过去分词 ); (用吸墨纸)吸干 | |
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19 laments | |
n.悲恸,哀歌,挽歌( lament的名词复数 )v.(为…)哀悼,痛哭,悲伤( lament的第三人称单数 ) | |
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20 entirely | |
ad.全部地,完整地;完全地,彻底地 | |
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21 gainsay | |
v.否认,反驳 | |
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22 grotesque | |
adj.怪诞的,丑陋的;n.怪诞的图案,怪人(物) | |
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23 erring | |
做错事的,错误的 | |
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24 volition | |
n.意志;决意 | |
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25 Christian | |
adj.基督教徒的;n.基督教徒 | |
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26 wrought | |
v.引起;以…原料制作;运转;adj.制造的 | |
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27 consecrated | |
adj.神圣的,被视为神圣的v.把…奉为神圣,给…祝圣( consecrate的过去式和过去分词 );奉献 | |
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28 virtue | |
n.德行,美德;贞操;优点;功效,效力 | |
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29 pathos | |
n.哀婉,悲怆 | |
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30 theatrical | |
adj.剧场的,演戏的;做戏似的,做作的 | |
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31 joviality | |
n.快活 | |
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32 psychology | |
n.心理,心理学,心理状态 | |
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33 motives | |
n.动机,目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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34 verity | |
n.真实性 | |
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35 awe | |
n.敬畏,惊惧;vt.使敬畏,使惊惧 | |
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36 preposterous | |
adj.荒谬的,可笑的 | |
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37 feats | |
功绩,伟业,技艺( feat的名词复数 ) | |
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38 mere | |
adj.纯粹的;仅仅,只不过 | |
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39 joint | |
adj.联合的,共同的;n.关节,接合处;v.连接,贴合 | |
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40 juggle | |
v.变戏法,纂改,欺骗,同时做;n.玩杂耍,纂改,花招 | |
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41 wholesome | |
adj.适合;卫生的;有益健康的;显示身心健康的 | |
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42 artistically | |
adv.艺术性地 | |
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43 shudder | |
v.战粟,震动,剧烈地摇晃;n.战粟,抖动 | |
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44 collaborated | |
合作( collaborate的过去式和过去分词 ); 勾结叛国 | |
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45 shipwrecks | |
海难,船只失事( shipwreck的名词复数 ); 沉船 | |
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46 perilous | |
adj.危险的,冒险的 | |
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47 contented | |
adj.满意的,安心的,知足的 | |
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48 lasting | |
adj.永久的,永恒的;vbl.持续,维持 | |
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49 ethical | |
adj.伦理的,道德的,合乎道德的 | |
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50 phantoms | |
n.鬼怪,幽灵( phantom的名词复数 ) | |
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51 tableaux | |
n.舞台造型,(由活人扮演的)静态画面、场面;人构成的画面或场景( tableau的名词复数 );舞台造型;戏剧性的场面;绚丽的场景 | |
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52 inordinately | |
adv.无度地,非常地 | |
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53 apparition | |
n.幽灵,神奇的现象 | |
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54 parable | |
n.寓言,比喻 | |
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55 savagery | |
n.野性 | |
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56 generosity | |
n.大度,慷慨,慷慨的行为 | |
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57 manliness | |
刚毅 | |
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58 paupers | |
n.穷人( pauper的名词复数 );贫民;贫穷 | |
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59 virtuous | |
adj.有品德的,善良的,贞洁的,有效力的 | |
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60 peevishness | |
脾气不好;爱发牢骚 | |
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61 tolerance | |
n.宽容;容忍,忍受;耐药力;公差 | |
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