The War on Christmas

You’d think that with all his Ciceronian rhetorical skill and all his Plutarchian knowledge of history, Winston Churchill would have written the definitive history of England. But his History of the English-Speaking Peoples (i.e. History of England with Notes on Places that Ended Up Speaking Its Language) has some problems. Churchill assumes much of his reader; it’s his right since his original readers had all been educated in English public schools in the early twentieth century. But for me, the book has gaps, abridgements, unexplained terms. Even though the work is four volumes long, it still reads at times like summary notes for people who already know the story. When James I dies, for instance, he says, “The first king of Great Britain was dead.” That reference to “Great Britain” jarred me when I read it several days ago because it reminded me of the significance of the united crown, which he had not explained (or even mentioned in the chapter). Yes, he said that James was King of Scotland and that he inherited the English crown. But he didn’t stop to highlight it: “Now for the first time one person reigned as monarch of both Scotland and England.” In a history for the uninitiated, the author would at the very least have introduced the term “Great Britain” at the beginning of James’s reign. OK, so maybe “Great Britain” isn’t all that hard to understand. But several other terms, even more cryptic to the American, appear without explanation: “Black Rod” (a person?), “the Chapel” (which he opposes to the Church), and “the Ironsides” (apparently a nickname for both Cromwell and, in some instances, for his cavalry).

Now I learned all about these problems thirty years ago when I first read the HESP. But I still wanted to read it again. Maybe I know enough now that reminders are all I need. Or maybe I just wanted to enjoy the stodgy eloquence again. In any case, this year, I reread The New World, volume 2 of the HESP, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The stories were good, and the missing bits didn’t bother me so much this time around since I wasn’t reading to learn this history for the first time.

But I actually started learning things (or relearning, I guess) in chapters 19 and 20, covering the English Civil War. “Here,” Sir Winston says in almost the last good thing he has to offer about Oliver Cromwell, “is the salient fact which distinguishes the English Revolution from all others: that those who wielded irresistible physical force were throughout convinced that it would give them no security. Nothing is more characteristic of the English people than their instinctive reverence even in rebellion for law and tradition.” The rebel forces may at first have tried to find legal precedent for their treason and may have sought a new stability that fit into their interpretation of existing law. But it goes downhill from there. After the King’s forces have been totally defeated, the Roundhead (i.e. rebel) army won’t disband because they have not been paid. Now begins what Churchill calls the Second Civil War. (So much for “irresistible physical force” respecting “law and tradition.”) Once Cromwell and his army takes over, he says, “We must not be led by Victorian writers into regarding this triumph of the Ironsides and of Cromwell as a kind of victory for democracy and the Parliamentary system over Divine Right and Old World dreams. It was the victory of some twenty thousand resolute, ruthless, disciplined, military fanatics over all that England ever willed or ever wished. . . . Thus the struggle, in which we have in these days so much sympathy and part, begun to bring about a constitutional and limited monarchy, had led only to the autocracy of the sword.”

Again, Churchill assumes things. I don’t know who those Victorian writers were. I didn’t grow up thinking of Cromwell as a lightbearer for democracy and parliamentarism. But I get the idea. I live in a free democracy, as well, and I want those who established my freedom to have had no flaws and to have labored and bled solely for the abstract cause of freedom for future generations. So I can see why historians of a previous age would want to make heroes out of very flawed humans who fought for their own purposes and yet, even on a route as indirect as that leading from Oliver Cromwell, paved the way for the progress of greater freedom from tyranny. But when Cromwell and his brand of Puritanism won the rule of a Brave New England, he wanted no such thing as personal liberty for all. Among all the tyrannical policies enacted by this regicide and traitor, none seems more telling to me than his war on Christmas. A literal war. On Christmas. His understanding of Christianity dictated that this holiday smacked of Catholicism and should not be celebrated by him or by anyone he had power over. So the armed forces of the English government entered English homes on December 25 without a warrant and examined dinners. If a goose was involved, they confiscated the goose and sometimes took into custody the perpetrators of the lewd crime of being merry about the birth of Christ.

As I think about it, I want Churchill to be perfect, too. I actually believe I owe my freedom partly to him and his stalwart stand against Hitler, lonely but unwavering until the rest of the English-Speaking Peoples (i.e. us) went shoulder-to-shoulder with him. So I want him to be a paragon, even though I know that in reality he was human, as broken and self-centered as the rest of us. And yet I must admire the good and the noble in the man, and high among those admirable qualities is his understanding that shutting down Christmas with guns is an atrocity.

Modern Morality

In the early days of this blog, I would have made at least three posts out of three books. These days, I’m inclined to make just one post out of Hardy, Galsworthy, and Joyce.

Hardy

Let’s begin with Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I don’t know exactly what I expected from a book that I had heard characterized as “shocking”; maybe I thought it would be graphic in its depiction of sex or violence. It was not graphic, and, not being a Victorian, I didn’t find it shocking, either. Tragic and heartbreaking, yes. Surprising or offensive (are these the two main definitions of “shocking”?), no. Tess is seduced by a man who uses a very dirty trick, and then she despises him and tries to start a new life in a place where people don’t know she’s not a virgin. Is this shocking? The book itself describes the situation as one that “happens to girls.” Surely every proper Victorian had – I don't know – cousins who went astray. Then Tess suffers the hypocritical judgment of a man who otherwise seems like a very decent fellow; I imagine most women have found themselves victim to the male's double standard. So, again, it just looks like honest storytelling to me. I sympathized with and admired Tess until the end (I won’t give it away), and I’m really not sure why even Victorian ladies had such trouble with it.

Perhaps more shocking than the question of sexual morals, though, was Hardy’s anti-Christian, anti-Theist stance. But how offensive could this really have been? Tess’s Christianity is ill informed and syncretistically infused with folk legends. Sure. Such things happen in rural areas. The clergymen in her area are mostly hypocrites and nonbelievers. I’ve known several of these myself, and surely the most sincere Victorian believers were familiar with such, as well. I don’t see how they could have taken that part of the atmosphere of the book as an attack on all Christianity. I’m sad for Hardy that he couldn’t believe. It seems to me that he wanted to and just couldn’t. His books, including this one, don’t come across to me as personal accusations of stupidity and hypocrisy on the part of all Christians but as the honest observations of a struggling man. His narration denies the existence of a God who makes sense of Tess’s life, a God who cares for her. But he doesn’t want to tear down the social fabric. He doesn’t ask for a change in the Constitution or the disestablishment of the Anglican Church. He shows no scorn for the believer. I’m sure it helps that I approach the book from a perspective different from that of Victorians: I live after the modern age and in a country with no established church. But, really, why were they shocked?

Before I move on with my thoughts on modern morality in my recent reading, I have to say that I don’t believe I’ve ever read more beautifully poetic descriptions of rural life than those Hardy provides in Tess. A sample:

Thus, during this October month of wonderful afternoons they roved along the meads by creeping paths which followed the brinks of trickling tributary brooks, hopping across by little wooden bridges to the other side, and back again. They were never out of the sound of some purling weir, whose buzz accompanied their own murmuring, while the beams of the sun, almost as horizontal as the mead itself, formed a pollen of radiance over the landscape.

Yes, it is very hard to believe sometimes that God cares for girls like Tess. But I hope that Hardy, in stolen moments, thought that perhaps a God could have made that pastoral landscape and empowered that beautiful language.

Galsworthy

Right after finishing Tess, I read Silver Spoon, the fifth entry in John Galsworthy’s nine-part Forsyte Saga. Partly because the story was so similar to Tess, which I had just found so moving, and partly because I had enjoyed book 4, The White Monkey, so much last year, this book was a bit disappointing. Again, the story revolves around a young woman, Marjorie Ferrar, who has had a premarital affair. But, unlike Tess, Marjorie has no shame about it, no regrets. Galsworthy, calling the situation “modern morality,” literally puts this new morality on trial. An acquaintance, Fleur Mont, writes to a friend that Marjorie “hasn’t a moral about her,” and Marjorie takes Fleur to court for libel, where Fleur’s only defense is to show that what she said is totally true. The jury finds in Fleur’s favor, but Fleur loses in the court of Society. Right or wrong, says Galsworthy, this is where we are: our culture is a spoiled baby, tossing food around with a silver spoon and delighting in the mess while our only consequence lies in being told by an indulgent nurse that we’re naughty. (Actually, why was I disappointed? That all sounds pretty interesting!)

Joyce

I’ve read that some people think James Joyce spoke “the last word” on human sexuality in Ulysses. All I can say is that those critics and readers must not know very many words about human sexuality; I think much more can be spoken. In any case, I expected more “modern morality” in Finnegans Wake, but I didn’t find it. In fact, I didn’t find much that I could understand at all. I knew that the book ended with the line “A way a lone a last a loved a long the,” a string of words that strikes me as both interestingly cryptic and extremely beautiful. So I knew that the adventure would be loopy, but I didn’t know it would be quite as crazy as it has turned out to be. I had immense trouble getting through just the first day’s portion. I told myself decades ago that one day I would read this “hardest of all books to read.” So I don’t want to give up.

But in reading more about the book, I found that most readers don’t just sit down and take it in in a few days. Most take years. So, new plan. I’m going to divide Finnegans Wake up over not only the remaining five years of my current ten-year reading plan but also the ten years of my next decade-long schedule (most of which is already set). I don’t know what I’ll get out of the experience, but, assuming I live that long, I will finish reading this book!