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Christian and Pagan, by Clement A. Miles

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Title: Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan

Author: Clement A. Miles

Release Date: August 21, 2006 [EBook #19098]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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Christmas In Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan

by Clement A. Miles


Published by T. Fisher Unwin

1912


[Illustration:

THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI (DETAIL).

GENTILE DA FABRIANO

(_Florence: Accademia_)]

|5|




PREFACE


In this volume I have tried to show how Christmas is or has been kept in
various lands and ages, and to trace as far as possible the origin of the
pagan elements that have mingled with the Church's feast of the Nativity.

In Part I. I have dealt with the festival on its distinctively Christian
side. The book has, however, been so planned that readers not interested
in this aspect of Christmas may pass over Chapters II.-V., and proceed at
once from the Introduction to Part II., which treats of pagan survivals.

The book has been written primarily for the general reader, but I venture
to hope that, with all its imperfections, it may be of some use to the
more serious student, as a rough outline map of the field of Christmas
customs, and as bringing together materials hitherto scattered through a
multitude of volumes in various languages. There is certainly room for a
comprehensive English book on Christmas, taking account of the results of
modern historical and folk-lore research.

The writer of a work of this kind necessarily owes an immense debt to the
labours of others. In my bibliographical notes I have done my best to
acknowledge the sources from which I have drawn. It is only right that
I should express here my special obligation, both for information and for
suggestions, to Mr. E. K. Chambers's "The Mediaeval Stage," an invaluable
storehouse of fact, theory, and bibliographical references. I also owe
much to the important monographs of Dr. A. Tille, "Die Geschichte der
deutschen Weihnacht" and "Yule and Christmas"; to Dr. Feilberg's Danish
work, "Jul," the fullest account of Christmas |6|  customs yet written;
and of course, like every student of folk-lore, to Dr. Frazer's "The
Golden Bough."

References to authorities will be found at the end of the volume, and are
indicated by small numerals in the text; notes requiring to be read in
close conjunction with the text are printed at the foot of the pages to
which they relate, and are indicated by asterisks, &c.

   [Transcriber's Note: The 'small numerals' are represented in this
   ebook by numbers in {curly braces}. The footnotes appear at the end
   of the ebook and are indicated by numbers in [square brackets]. Page
   numbers from the original edition have been retained and appear in
   the text between |pipe characters|.]

I have to thank Mr. Frank Sidgwick for most kindly reading my proofs and
portions of my MS., and for some valuable suggestions.

                                                                C. A. M.

|7|




CONTENTS


  PREFACE                                                            5

  CHAPTER I
  INTRODUCTION                                                       15

    The Origin and Purpose of Festivals--Ideas suggested by
    Christmas--Pagan and Christian Elements--The Names of the
    Festival--Foundation of the Feast of the Nativity--Its
    Relation to the Epiphany--December 25 and the _Natalis
    Invicti_--The Kalends of January--Yule and Teutonic
    Festivals--The Church and Pagan Survivals--Two Conflicting
    Types of Festival--Their Interaction--Plan of the Book.


  PART I--THE CHRISTIAN FEAST

  CHAPTER II
  CHRISTMAS POETRY (I)                                               29

    Ancient Latin Hymns, their Dogmatic, Theological
    Character--Humanizing Influence of Franciscanism--Jacopone da
    Todi's Vernacular Verse--German Catholic Poetry--Mediaeval
    English Carols.

  CHAPTER III
  CHRISTMAS POETRY (II)                                              53

    The French _Noël_--Latin Hymnody in Eighteenth-century
    France--Spanish Christmas Verse--Traditional Carols of Many
    Countries--Christmas Poetry in Protestant
    Germany--Post-Reformation Verse in England--Modern English
    Carols. |8|

  CHAPTER IV
  CHRISTMAS IN LITURGY AND POPULAR DEVOTION                          87

    Advent and Christmas Offices of the Roman Church--The Three
    Masses of Christmas, their Origin and their Celebration in
    Rome--The Midnight Mass in Many Lands--Protestant Survivals of
    the Night Services--Christmas in the Greek Church--The Eastern
    Epiphany and the Blessing of the Waters--The _Presepio_ or
    Crib, its Supposed Institution by St. Francis--Early Traces of
    the Crib--The Crib in Germany, Tyrol, &c.--Cradle-rocking in
    Mediaeval Germany--Christmas Minstrels in Italy and
    Sicily--The _Presepio_ in Italy--Ceremonies with the _Culla_
    and the _Bambino_ in Rome--Christmas in Italian London--The
    Spanish Christmas--Possible Survivals of the Crib in England.

  CHAPTER V
  CHRISTMAS DRAMA                                                    119

    Origins of the Mediaeval Drama--Dramatic Tendencies in the
    Liturgy--Latin Liturgical Plays--The Drama becomes
    Laicized--Characteristics of the Popular Drama--The Nativity
    in the English Miracle Cycles--Christmas Mysteries in
    France--Later French Survivals of Christmas Drama--German
    Christmas Plays--Mediaeval Italian Plays and Pageants--Spanish
    Nativity Plays--Modern Survivals in Various Countries--The
    Star Singers, &c.

  POSTSCRIPT                                                         155


  PART II--PAGAN SURVIVALS

  CHAPTER VI
  PRE-CHRISTIAN WINTER FESTIVALS                                     159

    The Church and Superstition--Nature of Pagan Survivals--Racial
    Origins--Roman Festivals of the _Saturnalia_ and Kalends--Was
    there a Teutonic Midwinter Festival?--The Teutonic, Celtic, and
    Slav New Year--Customs attracted to Christmas or January 1--
    The Winter Cycle of Festivals--_Rationale_ of Festival Ritual:
    (_a_) Sacrifice and Sacrament, (_b_) The Cult of the Dead,
    (_c_) Omens and Charms for the New Year--Compromise in the
    Later Middle Ages--The Puritans and Christmas--Decay of Old
    Traditions. |9|

  CHAPTER VII
  ALL HALLOW TIDE TO MARTINMAS                                       187

    All Saints' and All Souls' Days, their Relation to a New Year
    Festival--All Souls' Eve and Tendance of the Departed--Soul
    Cakes in England and on the Continent--Pagan Parallels of All
    Souls'--Hallowe'en Charms and Omens--Hallowe'en Fires--Guy
    Fawkes Day--"Old Hob," the _Schimmelreiter_, and other Animal
    Masks--Martinmas and its Slaughter--Martinmas Drinking--St.
    Martin's Fires in Germany--Winter Visitors in the Low
    Countries and Germany--St. Martin as Gift-bringer--St.
    Martin's Rod.

  CHAPTER VIII
  ST. CLEMENT TO ST. THOMAS                                          209

    St. Clement's Day Quests and Processions--St. Catherine's Day
    as Spinsters' Festival--St. Andrew's Eve Auguries--The
    _Klöpfelnächte_--St. Nicholas's Day, the Saint as
    Gift-bringer, and his Attendants--Election of the Boy
    Bishop--St. Nicholas's Day at Bari--St. Lucia's Day in Sweden,
    Sicily, and Central Europe--St. Thomas's Day as School
    Festival--Its Uncanny Eve--"Going a-Thomassin'."

  CHAPTER IX
  CHRISTMAS EVE AND THE TWELVE DAYS                                  227

    Christkind, Santa Klaus, and Knecht Ruprecht--Talking Animals
    and other Wonders of Christmas Eve--Scandinavian Beliefs about
    Trolls and the Return of the Dead--Traditional Christmas Songs
    in Eastern Europe--The Twelve Days, their Christian Origin and
    Pagan Superstitions--The Raging Host--Hints of Supernatural
    Visitors in England--The German _Frauen_--The Greek
    _Kallikantzaroi_.

  CHAPTER X
  THE YULE LOG                                                       249

    The Log as Centre of the Domestic Christmas--Customs of the
    Southern Slavs--The _Polaznik_--Origin of the Yule
    Log--Probable Connection with Vegetation-cults or
    Ancestor-worship--The _Souche de Noël_ in France--Italian and
    German Christmas Logs--English Customs--The Yule Candle in
    England and Scandinavia. |10|

  CHAPTER XI
  THE CHRISTMAS-TREE, DECORATIONS, AND GIFTS                         261

    The Christmas-tree a German Creation--Charm of the German
    Christmas--Early Christmas-trees--The Christmas
    Pyramid--Spread of the Tree in Modern Germany and other
    Countries--Origin of the Christmas-tree--Beliefs about
    Flowering Trees at Christmas--Evergreens at the
    Kalends--Non-German Parallels to the Christmas-tree--Christmas
    Decorations connected with Ancient Kalends Customs--Sacredness
    of Holly and Mistletoe--Floors strewn with Straw--Christmas
    and New Year Gifts, their Connection with the Roman _Strenae_
    and St. Nicholas--Present-giving in Various
    Countries--Christmas Cards.

  CHAPTER XII
  CHRISTMAS FEASTING AND SACRIFICIAL SURVIVALS                       281

    Prominence of Eating in the English Christmas--The Boar's
    Head, the Goose, and other Christmas Fare--Frumenty, Sowens,
    Yule Cakes, and the Wassail Bowl--Continental Christmas
    Dishes, their Possible Origins--French and German Cakes--The
    Animals' Christmas Feast--Cakes in Eastern Europe--Relics of
    Animal Sacrifice--Hunting the Wren--Various Games of
    Sacrificial Origin.

  CHAPTER XIII
  MASKING, THE MUMMERS' PLAY, THE FEAST OF FOOLS, AND THE BOY BISHOP 295

    English Court Masking--"The Lord of Misrule"--The Mummers'
    Play, the Sword-Dance, and the Morris Dance--Origin of St.
    George and other Characters--Mumming in Eastern Europe--The
    Feast of Fools, its History and Suppression--The Boy Bishop,
    his Functions and Sermons--Modern Survivals of the Boy Bishop.

  CHAPTER XIV
  ST. STEPHEN'S, ST. JOHN'S, AND HOLY INNOCENTS' DAYS                309

    Horse Customs of St. Stephen's Day--The Swedish St.
    Stephen--St. John's Wine--Childermas and its Beatings. |11|

  CHAPTER XV
  NEW YEAR'S DAY                                                     319

    Principle of New Year Customs--The New Year in France,
    Germany, the United States, and Eastern
    Europe--"First-footing" in Great Britain--Scottish New Year
    Practices--Highland Fumigation and "Breast-strip"
    Customs--Hogmanay and Aguillanneuf--New Year Processions in
    Macedonia, Roumania, Greece, and Rome--Methods of
    Augury--Sundry New Year Charms.

  CHAPTER XVI
  EPIPHANY TO CANDLEMAS                                              335

    The Twelfth Cake and the "King of the Bean"--French Twelfth
    Night Customs--St. Basil's Cake in Macedonia--Epiphany and the
    Expulsion of Evils--The Befana in Italy--The Magi as
    Present-bringers--Greek Epiphany Customs--Wassailing
    Fruit-trees--Herefordshire and Irish Twelfth Night
    Practices--The "Haxey Hood" and Christmas Football--St. Knut's
    Day in Sweden--Rock Day--Plough Monday--Candlemas, its
    Ecclesiastical and Folk Ceremonies--Farewells to Christmas.

  CONCLUSION                                                         357

  NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY                                             361

  INDEX                                                              389

|12|

[Illustration: MADONNA AND CHILD. _By Albrecht Dürer._]

|13|




ILLUSTRATIONS


  THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI (DETAIL)                       Frontispiece
    Gentile da Fabriano. (_Florence: Accademia_)

  MADONNA AND CHILD                                                  13
    Albert Dürer

  MADONNA ENTHRONED WITH SAINTS AND ANGELS                           31
    Pesellino. (_Empoli Gallery_)

  JACOPONE IN ECSTASY BEFORE THE VIRGIN                              40
    From "Laude di Frate Jacopone da Todi" (Florence, 1490)

  THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS                                     55
    By Fouquet. (_Musée Condé, Chantilly_)

  THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT: THE REST BY THE WAY                         70
    Master of the Seven Sorrows of Mary. (Also attributed to Joachim
    Patinir.) (_Vienna: Imperial Gallery_)

  SINGING "VOM HIMMEL HOCH" FROM A CHURCH TOWER AT CHRISTMAS         71
    By Ludwig Richter

  THE NATIVITY                                                       89
    From Add. MS. 32454 in the British Museum. (French, 15th Century)

  A NEAPOLITAN _PRESEPIO_                                            108

  CALABRIAN SHEPHERDS PLAYING IN ROME AT CHRISTMAS                   112
    After an Etching by D. Allan. From Hone's "Every-day Book"
    (London, 1826)

  ST. FRANCIS INSTITUTES THE _PRESEPIO_ AT GRECCIO                   114
    By Giotto. (_Upper Church of St. Francis, Assisi_)

|14|

  THE _BAMBINO_ OF ARA COELI                                         115

  THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS                                     121
    From Broadside No. 305 in the Collection of the Society of
    Antiquaries at Burlington House

  THE SHEPHERDS OF BETHLEHEM                                         140
    From "Le grant Kalendrier & compost des Bergiers" (N. le Rouge,
    Troyes, 1529)

  THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI                                          154
    Masaccio. (_Berlin: Kaiser Friedrich Museum_)

  NEW YEAR MUMMERS IN MANCHURIA                                      161
    An Asiatic example of animal masks

  CHRISTMAS EVE IN DEVONSHIRE--THE MUMMERS COMING IN                 229

  THE GERMAN CHRISTMAS-TREE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY                263
    From an engraving by Joseph Kellner

  CHRISTMAS MORNING IN LOWER AUSTRIA                                 281
    By Ferdinand Waldmüller (b. 1793)

  YORKSHIRE SWORD-ACTORS: ST. GEORGE IN COMBAT WITH ST. PETER        297
    From an article by Mr. T. M. Fallow in _The Antiquary_, May, 1895

  THE EPIPHANY IN FLORENCE                                           337

|15| |16| |17|




CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION


    The Origin and Purpose of Festivals--Ideas suggested by
    Christmas--Pagan and Christian Elements--The Names of the
    Festival--Foundation of the Feast of the Nativity--Its Relation to
    the Epiphany--December 25 and the _Natalis Invicti_--The Kalends of
    January--Yule and Teutonic Festivals--The Church and Pagan
    Survivals--Two Conflicting Types of Festival--Their Interaction--Plan
    of the Book.

It has been an instinct in nearly all peoples, savage or civilized, to
set aside certain days for special ceremonial observances, attended by
outward rejoicing. This tendency to concentrate on special times answers
to man's need to lift himself above the commonplace and the everyday, to
escape from the leaden weight of monotony that oppresses him. "We tend to
tire of the most eternal splendours, and a mark on our calendar, or a
crash of bells at midnight maybe, reminds us that we have only recently
been created."[1]{1} That they wake people up is the great justification
of festivals, and both man's religious sense and his joy in life have
generally tended to rise "into peaks and towers and turrets, into
superhuman exceptions which really prove the rule."{2} It is difficult
to be religious, impossible to be merry, at every moment of life, and
festivals are as sunlit peaks, testifying, above dark valleys, to the
eternal radiance. This is one view of the purpose and value of festivals,
and their function of cheering people and giving them larger perspectives
has no doubt been an important reason for their maintenance in the past.
If we could trace the custom of festival-keeping back to its origins in
primitive society |18| we should find the same principle of
specialization involved, though it is probable that the practice came
into being not for the sake of its moral or emotional effect, but from
man's desire to lay up, so to speak, a stock of sanctity, magical not
ethical, for ordinary days.

The first holy-day-makers were probably more concerned with such material
goods as food than with spiritual ideals, when they marked with sacred
days the rhythm of the seasons.{3} As man's consciousness developed, the
subjective aspect of the matter would come increasingly into prominence,
until in the festivals of the Christian Church the main object is to
quicken the devotion of the believer by contemplation of the mysteries of
the faith. Yet attached, as we shall see, to many Christian festivals,
are old notions of magical sanctity, probably quite as potent in the
minds of the common people as the more spiritual ideas suggested by the
Church's feasts.

In modern England we have almost lost the festival habit, but if there is
one feast that survives among us as a universal tradition it is
Christmas. We have indeed our Bank Holidays, but they are mere days of
rest and amusement, and for the mass of the people Easter and Whitsuntide
have small religious significance--Christmas alone has the character of
sanctity which marks the true festival. The celebration of Christmas has
often little or nothing to do with orthodox dogma, yet somehow the sense
of obligation to keep the feast is very strong, and there are few English
people, however unconventional, who escape altogether the spell of
tradition in this matter.

_Christmas_--how many images the word calls up: we think of carol-singers
and holly-decked churches where people hymn in time-honoured strains the
Birth of the Divine Child; of frost and snow, and, in contrast, of warm
hearths and homes bright with light and colour, very fortresses against
the cold; of feasting and revelry, of greetings and gifts exchanged; and
lastly of vaguely superstitious customs, relics of long ago, performed
perhaps out of respect for use and wont, or merely in jest, or with a
deliberate attempt to throw ourselves back into the past, to re-enter for
a moment the mental childhood of the race. These are a few of |19| the
pictures that rise pell-mell in the minds of English folk at the mention
of Christmas; how many other scenes would come before us if we could
realize what the festival means to men of other nations. Yet even these
will suggest what hardly needs saying, that Christmas is something far
more complex than a Church holy-day alone, that the celebration of the
Birth of Jesus, deep and touching as is its appeal to those who hold the
faith of the Incarnation, is but one of many elements that have entered
into the great winter festival.

In the following pages I shall try to present a picture, sketchy and
inadequate though it must be, of what Christmas is and has been to the
peoples of Europe, and to show as far as possible the various elements
that have gone into its make-up. Most people have a vague impression that
these are largely pagan, but comparatively few have any idea of the
process by which the heathen elements have become mingled with that which
is obviously Christian, and equal obscurity prevails as to the nature and
meaning of the non-Christian customs. The subject is vast, and has not
been thoroughly explored as yet, but the labours of historians and
folk-lorists have made certain conclusions probable, and have produced
hypotheses of great interest and fascination.

I have spoken of "Christian"[2] and "pagan" elements. The distinction is
blurred to some extent by the clothing of heathen customs in a
superficial Christianity, but on the whole it is clear enough to justify
the division of this book into two parts, one dealing with the Church's
feast of the Holy Birth, the other with those remains of pagan winter
festivals which extend from November to January, but cluster especially
round Christmas and the Twelve Days.

       *       *       *       *       *

Before we pass to the various aspects of the Church's Christmas, we must
briefly consider its origins and its relation to certain |20| pagan
festivals, the customs of which will be dealt with in detail in Part II.

The names given to the feast by different European peoples throw a
certain amount of light on its history. Let us take five of
them--_Christmas_, _Weihnacht_, _Noël_, _Calendas_, and _Yule_--and see
what they suggest.

I. The English _Christmas_ and its Dutch equivalent _Kerstmisse_, plainly
point to the ecclesiastical side of the festival; the German
_Weihnacht_{4} (sacred night) is vaguer, and might well be either pagan
or Christian; in point of fact it seems to be Christian, since it does
not appear till the year 1000, when the Faith was well established in
Germany.{5} _Christmas_ and _Weihnacht_, then, may stand for the
distinctively Christian festival, the history of which we may now briefly
study.

When and where did the keeping of Christmas begin? Many details of its
early history remain in uncertainty, but it is fairly clear that the
earliest celebration of the Birth of Christ on December 25 took place at
Rome about the middle of the fourth century, and that the observance of
the day spread from the western to the eastern Church, which had before
been wont to keep January 6 as a joint commemoration of the Nativity and
the Baptism of the Redeemer.[3]

The first mention of a Nativity feast on December 25 is found in a Roman
document known as the Philocalian Calendar, dating from the year 354, but
embodying an older document evidently belonging to the year 336. It is
uncertain to which date the Nativity reference belongs;[4] but further
back than 336 at all events the festival cannot be traced.

From Rome, Christmas spread throughout the West, with the |21| conversion
of the barbarians. Whether it came to England through the Celtic Church
is uncertain, but St. Augustine certainly brought it with him, and
Christmas Day, 598, witnessed a great event, the baptism of more than
ten thousand English converts.{9} In 567 the Council of Tours had
declared the Twelve Days, from Christmas to Epiphany, a festal tide;{10}
the laws of Ethelred (991-1016) ordained it to be a time of peace and
concord among Christian men, when all strife must cease.{11} In Germany
Christmas was established by the Synod of Mainz in 813;{12} in Norway by
King Hakon the Good about the middle of the tenth century.{13}

In the East, as has been seen, the Birth of the Redeemer was at first
celebrated not on December 25, but on January 6, the feast of the
Epiphany or manifestation of Christ's glory. The Epiphany can be traced
as far back as the second century, among the Basilidian heretics, from
whom it may have spread to the Catholic Church. It was with them
certainly a feast of the Baptism, and possibly also of the Nativity, of
Christ. The origins of the Epiphany festival{14} are very obscure, nor
can we say with certainty what was its meaning at first. It may be that
it took the place of a heathen rite celebrating the birth of the World or
Æon from the Virgin on January 6.[5] At all events one of its objects was
to commemorate the Baptism, the appearance of the Holy Dove, and the
Voice from heaven, "Thou art my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased"
(or, as other MSS. read, "This day have I begotten thee").

|22| In some circles of early Christianity the Baptism appears to have
been looked upon as the true Birth of Christ, the moment when, filled by
the Spirit, He became Son of God; and the carnal Birth was regarded as of
comparatively little significance. Hence the Baptism festival may have
arisen first, and the celebration of the Birth at Bethlehem may have been
later attached to the same day, partly perhaps because a passage in St.
Luke's Gospel was supposed to imply that Jesus was baptized on His
thirtieth birthday. As however the orthodox belief became more sharply
defined, increasing stress was laid on the Incarnation of God in Christ
in the Virgin's womb, and it may have been felt that the celebration of
the Birth and the Baptism on the same day encouraged heretical views.
Hence very likely the introduction of Christmas on December 25 as a
festival of the Birth alone. In the East the concelebration of the two
events continued for some time after Rome had instituted the separate
feast of Christmas. Gradually, however, the Roman use spread: at
Constantinople it was introduced about 380 by the great theologian,
Gregory Nazianzen; at Antioch it appeared in 388, at Alexandria in 432.
The Church of Jerusalem long stood out, refusing to adopt the new feast
till the seventh century, it would seem.{18} One important Church, the
Armenian, knows nothing of December 25, and still celebrates the Nativity
with the Epiphany on January 6.{19} Epiphany in the eastern Orthodox
Church has lost its connection with the Nativity and is now chiefly a
celebration of the Baptism of Christ, while in the West, as every one
knows, it is primarily a celebration of the Adoration by the Magi, an
event commemorated by the Greeks on Christmas Day. Epiphany is, however,
as we shall see, a greater festival in the Greek Church than Christmas.

Such in bare outline is the story of the spread of Christmas as an
independent festival. Its establishment fitly followed the triumph of the
Catholic doctrine of the perfect Godhead or Christ at the Council of
Nicea in 325.

II. The French _Noël_ is a name concerning whose origin there has been
considerable dispute; there can, however, be little doubt that it is the
same word as the Provençal _Nadau_ or _Nadal_, |23| the Italian
_Natale_, and the Welsh _Nadolig_, all obviously derived from the Latin
_natalis_, and meaning "birthday." One naturally takes this as referring
to the Birth of Christ, but it may at any rate remind us of another
birthday celebrated on the same date by the Romans of the Empire, that of
the unconquered Sun, who on December 25, the winter solstice according to
the Julian calendar, began to rise to new vigour after his autumnal
decline.

Why, we may ask, did the Church choose December 25 for the celebration of
her Founder's Birth? No one now imagines that the date is supported by a
reliable tradition; it is only one of various guesses of early Christian
writers. As a learned eighteenth-century Jesuit{20} has pointed out,
there is not a single month in the year to which the Nativity has not
been assigned by some writer or other. The real reason for the choice of
the day most probably was, that upon it fell the pagan festival just
mentioned.

The _Dies Natalis Invicti_ was probably first celebrated in Rome by order
of the Emperor Aurelian (270-5), an ardent worshipper of the Syrian
sun-god Baal.{21} With the _Sol Invictus_ was identified the figure of
Mithra, that strange eastern god whose cult resembled in so many ways the
worship of Jesus, and who was at one time a serious rival of the Christ
in the minds of thoughtful men.[6]{22} It was the sun-god, poetically
and philosophically conceived, whom the Emperor Julian made the centre of
his ill-fated revival of paganism, and there is extant a fine prayer of
his to "King Sun."{23}

What more natural than that the Church should choose this day to
celebrate the rising of her Sun of Righteousness with healing in His
wings, that she should strive thus to draw away to His worship some
adorers of the god whose symbol and representative was the earthly sun!
There is no direct evidence of deliberate substitution, but at all events
ecclesiastical writers soon after the foundation of Christmas made good
use of the idea |24| that the birthday of the Saviour had replaced the
birthday of the sun.[7]

Little is known of the manner in which the _Natalis Invicti_ was kept; it
was not a folk-festival, and was probably observed by the classes rather
than the masses.{24} Its direct influence on Christmas customs has
probably been little or nothing. It fell, however, just before a Roman
festival that had immense popularity, is of great importance for our
subject, and is recalled by another name for Christmas that must now be
considered.

III. The Provençal _Calendas_ or _Calenos_, the Polish _Kolenda_, the
Russian _Kolyáda_, the Czech _Koleda_ and the Lithuanian _Kalledos_, not
to speak of the Welsh _Calenig_ for Christmas-box, and the Gaelic
_Calluinn_ for New Year's Eve, are all derived from the Latin _Kalendae_,
and suggest the connection of Christmas with the Roman New Year's Day,
the Kalends or the first day of January, a time celebrated with many
festive customs. What these were, and how they have affected Christmas we
shall see in some detail in Part II.; suffice it to say here that the
festival, which lasted for at least three days, was one of riotous life,
of banqueting and games and licence. It was preceded, moreover, by the
_Saturnalia_ (December 17 to 23) which had many like features, and must
have formed practically one festive season with it. The word _Saturnalia_
has become so familiar in modern usage as to suggest sufficiently the
character of the festival for which it stands.

|25| Into the midst of this season of revelry and licence the Church
introduced her celebration of the beginning of man's redemption from the
bondage of sin. Who can wonder that Christmas contains incongruous
elements, for old things, loved by the people, cannot easily be uprooted.

IV. One more name yet remains to be considered, _Yule_ (Danish _Jul_),
the ordinary word for Christmas in the Scandinavian languages, and not
extinct among ourselves. Its derivation has been widely discussed, but so
far no satisfactory explanation of it has been found. Professor Skeat in
the last edition of his Etymological Dictionary (1910) has to admit that
its origin is unknown. Whatever its source may be, it is clearly the name
of a Germanic season--probably a two-month tide covering the second half
of November, the whole of December, and the first half of January.{26}
It may well suggest to us the element added to Christmas by the barbarian
peoples who began to learn Christianity about the time when the festival
was founded. Modern research has tended to disprove the idea that the old
Germans held a Yule feast at the winter solstice, and it is probable, as
we shall see, that the specifically Teutonic Christmas customs come from
a New Year and beginning-of-winter festival kept about the middle of
November. These customs transferred to Christmas are to a great extent
religious or magical rites intended to secure prosperity during the
coming year, and there is also the familiar Christmas feasting,
apparently derived in part from the sacrificial banquets that marked the
beginning of winter.

       *       *       *       *       *

We have now taken a general glance at the elements which have combined in
Christmas. The heathen folk-festivals absorbed by the Nativity feast were
essentially life-affirming, they expressed the mind of men who said "yes"
to this life, who valued earthly good things. On the other hand
Christianity, at all events in its intensest form, the religion of the
monks, was at bottom pessimistic as regards this earth, and valued it
only as a place of discipline for the life to come; it was essentially a
religion of renunciation that said "no" to the world. The |26| Christian
had here no continuing city, but sought one to come. How could the
Church make a feast of the secular New Year; what mattered to her the
world of time? her eye was fixed upon the eternal realities--the great
drama of Redemption. Not upon the course of the temporal sun through the
zodiac, but upon the mystical progress of the eternal Sun of
Righteousness must she base her calendar. Christmas and New Year's
Day--the two festivals stood originally for the most opposed of
principles.

Naturally the Church fought bitterly against the observance of the
Kalends; she condemned repeatedly the unseemly doings of Christians in
joining in heathenish customs at that season; she tried to make the first
of January a solemn fast; and from the ascetic point of view she was
profoundly right, for the old festivals were bound up with a lusty
attitude towards the world, a seeking for earthly joy and well-being.

The struggle between the ascetic principle of self-mortification,
world-renunciation, absorption in a transcendent ideal, and the natural
human striving towards earthly joy and well-being, is, perhaps, the most
interesting aspect of the history of Christianity; it is certainly shown
in an absorbingly interesting way in the development of the Christian
feast of the Nativity. The conflict is keen at first; the Church
authorities fight tooth and nail against these relics of heathenism,
these devilish rites; but mankind's instinctive paganism is
insuppressible, the practices continue as ritual, though losing much of
their meaning, and the Church, weary of denouncing, comes to wink at
them, while the pagan joy in earthly life begins to colour her own
festival.

The Church's Christmas, as the Middle Ages pass on, becomes increasingly
"merry"--warm and homely, suited to the instincts of ordinary humanity,
filled with a joy that is of this earth, and not only a mystical rapture
at a transcendental Redemption. The Incarnate God becomes a real child to
be fondled and rocked, a child who is the loveliest of infants, whose
birthday is the supreme type of all human birthdays, and may be kept with
feasting and dance and song. Such is the Christmas of popular tradition,
the Nativity as it is reflected in the carols, the cradle-rocking, the
mystery plays of the later Middle Ages. This |27| Christmas, which
still lingers, though maimed, in some Catholic regions, is strongly
life-affirming; the value and delight of earthly, material things is
keenly felt; sometimes, even, it passes into coarseness and riot. Yet a
certain mysticism usually penetrates it, with hints that this dear life,
this fair world, are not all, for the soul has immortal longings in her.
Nearly always there is the spirit of reverence, of bowing down before the
Infant God, a visitor from the supernatural world, though bone of man's
bone, flesh of his flesh. Heaven and earth have met together; the rough
stable is become the palace of the Great King.

This we might well call the "Catholic" Christmas, the Christmas of the
age when the Church most nearly answered to the needs of the whole man,
spiritual and sensuous. The Reformation in England and Germany did not
totally destroy it; in England the carol-singers kept up for a while the
old spirit; in Lutheran Germany a highly coloured and surprisingly
sensuous celebration of the Nativity lingered on into the eighteenth
century. In the countries that remained Roman Catholic much of the old
Christmas continued, though the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, faced
by the challenge of Protestantism, made for greater "respectability," and
often robbed the Catholic Christmas of its humour, its homeliness, its
truly popular stamp, substituting pretentiousness for simplicity, sugary
sentiment for naïve and genuine poetry.

Apart from the transformation of the Church's Christmas from something
austere and metaphysical into something joyous and human, warm and
kindly, we shall note in our Second Part the survival of much that is
purely pagan, continuing alongside of the celebration of the Nativity,
and often little touched by its influence. But first we must consider the
side of the festival suggested by the English and French names:
_Christmas_ will stand for the liturgical rites commemorating the wonder
of the Incarnation--God in man made manifest--_Noël_ or "the Birthday,"
for the ways in which men have striven to realize the human aspect of the
great Coming.

How can we reach the inner meaning of the Nativity feast, its
significance for the faithful? Better, perhaps, by the way of |28|
poetry than by the way of ritual, for it is poetry that reveals the
emotions at the back of the outward observances, and we shall understand
these better when the singers of Christmas have laid bare to us their
hearts. We may therefore first give attention to the Christmas poetry of
sundry ages and peoples, and then go on to consider the liturgical and
popular ritual in which the Church has striven to express her joy at the
Redeemer's birth. Ceremonial, of course, has always mimetic tendencies,
and in a further chapter we shall see how these issued in genuine drama;
how, in the miracle plays, the Christmas story was represented by the
forms and voices of living men.

|29| |30| |31|






Part I--The Christian Feast




CHAPTER II

CHRISTMAS POETRY (I)[8]{1}


    Ancient Latin Hymns, their Dogmatic, Theological
    Character--Humanizing Influence of Franciscanism--Jacopone da Todi's
    Vernacular Verse--German Catholic Poetry--Mediaeval English Carols.

[Illustration:

MADONNA ENTHRONED WITH SAINTS AND ANGELS.

PESELLINO

(_Empoli Gallery_)]

Christmas, as we have seen, had its beginning at the middle of the fourth
century in Rome. The new feast was not long in finding a hymn-writer to
embody in immortal Latin the emotions called forth by the memory of the
Nativity. "Veni, redemptor gentium" is one of the earliest of Latin
hymns--one of the few that have come down to us from the father of Church
song, Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan (d. 397). Great as theologian and
statesman, Ambrose was great also as a poet and systematizer of Church
music. "Veni, redemptor gentium" is above all things stately and severe,
in harmony with the austere character of the zealous foe of the Arian
heretics, the champion of monasticism. It is the theological aspect alone
of Christmas, the redemption of sinful man by the mystery of the
Incarnation and the miracle of the Virgin Birth, that we find in St.
Ambrose's terse and pregnant Latin; there is no feeling for the human
pathos and poetry of the scene at Bethlehem--

   "Veni, redemptor gentium,
    Ostende partum virginis;
    Miretur omne saeculum:
    Talis decet partus Deum. |32|
    Non ex virili semine,
    Sed mystico spiramine,
    Verbum Dei factum caro,
    Fructusque ventris floruit."[9]{2}

       *       *       *       *       *

Another fine hymn often heard in English churches is of a slightly later
date. "Corde natus ex Parentis" ("Of the Father's love begotten") is a
cento from a larger hymn by the Spanish poet Prudentius (_c._ 348-413).
Prudentius did not write for liturgical purposes, and it was several
centuries before "Corde natus" was adopted into the cycle of Latin hymns.
Its elaborate rhetoric is very unlike the severity of "Veni, redemptor
gentium," but again the note is purely theological; the Incarnation as a
world-event is its theme. It sings the Birth of Him who is

   "Corde natus ex Parentis
    Ante mundi exordium,
    Alpha et O cognominatus,
    Ipse fons et clausula
    Omnium quae sunt, fuerunt,
    Quaeque post futura sunt
        Saeculorum saeculis."[10]{3}

Other early hymns are "A solis ortus cardine" ("From east to west, from
shore to shore"), by a certain Coelius Sedulius (d. _c._ 450), still sung
by the Roman Church at Lauds on Christmas Day, and "Jesu, redemptor
omnium" (sixth century), the office hymn at Christmas Vespers. Like the
poems of Ambrose and Prudentius, they are in classical metres, unrhymed,
and based upon quantity, not accent, and they have the same general
character, doctrinal rather than humanly tender.

In the ninth and tenth centuries arose a new form of hymnody, the Prose
or Sequence sung after the Gradual (the anthem between the Epistle and
Gospel at Mass). The earliest writer of sequences was Notker, a monk of
the abbey of St. Gall, near |33| the Lake of Constance. Among those
that are probably his work is the Christmas "Natus ante saecula Dei
filius." The most famous Nativity sequence, however, is the "Laetabundus,
exsultet fidelis chorus" of St. Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), once sung
all over Europe, and especially popular in England and France. Here are
its opening verses:--

   "Laetabundus,
    Exsultet fidelis chorus;
        Alleluia!
    Regem regum
    Intactae profudit thorus;
        Res miranda!

    Angelus consilii
    Natus est de Virgine,
        Sol de stella!
    Sol occasum nesciens,
    Stella semper rutilans,
        Semper clara."[11]{4}

The "Laetabundus" is in rhymed stanzas; in this it differs from most
early proses. The writing of rhymed sequences, however, became common
through the example of the Parisian monk, Adam of St. Victor, in the
second half of the twelfth century. He adopted an entirely new style of
versification and music, derived from popular songs; and he and his
successors in |34| the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries wrote
various proses for the Christmas festival.

If we consider the Latin Christmas hymns from the fourth century to the
thirteenth, we shall find that however much they differ in form, they have
one common characteristic: they are essentially theological--dwelling on
the Incarnation and the Nativity as part of the process of man's
redemption--rather than realistic. There is little attempt to imagine
the scene in the stable at Bethlehem, little interest in the Child as a
child, little sense of the human pathos of the Nativity. The explanation
is, I think, very simple, and it lights up the whole observance of
Christmas as a Church festival in the centuries we are considering:
_this poetry is the poetry of monks, or of men imbued with the monastic
spirit_.

The two centuries following the institution of Christmas saw the break-up
of the Roman Empire in the west, and the incursions of barbarians
threatening the very existence of the Christian civilization that had
conquered classic paganism. It was by her army of monks that the Church
tamed and Christianized the barbarians, and both religion and culture
till the middle of the twelfth century were predominantly monastic. "In
writing of any eminently religious man of this period" [the eleventh
century], says Dean Church, "it must be taken almost as a matter of
course that he was a monk."{5} And a monastery was not the place for
human feeling about Christmas; the monk was--at any rate in ideal--cut
off from the world; not for him were the joys of parenthood or tender
feelings for a new-born child. To the monk the world was, at least in
theory, the vale of misery; birth and generation were, one may almost
say, tolerated as necessary evils among lay folk unable to rise to the
heights of abstinence and renunciation; one can hardly imagine a true
early Benedictine filled with "joy that a man is born into the world."
The Nativity was an infinitely important event, to be celebrated with a
chastened, unearthly joy, but not, as it became for the later Middle Ages
and the Renaissance, a matter upon which human affection might lavish
itself, which imagination might deck with vivid concrete detail. In the
later Christmas |35| the pagan and the Christian spirit, or delight in
earthly things and joy in the invisible, seem to meet and mingle; to the
true monk of the Dark and Early Middle Ages they were incompatible.

What of the people, the great world outside the monasteries? Can we
imagine that Christmas, on its Christian side, had a deep meaning for
them? For the first ten centuries, to quote Dean Church again,
Christianity "can hardly be said to have leavened society at all.... It
acted upon it doubtless with enormous power; but it was as an extraneous
and foreign agent, which destroys and shapes, but does not mingle or
renew.... Society was a long time unlearning heathenism; it has not done
so yet; but it had hardly begun, at any rate it was only just beginning,
to imagine the possibility of such a thing in the eleventh century."{6}

"The practical religion of the illiterate," says another ecclesiastical
historian, Dr. W. R. W. Stephens, "was in many respects merely a survival
of the old paganism thinly disguised. There was a prevalent belief in
witchcraft, magic, sortilegy, spells, charms, talismans, which mixed
itself up in strange ways with Christian ideas and Christian worship....
Fear, the note of superstition, rather than love, which is the
characteristic of a rational faith, was conspicuous in much of the
popular religion. The world was haunted by demons, hobgoblins, malignant
spirits of divers kinds, whose baneful influence must be averted by
charms or offerings."{7}

The writings of ecclesiastics, the decrees of councils and synods, from
the fourth century to the eleventh, abound in condemnations of pagan
practices at the turn of the year. It is in these customs, and in secular
mirth and revelry, not in Christian poetry, that we must seek for the
expression of early lay feeling about Christmas. It was a feast of
material good things, a time for the fulfilment of traditional heathen
usages, rather than a joyous celebration of the Saviour's birth. No doubt
it was observed by due attendance at church, but the services in a tongue
not understanded of the people cannot have been very full of meaning to
them, and we can imagine |36| their Christmas church-going as rather a
duty inspired by fear than an expression of devout rejoicing. It is
noteworthy that the earliest of vernacular Christmas carols known to us,
the early thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman "Seignors, ore entendez à nus,"
is a song not of religion but of revelry. Its last verse is typical:

   "Seignors, jo vus di par Noël,
    E par li sires de cest hostel,
            Car bevez ben;
    E jo primes beverai le men,
    E pois aprèz chescon le soen,
        Par mon conseil;
    Si jo vus di trestoz, 'Wesseyl!'
    Dehaiz eit qui ne dirra, 'Drincheyl!'"[12]{8}

Not till the close of the thirteenth century do we meet with any
vernacular Christmas poetry of importance. The verses of the
_troubadours_ and _trouvères_ of twelfth-century France had little to do
with Christianity; their songs were mostly of earthly and illicit love.
The German Minnesingers of the thirteenth century were indeed pious, but
their devout lays were addressed to the Virgin as Queen of Heaven, the
ideal of womanhood, holding in glory the Divine Child in her arms, rather
than to the Babe and His Mother in the great humility of Bethlehem.

The first real outburst of Christmas joy in a popular tongue is found in
Italy, in the poems of that strange "minstrel of the Lord," the
Franciscan Jacopone da Todi (b. 1228, d. 1306). _Franciscan_, in that
name we have an indication of the change in religious feeling that came
over the western world, and |37| especially Italy, in the thirteenth
century.{9} For the twenty all-too-short years of St. Francis's
apostolate have passed, and a new attitude towards God and man and the
world has become possible. Not that the change was due solely to St.
Francis; he was rather the supreme embodiment of the ideals and
tendencies of his day than their actual creator; but he was the spark
that kindled a mighty flame. In him we reach so important a turning-point
in the history of Christmas that we must linger awhile at his side.

Early Franciscanism meant above all the democratizing, the humanizing of
Christianity; with it begins that "carol spirit" which is the most
winning part of the Christian Christmas, the spirit which, while not
forgetting the divine side of the Nativity, yet delights in its simple
humanity, the spirit that links the Incarnation to the common life of the
people, that brings human tenderness into religion. The faithful no
longer contemplate merely a theological mystery, they are moved by
affectionate devotion to the Babe of Bethlehem, realized as an actual
living child, God indeed, yet feeling the cold of winter, the roughness
of the manger bed.

St. Francis, it must be remembered, was not a man of high birth, but the
son of a silk merchant, and his appeal was made chiefly to the traders
and skilled workmen of the cities, who, in his day, were rising to
importance, coming, in modern Socialist terms, to class-consciousness.
The monks, although boys of low birth were sometimes admitted into the
cloister, were in sympathy one with the upper classes, and monastic
religion and culture were essentially aristocratic. The rise of the
Franciscans meant the bringing home of Christianity to masses of
town-workers, homely people, who needed a religion full of vivid
humanity, and whom the pathetic story of the Nativity would peculiarly
touch.

Love to man, the sense of human brotherhood--that was the great thing
which St. Francis brought home to his age. The message, certainly, was
not new, but he realized it with infectious intensity. The second great
commandment, "Thou shall love thy neighbour as thyself," had not indeed
been forgotten by |38| mediaeval Christianity; the common life of
monasticism was an attempt to fulfil it; yet for the monk love to man was
often rather a duty than a passion. But to St. Francis love was very
life; he loved not by duty but by an inner compulsion, and his burning
love of God and man found its centre in the God-man, Christ Jesus. For no
saint, perhaps, has the earthly life of Christ been the object of such
passionate devotion as for St. Francis; the Stigmata were the awful, yet,
to his contemporaries, glorious fruit of his meditations on the Passion;
and of the ecstasy with which he kept his Christmas at Greccio we shall
read when we come to consider the _Presepio_. He had a peculiar affection
for the festival of the Holy Child; "the Child Jesus," says Thomas of
Celano, "had been given over to forgetfulness in the hearts of many in
whom, by the working of His grace, He was raised up again through His
servant Francis."{10}

To the Early Middle Ages Christ was the awful Judge, the _Rex tremendae
majestatis_, though also the divine bringer of salvation from sin and
eternal punishment, and, to the mystic, the Bridegroom of the Soul. To
Francis He was the little brother of all mankind as well. It was a new
human joy that came into religion with him. His essentially artistic
nature was the first to realize the full poetry of Christmas--the coming
of infinity into extremest limitation, the Highest made the lowliest, the
King of all kings a poor infant. He had, in a supreme degree, the mingled
reverence and tenderness that inspire the best carols.

Though no Christmas verses by St. Francis have come down to us, there is
a beautiful "psalm" for Christmas Day at Vespers, composed by him partly
from passages of Scripture. A portion of Father Paschal Robinson's
translation may be quoted:--

   "Rejoice to God our helper.
    Shout unto God, living and true,
    With the voice of triumph.
    For the Lord is high, terrible:
    A great King over all the earth.
    For the most holy Father of heaven, |39|
    Our King, before ages sent His Beloved
      Son from on high, and He
      was born of the Blessed Virgin,
      holy Mary.

       *       *       *       *       *

   This is the day which the Lord
      hath made: let us rejoice and be glad in it.
    For the beloved and most holy
    Child has been given to us and
      born for us by the wayside.
    And laid in a manger because He
      had no room in the inn.
    Glory to God in the highest: and
      on earth peace to men of good will."{11}

[Illustration:

JACOPONE IN ECSTASY BEFORE THE VIRGIN.

From "Laude di Frate Jacopone da Todi"

(Florence, 1490).]

It is in the poetry of Jacopone da Todi, born shortly after the death of
St. Francis, that the Franciscan Christmas spirit finds its most intense
expression. A wild, wandering ascetic, an impassioned poet, and a soaring
mystic, Jacopone is one of the greatest of Christian singers, unpolished
as his verses are. Noble by birth, he made himself utterly as the common
people for whom he piped his rustic notes. "Dio fatto piccino" ("God made
a little thing") is the keynote of his music; the Christ Child is for him
"our sweet little brother"; with tender affection he rejoices in
endearing diminutives--"Bambolino," "Piccolino," "Jesulino." He sings of
the Nativity with extraordinary realism.[13] Here, in words, is a picture
of the Madonna and her Child that might well have inspired an early
Tuscan artist:--

   "Veggiamo il suo Bambino
    Gammettare nel fieno,
    E le braccia scoperte
    Porgere ad ella in seno, |40|
    Ed essa lo ricopre
    El meglio che può almeno,
    Mettendoli la poppa
    Entro la sua bocchina.

       *       *       *       *       *

    A la sua man manca,
    Cullava lo Bambino,
    E con sante carole
    Nenciava il suo amor fino....
    Gli Angioletti d' intorno
    Se ne gian danzando,
    Facendo dolci versi
    E d' amor favellando."[14]{12}

But there is an intense sense of the divine, as well as the human, in the
Holy Babe; no one has felt more vividly the paradox of the Incarnation:--

   "Ne la degna stalla del dolce Bambino
    Gli Angeli cantano d' intorno al piccolino;
      Cantano e gridano gli Angeli diletti,
    Tutti riverenti timidi e subietti, |41|
    Al Bambolino principe de gli eletti,
    Che nudo giace nel pungente spino.

       *       *       *       *       *

      Il Verbo divino, che è sommo sapiente,
    In questo dì par che non sappia niente,
    Guardal su' l fieno, che gambetta piangente,
    Como elli non fusse huomo divino."[15]{13}

Here, again, are some sweet and homely lines about preparation for the
Infant Saviour:--

      "Andiamo a lavare
    La casa a nettare,
    Che non trovi bruttura.
      Poi el menaremo,
    Et gli daremo
    Ben da ber' e mangiare.
      Un cibo espiato,
    Et d' or li sia dato
    Senza alcuna dimura.
      Lo cor adempito
    Dagiamoli fornito
    Senza odio ne rancura."[16]{14}

|42| There have been few more rapturous poets than Jacopone; men deemed
him mad; but, "if he is mad," says a modern Italian writer, "he is mad as
the lark"--"Nessun poeta canta a tutta gola come questo frate minore. S'
è pazzo, è pazzo come l' allodola."

To him is attributed that most poignant of Latin hymns, the "Stabat Mater
dolorosa"; he wrote also a joyous Christmas pendant to it:--

   "Stabat Mater speciosa,
    Juxta foenum gaudiosa,
      Dum jacebat parvulus.
    Cujus animam gaudentem,
    Laetabundam ac ferventem,
      Pertransivit jubilus."[17]{15}

In the fourteenth century we find a blossoming forth of Christmas poetry
in another land, Germany.{16} There are indeed Christmas and Epiphany
passages in a poetical Life of Christ by Otfrid of Weissenburg in the
ninth century, and a twelfth-century poem by Spervogel, "Er ist gewaltic
unde starc," opens with a mention of Christmas, but these are of little
importance for us. The fourteenth century shows the first real outburst,
and that is traceable, in part at least, to the mystical movement in the
Rhineland caused by the preaching of the great Dominican, Eckhart of
Strasburg, and his followers. It was a movement towards inward piety as
distinguished from, though not excluding, external observances, which
made its way largely by sermons listened to by great congregations in the
towns. Its impulse came not from the monasteries proper, but from the
convents of Dominican friars, and it was for Germany in the fourteenth
century something like what Franciscanism had been for Italy in the
thirteenth. One of the central doctrines of the school |43| was that of
the Divine Birth in the soul of the believer; according to Eckhart the
soul comes into immediate union with God by "bringing forth the Son"
within itself; the historic Christ is the symbol of the divine humanity
to which the soul should rise: "when the soul bringeth forth the Son," he
says, "it is happier than Mary."{17} Several Christmas sermons by
Eckhart have been preserved; one of them ends with the prayer, "To this
Birth may that God, who to-day is new born as man, bring us, that we,
poor children of earth, may be born in Him as God; to this may He bring
us eternally! Amen."{18} With this profound doctrine of the Divine
Birth, it was natural that the German mystics should enter deeply into
the festival of Christmas, and one of the earliest of German Christmas
carols, "Es komt ein schif geladen," is the work of Eckhart's disciple,
John Tauler (d. 1361). It is perhaps an adaptation of a secular song:--

   "A ship comes sailing onwards
      With a precious freight on board;
    It bears the only Son of God,
      It bears the Eternal Word."

The doctrine of the mystics, "Die in order to live," fills the last
verses:--

   "Whoe'er would hope in gladness
      To kiss this Holy Child,
    Must suffer many a pain and woe,
      Patient like Him and mild;

    Must die with Him to evil
      And rise to righteousness,
    That so with Christ he too may share
      Eternal life and bliss."{19}

To the fourteenth century may perhaps belong an allegorical carol still
sung in both Catholic and Protestant Germany:--

   "Es ist ein Ros entsprungen
    Aus einer Wurzel zart, |44|
    Als uns die Alten sungen,
    Von Jesse kam die Art,
    Und hat ein Blümlein bracht,
    Mitten im kalten Winter,
    Wohl zu der halben Nacht.
    Das Röslein, das ich meine,
    Davon Jesajas sagt,
    Hat uns gebracht alleine
    Marie, die reine Magd.
    Aus Gottes ew'gem Rat
    Hat sie ein Kind geboren
    Wohl zu der halben Nacht."[18]{20}

In a fourteenth-century Life of the mystic Heinrich Suso it is told how
one day angels came to him to comfort him in his sufferings, how they
took him by the hand and led him to dance, while one began a glad song of
the child Jesus, "In dulci jubilo." To the fourteenth century, then,
dates back that most delightful of German carols, with its interwoven
lines of Latin. I may quote the fine Scots translation in the "Godlie and
Spirituall Sangis" of 1567:--

   "_In dulci Jubilo_, Now lat us sing with myrth and jo
    Our hartis consolatioun lyis _in praesepio_,
    And schynis as the Sone, _Matris in gremio_,
    _Alpha es et O, Alpha es et O._
    _O Jesu parvule!_ I thrist sore efter thé, |45|
    Confort my hart and mynde, _O puer optime_,
    God of all grace sa kynde, _et princeps gloriae_
    _Trahe me post te, Trahe me post te_.
    _Ubi sunt gaudia_, in ony place bot thair,
    Quhair that the Angellis sing _Nova cantica_,
    Bot and the bellis ring _in regis curia_,
    God gif I war thair, God gif I war thair."{21}

The music of "In dulci jubilo"[19] has, with all its religious feeling,
something of the nature of a dance, and unites in a strange fashion
solemnity, playfulness, and ecstatic delight. No other air, perhaps,
shows so perfectly the reverent gaiety of the carol spirit.

The fifteenth century produced a realistic type of German carol. Here is
the beginning of one such:--

   "Da Jesu Krist geboren wart,
    do was es kalt;
    in ain klaines kripplein
    er geleget wart.
    Da stunt ain esel und ain rint,
    die atmizten über das hailig kint
    gar unverborgen.
    Der ain raines herze hat, der darf nit sorgen."[20]{22}

It goes on to tell in naïve language the story of the wanderings of the
Holy Family during the Flight into Egypt.

This carol type lasted, and continued to develop, in Austria and the
Catholic parts of Germany through the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries, and even in the nineteenth. In Carinthia in the
early nineteenth century, almost every parish had its local poet, who
added new songs to the old treasury.{23} Particularly popular were the
_Hirtenlieder_ or shepherd songs, in which the peasant worshippers joined
themselves to the shepherds of Bethlehem, and sought to share their
devout |46| emotions. Often these carols are of the most rustic
character and in the broadest dialect. They breathe forth a great
kindliness and homeliness, and one could fill pages with quotations. Two
more short extracts must, however, suffice to show their quality.

How warm and hearty is their feeling for the Child:--

   "Du herzliabste Muater, gib Acht auf dös Kind,
    Es is ja gar frostig, thuas einfatschen gschwind.
    Und du alter Voda, decks Kindlein schen zua,
    Sonst hats von der Kölden und Winden kan Ruah.
    Hiazt nemen mir Urlaub, o gettliches Kind,
    Thua unser gedenken, verzeich unser Sünd.
    Es freut uns von Herzen dass d'ankomen bist;
    Es hätt uns ja niemand zu helfen gewist."[21]{24}

And what fatherly affection is here:--

   "Das Kind is in der Krippen glögn,
    So herzig und so rar!
    Mei klâner Hansl war nix dgögn,
    Wenn a glei schener war.
    Kolschwarz wie d'Kirchen d'Augen sein,
    Sunst aber kreidenweiss;
    Die Händ so hübsch recht zart und fein,
    I hans angrürt mit Fleiss.

    Aft hats auf mi an Schmutza gmacht,
    An Höscheza darzue;
    O warst du mein, hoan i gedacht,
    Werst wol a munter Bue.
    Dahoam in meiner Kachelstub
    Liess i brav hoazen ein,
    Do in den Stâl kimt überâl
    Der kalte Wind herein."[22]{25}

|47| We have been following on German ground a mediaeval tradition that
has continued unbroken down to modern days; but we must now take a leap
backward in time, and consider the beginnings of the Christmas carol in
England.

Not till the fifteenth century is there any outburst of Christmas poetry
in English, though other forms of religious lyrics were produced in
considerable numbers in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.
When the carols come at last, they appear in the least likely of all
places, at the end of a versifying of the whole duty of man, by John
Awdlay, a blind chaplain of Haghmon, in Shropshire. In red letters he
writes:--

   "I pray you, sirus, boothe moore and lase,
    Sing these caroles in Cristëmas,"

and then follows a collection of twenty-five songs, some of which are
genuine Christmas carols, as one now understands the word.{26}

A carol, in the modern English sense, may perhaps be defined as a
religious song, less formal and solemn than the ordinary Church hymn--an
expression of popular and often naïve devotional feeling, a thing
intended to be sung outside rather than within church walls. There still
linger about the word some echoes of its original meaning, for "carol"
had at first a secular or even pagan significance: in twelfth-century
France it was used to describe the amorous song-dance which hailed the
coming of spring; in Italian it meant a ring- or song-dance; while by
English writers from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century it was used
chiefly of singing joined with dancing, and had no necessary connection
with religion. Much as the mediaeval Church, with its ascetic tendencies,
disliked religious dancing, it could not always suppress it; and in
Germany, as we shall see, there was choral dancing at Christmas round the
cradle of the Christ Child. Whether Christmas carols were ever danced to
in England |48| is doubtful; many of the old airs and words have,
however, a glee and playfulness as of human nature following its natural
instincts of joy even in the celebration of the most sacred mysteries. It
is probable that some of the carols are religious parodies of love-songs,
written for the melodies of the originals, and many seem by their
structure to be indirectly derived from the choral dances of farm folk, a
notable feature being their burden or refrain, a survival of the common
outcry of the dancers as they leaped around.

Awdlay's carols are perhaps meant to be sung by "wassailing neighbours,
who make their rounds at Christmastide to drink a cup and take a gift,
and bring good fortune upon the house"{27}--predecessors of those
carol-singers of rural England in the nineteenth century, whom Mr. Hardy
depicts so delightfully in "Under the Greenwood Tree." Carol-singing by a
band of men who go from house to house is probably a Christianization of
such heathen processions as we shall meet in less altered forms in Part
II.

It must not be supposed that the carols Awdlay gives are his own work;
and their exact date it is impossible to determine. Part of his book was
composed in 1426, but one at least of the carols was probably written in
the last half of the fourteenth century. They seem indeed to be the later
blossomings of the great springtime of English literature, the period
which produced Chaucer and Langland, an innumerable company of minstrels
and ballad-makers, and the mystical poet, Richard Rolle of Hampole.[23]

Through the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth, the
flowering continued; and something like two hundred carols of this period
are known. It is impossible to attempt here anything like representative
quotation; I can only sketch in |49| roughest outline the main
characteristics of English carol literature, and refer the reader for
examples to Miss Edith Rickert's comprehensive collection, "Ancient
English Carols, MCCCC-MDCC," or to the smaller but fine selection in
Messrs. E. K. Chambers and F. Sidgwick's "Early English Lyrics." Many may
have been the work of _goliards_ or wandering scholars, and a common
feature is the interweaving of Latin with English words.

Some, like the exquisite "I sing of a maiden that is makeles,"{29} are
rather songs to or about the Virgin than strictly Christmas carols; the
Annunciation rather than the Nativity is their theme. Others again tell
the whole story of Christ's life. The feudal idea is strong in such lines
as these:--

   "Mary is quene of allë thinge,
    And her sone a lovely kinge.
    God graunt us allë good endinge!
          _Regnat dei gracia_."{30}

On the whole, in spite of some mystical exceptions, the mediaeval English
carol is somewhat external in its religion; there is little deep
individual feeling; the caroller sings as a member of the human race,
whose curse is done away, whose nature is exalted by the Incarnation,
rather than as one whose soul is athirst for God:--

   "Now man is brighter than the sonne;
    Now man in heven an hie shall wonne;
    Blessëd be God this game is begonne
      And his moder emperesse of helle."{31}

Salvation is rather an objective external thing than an inward and
spiritual process. A man has but to pray devoutly to the dear Mother and
Child, and they will bring him to the heavenly court. It is not so much
personal sin as an evil influence in humanity, that is cured by the great
event of Christmas:--

   "It was dark, it was dim,
    For men that levëd in gret sin;
    Lucifer was all within,
      Till on the Cristmes day. |50|

    There was weping, there was wo,
    For every man to hell gan go.
    It was litel mery tho,
      Till on the Cristmes day."{32}

But now that Christ is born, and man redeemed, one may be blithe
indeed:--

   "Jhesus is that childës name,
    Maide and moder is his dame,
    And so oure sorow is turned to game.
          _Gloria tibi domine._

       *       *       *       *       *

    Now sitte we downe upon our knee,
    And pray that child that is so free;
    And with gode hertë now sing we
          _Gloria tibi domine_."{33}

Sometimes the religious spirit almost vanishes, and the carol becomes
little more than a gay pastoral song:--

   "The shepard upon a hill he satt;
    He had on him his tabard and his hat,
    His tar-box, his pipe, and his flagat;
    His name was called Joly Joly Wat,
      For he was a gud herdës boy.
                  Ut hoy!
      For in his pipe he made so much joy.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Whan Wat to Bedlem cum was,
    He swet, he had gone faster than a pace;
    He found Jesu in a simpell place,
    Betwen an ox and an asse.
                  Ut hoy!
      For in his pipe he made so much joy.

    'Jesu, I offer to thee here my pipe,
    My skirt, my tar-box, and my scripe;
    Home to my felowes now will I skipe,
    And also look unto my shepe.'
                  Ut hoy!
      For in his pipe he made so much joy."{34}

|51| But to others again, especially the lullabies, the hardness of the
Nativity, the shadow of the coming Passion, give a deep note of sorrow
and pathos; there is the thought of the sword that shall pierce Mary's
bosom:--

   "This endris night I saw a sight,
      A maid a cradell kepe,
    And ever she song and seid among
      'Lullay, my child, and slepe.'

    'I may not slepe, but I may wepe,
      I am so wo begone;
    Slepe I wold, but I am colde
      And clothës have I none.

       *       *       *       *       *

    'Adam's gilt this man had spilt;
      That sin greveth me sore.
    Man, for thee here shall I be
      Thirty winter and more.

       *       *       *       *       *

    'Here shall I be hanged on a tree,
      And die as it is skill.
    That I have bought lesse will I nought;
      It is my fader's will.'"{35}

The lullabies are quite the most delightful, as they are the most human,
of the carols. Here is an exquisitely musical verse from one of 1530:--

   "In a dream late as I lay,
    Methought I heard a maiden say
      And speak these words so mild:
    'My little son, with thee I play,
    And come,' she sang, 'by, lullaby.'
      Thus rockëd she her child.

    _By-by, lullaby, by-by, lullaby,_
      _Rockëd I my child._
    _By-by, by-by, by-by, lullaby,_
      _Rockëd I my child._"{36}

|52| |53| |54| |55|




CHAPTER III

CHRISTMAS POETRY (II)


    The French _Noël_--Latin Hymnody in Eighteenth-century
    France--Spanish Christmas Verse--Traditional Carols of Many
    Countries--Christmas Poetry in Protestant Germany--Post-Reformation
    Verse in England--Modern English Carols.

[Illustration:

THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS.

_By Fouquet._

(Musée Condé, Chantilly.)]

The Reformation marks a change in the character of Christmas poetry in
England and the larger part of Germany, and, instead of following its
development under Protestantism, it will be well to break off and turn
awhile to countries where Catholic tradition remained unbroken. We shall
come back later to Post-Reformation England and Protestant Germany.

In French{1} there is little or no Christmas poetry, religious in
character, before the fifteenth century; the earlier carols that have
come down to us are songs rather of feasting and worldly rejoicing than
of sacred things. The true _Noël_ begins to appear in fifteenth-century
manuscripts, but it was not till the following century that it attained
its fullest vogue and was spread all over the country by the printing
presses. Such _Noëls_ seem to have been written by clerks or recognized
poets, either for old airs or for specially composed music. "To a great
extent," says Mr. Gregory Smith, "they anticipate the spirit which
stimulated the Reformers to turn the popular and often obscene songs into
good and godly ballads."{2}

Some of the early _Noëls_ are not unlike the English carols of the
period, and are often half in Latin, half in French. Here are a few such
"macaronic" verses:--

   "Célébrons la naissance
    _Nostri Salvatoris_, |56|
    Qui fait la complaisance
    _Dei sui Patris_.
    Cet enfant tout aimable,
    _In nocte mediâ_,
    Est né dans une étable,
    _De castâ Mariâ_.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Mille esprits angéliques,
    _Juncti pastoribus_,
    Chantent dans leur musique,
    _Puer vobis natus_,
    Au Dieu par qui nous sommes,
    _Gloria in excelsis_,
    Et la paix soit aux hommes
    _Bonae voluntatis_.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Qu'on ne soit insensible!
    _Adeamus omnes_
    A Dieu rendu passible,
    _Propter nos mortales_,
    Et tous, de compagnie,
    _Deprecemur eum_
    Qu'à la fin de la vie,
    _Det regnum beatum_."{3}

The sixteenth century is the most interesting _Noël_ period; we find then
a conflict of tendencies, a conflict between Gallic realism and broad
humour and the love of refined language due to the study of the ancient
classics. There are many anonymous pieces of this time, but three
important _Noëlistes_ stand out by name: Lucas le Moigne, Curé of Saint
Georges, Puy-la-Garde, near Poitiers; Jean Daniel, called "Maître Mitou,"
a priest-organist at Nantes; and Nicholas Denisot of Le Mans, whose
_Noëls_ appeared posthumously under the pseudonym of "Comte d'Alsinoys."

Lucas le Moigne represents the _esprit gaulois_, the spirit that is often
called "Rabelaisian," though it is only one side of the genius of
Rabelais. The good Curé was a contemporary of |57| the author of
"Pantagruel." His "Chansons de Noëls nouvaulx" was published in 1520, and
contains carols in very varied styles, some naïve and pious, others
hardly quotable at the present day. One of his best-known pieces is a
dialogue between the Virgin and the singers of the carol: Mary is asked
and answers questions about the wondrous happenings of her life. Here are
four verses about the Nativity:--

   "Or nous dites, Marie,
    Les neuf mois accomplis,
    Naquit le fruit de vie,
    Comme l'Ange avoit dit?
    --Oui, sans nulle peine
    Et sans oppression,
    Naquit de tout le monde
    La vraie Rédemption.

      Or nous dites, Marie,
    Du lieu impérial,
    Fut-ce en chambre parée,
    Ou en Palais royal?
    --En une pauvre étable
    Ouverte à l'environ
    Ou n'avait feu, ni flambe
    Ni latte, ni chevron.

      Or nous dites, Marie,
    Qui vous vint visiter;
    Les bourgeois de la ville
    Vous ont-ils confortée?
    --Oncque, homme ni femme
    N'en eut compassion,
    Non plus que d'un esclave
    D'étrange région.

       *       *       *       *       *

      Or nous dites, Marie,
    Des pauvres pastoureaux
    Qui gardaient ès montagnes
    Leurs brebis & aigneaux. |58|
    --Ceux-là m'ont visitée
    Par grande affection;
    Moult me fut agréable
    Leur visitation."{4}

The influence of the "Pléiade," with its care for form, its respect for
classical models, its enrichment of the French tongue with new Latin
words, is shown by Jean Daniel, who also owes something to the poets of
the late fifteenth century. Two stanzas may be quoted from him:--

       "C'est ung très grant mystère
        Qu'ung roy de si hault pris
        Vient naistre en lieu austère,
        En si meschant pourpris:
    Le Roy de tous les bons espritz,
        C'est Jésus nostre frère,
    Le Roy de tous les bons espritz,
        Duquel sommes apris.

    Saluons le doulx Jésuchrist,
        Notre Dieu, notre frère,
    Saluons le doulx Jésuchrist,
        Chantons Noel d'esprit!

       *       *       *       *       *

        En luy faisant prière,
        Soyons de son party,
        Qu'en sa haulte emperière
        Ayons lieu de party;
    Comme il nous a droict apparty,
        Jésus nostre bon frère,
    Comme il nous a droict apparty
        Au céleste convy.
    Saluons, etc.
        Amen. Noel."{5}

As for Denisot, I may give two charming verses from one of his
pastorals:--

   "Suz, Bergiez, en campaigne,
    Laissez là vos troppeaux, |59|
    Avant qu'on s'accompaigne,
    Enflez vos chalumeaux.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Enflez vos cornemuses,
    Dansez ensemblement,
    Et vos doucettes muses,
    Accollez doucement."{6}

One result of the Italian influences which came over France in the
sixteenth century was a fondness for diminutives. Introduced into carols,
these have sometimes a very graceful effect:--

   "Entre le boeuf & le bouvet,
        Noel nouvellet,
    Voulust Jésus nostre maistre,
    En un petit hostelet,
        Noel nouvellet,
    En ce pauvre monde naistre,
        O Noel nouvellet!

    Ne couche, ne bercelet,
        Noel nouvellet,
    Ne trouvèrent en cette estre,
    Fors ung petit drappelet,
        Noel nouvellet,
    Pour envelopper le maistre,
        O Noel nouvellet!"{7}

These diminutives are found again, though fewer, in a particularly
delightful carol:--

      "Laissez paître vos bestes
    Pastoureaux, par monts et par vaux;
      Laissez paître vos bestes,
      Et allons chanter Nau.

    J'ai ouï chanter le rossignol,
    Qui chantoit un chant si nouveau,
      Si haut, si beau,
      Si résonneau, |60|

      Il m'y rompoit la tête,
    Tant il chantoit et flageoloit:
      Adonc pris ma houlette
      Pour aller voir Naulet.
      Laissez paître, etc."{8}

The singer goes on to tell how he went with his fellow-shepherds and
shepherdesses to Bethlehem:--

   "Nous dîmes tous une chanson
    Les autres en vinrent au son,
        Chacun prenant
        Son compagnon:
      Je prendrai Guillemette,
    Margot tu prendras gros Guillot;
      Qui prendra Péronelle?
      Ce sera Talebot.
      Laissez paître, etc.

    Ne chantons plus, nous tardons trop,
    Pensons d'aller courir le trot.
        Viens-tu, Margot?--
        J'attends Guillot.--
      J'ai rompu ma courette,
    Il faut ramancher mon sabot.--
      Or, tiens cette aiguillette,
      Elle y servira trop.
      Laissez paître, etc.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Nous courumes de grand' roideur
    Pour voir notre doux Rédempteur
        Et Créateur
        Et Formateur,
      Qui était tendre d'aage
    Et sans linceux en grand besoin,
      Il gisait en la crêche
      Sur un botteau de foin.
      Laissez paître, etc. |61|

    Sa mère avecque lui était:
    Et Joseph si lui éclairait,
        Point ne semblait
        Au beau fillet,
      Il n'était point son père;
    Je l'aperçus bien au cameau (_visage_)
      Il semblait à sa mère,
      Encore est-il plus beau.
      Laissez paître, etc."

This is but one of a large class of French _Noëls_ which make the
Nativity more real, more present, by representing the singer as one of a
company of worshippers going to adore the Child. Often these are
shepherds, but sometimes they are simply the inhabitants of a parish, a
town, a countryside, or a province, bearing presents of their own produce
to the little Jesus and His parents. Barrels of wine, fish, fowls,
sucking-pigs, pastry, milk, fruit, firewood, birds in a cage--such are
their homely gifts. Often there is a strongly satiric note: the
peculiarities and weaknesses of individuals are hit off; the reputation
of a place is suggested, a village whose people are famous for their
stinginess offers cider that is half rain-water; elsewhere the
inhabitants are so given to law-suits that they can hardly find time to
go to Bethlehem.

Such _Noëls_ with their vivid local colour, are valuable pictures of the
manners of their time. They are, unfortunately, too long for quotation
here, but any reader who cares to follow up the subject will find some
interesting specimens in a little collection of French carols that can be
bought for ten _centimes_.{9} They are of various dates; some probably
were written as late as the eighteenth century. In that century, and
indeed in the seventeenth, the best Christmas verses are those of a
provincial and rustic character, and especially those in _patois_; the
more cultivated poets, with their formal classicism, can ill enter into
the spirit of the festival. Of the learned writers the best is a woman,
Françoise Paschal, of Lyons (b. about 1610); in spite of her Latinity she
shows a real feeling for her subjects. Some of her _Noëls_ are dialogues
between the sacred personages; one presents |62| Joseph and Mary as
weary wayfarers seeking shelter at all the inns of Bethlehem and
everywhere refused by host or hostess:--

        "_Saint Joseph._

    Voyons la _Rose-Rouge_.
    Madame de céans,
    Auriez-vous quelque bouge
    Pour de petites gens?

        _L'Hôtesse._

    Vous n'avez pas la mine
    D'avoir de grands trésors;
    Voyez chez ma voisine,
    Car, quant à moi, je dors.

        _Saint Joseph._

    Monsieur des _Trois-Couronnes_,
    Avez-vous logement,
    Chez vous pour trois personnes,
    Quelque trou seulement.

        _L'Hôte._

    Vous perdez votre peine,
    Vous venez un peu tard,
    Ma maison est fort pleine,
    Allez quelqu'autre part."{10}

The most remarkable of the _patois Noëlistes_ of the seventeenth century
are the Provençal Saboly and the Burgundian La Monnoye, the one kindly
and tender, the other witty and sarcastic. Here is one of Saboly's
Provençal _Noëls_:--

   "Quand la mièjonue sounavo,
    Ai sautà dóu liech au sòu;
    Ai vist un bèl ange que cantavo
    Milo fes pu dous qu'un roussignòu.

    Lei mastin dóu vesinage
    Se soun toutes atroupa; |63|
    N'avien jamai vist aquéu visage
    Se soun tout-d'un-cop mes à japa.

    Lei pastre dessus la paio
    Dourmien coume de soucas;
    Quand an aussi lou bru dei sounaio
    Au cresegu qu'ero lou souiras.

    S'eron de gent resounable,
    Vendrien sèns èstre envita:
    Trouvarien dins un petit estable
    La lumiero emai la verita."[24]{11}

As for La Monnoye, here is a translation of one of his satirical
verses:--"When in the time of frost Jesus Christ came into the world the
ass and ox warmed Him with their breath in the stable. How many asses and
oxen I know in this kingdom of Gaul! How many asses and oxen I know who
would not have done as much!"{12}

       *       *       *       *       *

Apart from the rustic _Noëls_, the eighteenth century produced little
French Christmas poetry of any charm. Some of the carols most sung in
French churches to-day belong, however, to this period, _e.g._, the
"Venez, divin Messie" of the Abbé Pellegrin.{13}

       *       *       *       *       *

One cannot leave the France of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
without some mention of its Latin hymnody. From a date near 1700,
apparently, comes the sweet and solemn "Adeste, fideles"; by its music
and its rhythm, perhaps, rather than by its actual words it has become
the best beloved of Christmas hymns. The present writer has heard it sung
with equal reverence and heartiness in English, German, French, and
Italian churches, and no other hymn seems so full of the spirit of
Christmas devotion--wonder, |64| awe, and tenderness, and the sense of
reconciliation between Heaven and earth. Composed probably in France,
"Adeste, fideles" came to be used in English as well as French Roman
Catholic churches during the eighteenth century. In 1797 it was sung at
the chapel of the Portuguese Embassy in London; hence no doubt its once
common name of "Portuguese hymn." It was first used in an Anglican church
in 1841, when the Tractarian Oakley translated it for his congregation at
Margaret Street Chapel, London.

Another fine Latin hymn of the eighteenth-century French Church is
Charles Coffin's "Jam desinant suspiria."{14} It appeared in the
Parisian Breviary in 1736, and is well known in English as "God from on
high hath heard."

       *       *       *       *       *

The Revolution and the decay of Catholicism in France seem to have killed
the production of popular carols. The later nineteenth century, however,
saw a revival of interest in the _Noël_ as a literary form. In 1875 the
bicentenary of Saboly's death was celebrated by a competition for a
_Noël_ in the Provençal tongue, and something of the same kind has been
done in Brittany.{15} The _Noël_ has attracted by its aesthetic charm
even poets who are anything but devout; Théophile Gautier, for instance,
wrote a graceful Christmas carol, "Le ciel est noir, la terre est
blanche."

On a general view of the vernacular Christmas poetry of France it must be
admitted that the devotional note is not very strong; there is indeed a
formal reverence, a courtly homage, paid to the Infant Saviour, and the
miraculous in the Gospel story is taken for granted; but there is little
sense of awe and mystery. In harmony with the realistic instincts of the
nation, everything is dramatically, very humanly conceived; at times,
indeed, the personages of the Nativity scenes quite lose their sacred
character, and the treatment degenerates into grossness. At its best,
however, the French _Noël_ has a gaiety and a grace, joined to a genuine,
if not very deep, piety, that are extremely charming. Reading these
rustic songs, we are carried in imagination to French countrysides; we
think of the long walk through the snow to the Midnight Mass, the
cheerful _réveillon_ spread on the |65| return, the family gathered
round the hearth, feasting on wine and chestnuts and _boudins_, and
singing in traditional strains the joys of _Noël_.

       *       *       *       *       *

Across the Pyrenees, in Spain, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries saw a great output of Christmas verse. Among the chief writers
were Juan López de Ubeda, Francisco de Ocaña, and José de
Valdivielso.{16} Their _villancicos_ remind one of the paintings of
Murillo; they have the same facility, the same tender and graceful
sentiment, without much depth. They lack the homely flavour, the
quaintness that make the French and German folk-carols so delightful;
they have not the rustic tang, and yet they charm by their simplicity and
sweetness.

Here are a few stanzas by Ocaña:--

   "Dentro de un pobre pesebre
    y cobijado con heno
    yace Jesus Nazareno.

      En el heno yace echado
    el hijo de Dios eterno,
    para librar del infierno
    al hombre que hubo criado,
    y por matar el pecado
    el heno tiene por bueno
    nuestro Jesus Nazareno.

      Está entre dos animales
    que le calientan del frio,
    quien remedia nuestros males
    con su grande poderío:
    es su reino y señorío
    el mundo y el cielo sereno,
    y agora duerme en el heno.

      Tiene por bueno sufrir
    el frio y tanta fortuna,
    sin tener ropa ninguna
    con que se abrigar ni cubrir, |66|
    y por darnos el vivir
    padeció frio en el heno,
    nuestro Jesus Nazareno."[25]{17}

More of a peasant flavour is found in some snatches of Christmas carols
given by Fernan Caballero in her sketch, "La Noche de Navidad."

      "Ha nacido en un portal,
    Llenito de telarañas,
    Entre la mula y el buey
    El Redentor de las almas.

       *       *       *       *       *

      En el portal de Belen
    Hay estrella, sol y luna:
    La Virgen y San José
    Y el niño que está en la cuna.

      En Belen tocan á fuego,
    Del portal sale la llama,
    Es una estrella del cielo,
    Que ha caido entre la paja.

      Yo soy un pobre gitano
    Que vengo de Egipto aquí,
    Y al niño de Dios le traigo
    Un gallo quiquiriquí

      Yo soy un pobre gallego
    Que vengo de la Galicia,
    Y al niño de Dios le traigo
    Lienzo para una camisa. |67|

      Al niño recien nacido
    Todos le traen un don;
    Yo soy chico y nada tengo;
    Le traigo mi corazon."[26]{18}

In nearly every western language one finds traditional Christmas carols.
Europe is everywhere alive with them; they spring up like wild flowers.
Some interesting Italian specimens are given by Signor de Gubernatis in
his "Usi Natalizi." Here are a few stanzas from a Bergamesque cradle-song
of the Blessed Virgin:--

      "Dormi, dormi, o bel bambin,
    Re divin.
    Dormi, dormi, o fantolin.
    Fa la nanna, o caro figlio,
    Re del Ciel,
    Tanto bel, grazioso giglio.

      Chiüdi i lümi, o mio tesor,
    Dolce amor,
    Di quest' alma, almo Signor;
    Fa la nanna, o regio infante,
    Sopra il fien,
    Caro ben, celeste amante.

      Perchè piangi, o bambinell,
    Forse il giel
    Ti dà noia, o l'asinell?
    Fa la nanna, o paradiso
    Del mio cor,
    Redentor, ti bacio il viso."[27]{19}

|68| With this lullaby may be compared a singularly lovely and quite
untranslatable Latin cradle-song of unknown origin:--

   "Dormi, fili, dormi! mater
         Cantat unigenito:
    Dormi, puer, dormi! pater,
         Nato clamat parvulo:
    Millies tibi laudes canimus
         Mille, mille, millies.

    Lectum stravi tibi soli,
         Dormi, nate bellule!
    Stravi lectum foeno molli:
         Dormi, mi animule.
    Millies tibi laudes canimus
         Mille, mille, millies.

    Ne quid desit, sternam rosis,
         Sternam foenum violis,
    Pavimentum hyacinthis
         Et praesepe liliis.
    Millies tibi laudes canimus
         Mille, mille, millies. |69|

    Si vis musicam, pastores
        Convocabo protinus;
    Illis nulli sunt priores;
        Nemo canit castius.
    Millies tibi laudes canimus
        Mille, mille, millies."{21}

Curious little poems are found in Latin and other languages, making a
dialogue of the cries of animals at the news of Christ's birth.{22} The
following French example is fairly typical:--

   "Comme les bestes autrefois
    Parloient mieux latin que françois,
    Le coq, de loin voyant le fait,
    S'écria: _Christus natus est._
    Le boeuf, d'un air tout ébaubi,
    Demande: _Ubi? Ubi? Ubi?_
    La chèvre, se tordant le groin,
    Répond que c'est à _Béthléem_.
    Maistre Baudet, _curiosus_
    De l'aller voir, dit: _Eamus_;
    Et, droit sur ses pattes, le veau
    Beugle deux fois: _Volo, Volo!_"[28]{23}

In Wales, in the early nineteenth century, carol-singing was more
popular, perhaps, than in England; the carols were sung to the harp, in
church at the _Plygain_ or early morning service on Christmas Day, in the
homes of the people, and at the doors of the houses by visitors.{24} In
Ireland, too, the custom of carol-singing then prevailed.{25} Dr.
Douglas Hyde, in his "Religious Songs of Connacht," gives and translates
an interesting Christmas hymn in Irish, from which two verses may be
quoted. They set forth the great paradox of the Incarnation:--

   "Little babe who art so great,
      Child so young who art so old, |70|
    In the manger small his room,
      Whom not heaven itself could hold.

    Father--not more old than thou?
      Mother--younger, can it be?
    Older, younger is the Son,
      Younger, older, she than he."{27}

Even in dour Scotland, with its hatred of religious festivals, some kind
of carolling survived here and there among Highland folk, and a
remarkable and very "Celtic" Christmas song has been translated from the
Gaelic by Mr. J. A. Campbell. It begins:--

   "Sing hey the Gift, sing ho the Gift,
    Sing hey the Gift of the Living,
    Son of the Dawn, Son of the Star,
    Son of the Planet, Son of the Far [twice],
    Sing hey the Gift, sing ho the Gift."{28}

[Illustration:

THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT: THE REST BY THE WAY

MASTER OF THE SEVEN SORROWS OF MARY (ALSO ATTRIBUTED TO JOACHIM PATINIR)

(_Vienna: Imperial Gallery_)]

[Illustration:

SINGING "VOM HIMMEL HOCH" FROM A CHURCH TOWER AT CHRISTMAS.

_By Ludwig Richter._]

Before I close this study with a survey of Christmas poetry in England
after the Reformation, it may be interesting to follow the developments
in Protestant Germany. The Reformation gave a great impetus to German
religious song, and we owe to it some of the finest of Christmas hymns.
It is no doubt largely due to Luther, that passionate lover of music and
folk-poetry, that hymns have practically become the liturgy of German
Protestantism; yet he did but give typical expression to the natural
instincts of his countrymen for song. Luther, though a rebel, was no
Puritan; we can hardly call him an iconoclast; he had a conservative
mind, which only gradually became loosened from its old attachments. His
was an essentially artistic nature: "I would fain," he said, "see all
arts, especially music, in the service of Him who has given and created
them," and in the matter of hymnody he continued, in many respects, the
mediaeval German tradition. Homely, kindly, a lover of children, he had a
deep feeling for the festival of Christmas; and not only did he translate
into German "A solis ortus cardine" and "Veni, redemptor |71| gentium,"
but he wrote for his little son Hans one of the most delightful and
touching of all Christmas hymns--"Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her."

   "Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her,
    Ich bring euch gute neue Mär,
    Der guten Mär bring ich so viel,
    Davon ich singen und sagen will.

    Euch ist ein Kindlein heut gebor'n
    Von einer Jungfrau auserkor'n,
    Ein Kindelein so zart und fein,
    Das soll eu'r Freud und Wonne sein.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Merk auf, mein Herz, und sich dort hin:
    Was liegt doch in dem Kripplein drin?
    Wess ist das schöne Kindelein?
    Es ist das liebe Jesulein.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Ach Herr, du Schöpfer aller Ding,
    Wie bist du worden so gering,
    Dass du da liegst auf dürrem Gras,
    Davon ein Rind und Esel ass?

       *       *       *       *       *

    Ach, mein herzliebes Jesulein,
    Mach dir ein rein sanft Bettelein,
    Zu ruhen in mein's Herzens Schrein,
    Dass ich nimmer vergesse dein.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Davon ich allzeit fröhlich sei,
    Zu springen, singen immer frei
    Das rechte Lied dem Gottessohn
    Mit Herzenslust, den süssen Ton."[29]{29}

|72| "Vom Himmel hoch" has qualities of simplicity, directness, and
warm human feeling which link it to the less ornate forms of carol
literature. Its first verse is adapted from a secular song; its melody
may, perhaps, have been composed by Luther himself. There is another
Christmas hymn of Luther's, too--"Vom Himmel kam der Engel
Schar"--written for use when "Vom Himmel hoch" was thought too long, and
he also composed additional verses for the mediaeval "Gelobet seist du,
Jesu Christ."

   "Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ,
    Dass du Mensch geboren bist
    Von einer Jungfrau, das ist wahr,
    Des freuet sich der Engel Schar.
              _Kyrieleis!_

    Des ew'gen Vaters einig Kind
    Jetzt man in der Krippe find't,
    In unser armes Fleisch und Blut
    Verkleidet sich das ewig Gut.
              _Kyrieleis!_ |73|

    Den aller Weltkreis nie beschloss,
    Der lieget in Marie'n Schoss;
    Er ist ein Kindlein worden klein,
    Der alle Ding' erhält allein.
              _Kyrieleis!_"[30]{31}

The first stanza alone is mediaeval, the remaining six of the hymn are
Luther's.

The Christmas hymns of Paul Gerhardt, the seventeenth-century Berlin
pastor, stand next to Luther's. They are more subjective, more finished,
less direct and forcible. Lacking the finest qualities of poetry, they
are nevertheless impressive by their dignity and heartiness. Made for
music, the words alone hardly convey the full power of these hymns. They
should be heard sung to the old chorales, massive, yet sweet, by the
lusty voices of a German congregation. To English people they are
probably best known through the verses introduced into the "Christmas
Oratorio," where the old airs are given new beauty by Bach's marvellous
harmonies. The tone of devotion, one feels, in Gerhardt and Bach is the
same, immeasurably greater as is the genius of the composer; in both
there is a profound joy in the Redemption begun by the Nativity, a robust
faith joined to a deep sense of the mystery of suffering, and a keen
sympathy with childhood, a tender fondness for the Infant King.

|74| The finest perhaps of Gerhardt's hymns is the Advent "Wie soll ich
dich empfangen?" ("How shall I fitly meet Thee?"), which comes early in
the "Christmas Oratorio." More closely connected with the Nativity,
however, are the _Weihnachtslieder_, "Wir singen dir, Emanuel," "O Jesu
Christ, dein Kripplein ist," "Fröhlich soll mein Herze springen," "Ich
steh an deiner Krippen hier," and others. I give a few verses from the
third:--

   "Fröhlich soll mein Herze springen
            Dieser Zeit,
            Da für Freud
            Alle Engel singen.
    Hört, hört, wie mit vollen Choren
            Alle Luft
            Laute ruft:
            Christus ist geboren.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Nun, er liegt in seiner Krippen,
            Ruft zu sich
            Mich und dich,
            Spricht mit süssen Lippen:
    Lasset fahrn, O lieben Brüder
            Was euch quält,
            Was euch fehlt;
            Ich bring alles wieder.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Süsses Heil, lass dich umfangen;
            Lass mich dir,
            Meine Zier,
            Unverrückt anhangen.
    Du bist meines Lebens Leben;
            Nun kann ich
            Mich durch dich
            Wohl zufrieden geben."[31]{33}

|75| One more German Christmas hymn must be mentioned, Gerhard
Tersteegen's "Jauchzet, ihr Himmel, frohlocket, ihr englischen Chöre."
Tersteegen represents one phase of the mystical and emotional reaction
against the religious formalism and indifference of the eighteenth
century. In the Lutheran Church the Pietists, though they never seceded,
somewhat resembled the English Methodists; the Moravians formed a
separate community, while from the "Reformed" or Calvinistic Church
certain circles of spiritually-minded people, who drew inspiration from
the mediaeval mystics and later writers like Böhme and Madame Guyon,
gathered into more or less independent groups for religious intercourse.
Of these last Tersteegen is a representative singer. Here are three
verses from his best known Christmas hymn:--

   "Jauchzet, ihr Himmel, frohlocket, ihr englischen Chöre,
    Singet dem Herrn, dem Heiland der Menschen, zur Ehre:
           Sehet doch da!
           Gott will so freundlich und nah
           Zu den Verlornen sich kehren. |76|

    König der Ehren, aus Liebe geworden zum Kinde,
    Dem ich auch wieder mein Herz in der Liebe verbinde;
           Du sollst es sein,
           Den ich erwähle allein,
           Ewig entsag' ich der Sünde.

    Treuer Immanuel, werd' auch in mir neu geboren;
    Komm doch, mein Heiland, und lass mich nicht länger verloren;
           Wohne in mir,
           Mach mich ganz eines mit dir,
           Den du zum Leben erkoren."[32]{35}

The note of personal religion, as distinguished from theological
doctrine, is stronger in German Christmas poetry than in that of any
other nation--the birth of Christ in the individual soul, not merely the
redemption of man in general, is a central idea.

       *       *       *       *       *

We come back at last to England. The great carol period is, as has
already been said, the fifteenth, and the first half of the sixteenth,
century; after the Reformation the English domestic Christmas largely
loses its religious colouring, and the best carols of the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries are songs of |77| feasting and pagan
ceremonies rather than of the Holy Child and His Mother. There is no lack
of fine Christmas verse in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, but
for the most part it belongs to the oratory and the chamber rather than
the hall. The Nativity has become a subject for private contemplation,
for individual devotion, instead of, as in the later Middle Ages, a
matter for common jubilation, a wonder-story that really happened, in
which, all alike and all together, the serious and the frivolous could
rejoice, something that, with all its marvel, could be taken as a matter
of course, like the return of the seasons or the rising of the sun on the
just and on the unjust.

English Christmas poetry after the mid-sixteenth century is, then,
individual rather than communal in its spirit; it is also a thing less of
the people, more of the refined and cultivated few. The Puritanism which
so deeply affected English religion was abstract rather than dramatic in
its conception of Christianity, it was concerned less with the events of
the Saviour's life than with Redemption as a transaction between God and
man; St. Paul and the Old Testament rather than the gospels were its
inspiration. Moreover, the material was viewed not as penetrated by and
revealing the spiritual, but as sheer impediment blocking out the vision
of spiritual things. Hence the extremer Puritans were completely out of
touch with the sensuous poetry of Christmas, a festival which, as we
shall see, they actually suppressed when they came into power.

The singing of sacred carols by country people continued, indeed, but the
creative artistic impulse was lost. True carols after the Reformation
tend to be doggerel, and no doubt many of the traditional pieces printed
in such collections as Bramley and Stainer's[33]{37} are debased
survivals from the Middle Ages, or perhaps new words written for old
tunes. Such carols as "God rest you merry, gentlemen," have unspeakably
delightful airs, and the words charm us moderns by their quaintness and
rusticity, but they are far from the exquisite loveliness of the
mediaeval |78| things. Gleams of great beauty are, however, sometimes
found amid matter that in the process of transmission has almost ceased
to be poetry. Here, for instance, are five stanzas from the traditional
"Cherry-tree Carol":--

   "As Joseph was a-walking,
      He heard an angel sing:
    'This night shall be born
      Our heavenly King.

    'He neither shall be born
      In housen nor in hall,
    Nor in the place of Paradise,
      But in an ox's stall.

    'He neither shall be clothed
      In purple nor in pall,
    But all in fair linen
      As wear babies all.

    'He neither shall be rocked
      In silver nor in gold,
    But in a wooden cradle
      That rocks on the mould.

    'He neither shall be christened
      In white wine nor red,
    But with fair spring water
      With which we were christened.'"

The old carols sung by country folk have often not much to do with the
Nativity; they are sometimes rhymed lives of Christ or legends of the
Holy Childhood. Of the latter class the strangest is "The Bitter Withy,"
discovered in Herefordshire by Mr. Frank Sidgwick. It tells how the
little Jesus asked three lads to play with Him at ball. But they
refused:--

   "'O we are lords' and ladies' sons,
      Born in bower or in hall;
    And you are but a poor maid's child,
      Born in an oxen's stall.' |79|

    'If I am but a poor maid's child,
      Born in an oxen's stall,
    I will let you know at the very latter end
      That I am above you all.'

    So he built him a bridge with the beams of the sun,
      And over the sea went he,
    And after followed the three jolly jerdins,
      And drowned they were all three.

    Then Mary mild called home her child,
      And laid him across her knee,
    And with a handful of green withy twigs
      She gave him slashes three.

    'O the withy, O the withy, O bitter withy
      That causes me to smart!
    O the withy shall be the very first tree
      That perishes at the heart.'"

From these popular ballads, mediaeval memories in the rustic mind, we
must return to the devotional verse of the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries. Two of the greatest poets of the Nativity, the
Roman priests Southwell and Crashaw, are deeply affected by the wave of
mysticism which passed over Europe in their time. Familiar as is
Southwell's "The Burning Babe," few will be sorry to find it here:--

   "As I in hoary winter's night
      Stood shivering in the snow,
    Surprised I was with sudden heat,
      Which made my heart to glow;
    And lifting up a fearful eye
      To view what fire was near,
    A pretty Babe all burning bright
      Did in the air appear;
    Who, scorchèd with excessive heat,
      Such floods of tears did shed,
    As though His floods should quench His flames
      Which with His tears were fed. |80|
    'Alas!' quoth He, 'but newly born,
      In fiery heats I fry,
    Yet none approach to warm their hearts
      Or feel my fire, but I!
    My faultless breast the furnace is,
      The fuel, wounding thorns;
    Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke,
      The ashes, shame and scorns;
    The fuel Justice layeth on,
      And Mercy blows the coals,
    The metal in this furnace wrought
      Are men's defilèd souls,
    For which, as now on fire I am,
      To work them to their good,
    So will I melt into a bath,
      To wash them in my blood.'
    With this he vanished out of sight,
      And swiftly shrunk away:
    And straight I callèd unto mind
      That it was Christmas Day."{38}

As for Crashaw,

   "That the great angel-blinding light should shrink
    His blaze to shine in a poor shepherd's eye,
    That the unmeasured God so low should sink
    As Pris'ner in a few poor rags to lie,
    That from His mother's breast He milk should drink
    Who feeds with nectar heaven's fair family,
      That a vile manger His low bed should prove
      Who in a throne of stars thunders above:

    That He, whom the sun serves, should faintly peep
    Through clouds of infant flesh; that He the old
    Eternal Word should be a Child and weep,
    That He who made the fire should fear the cold:
    That heaven's high majesty His court should keep
    In a clay cottage, by each blast controll'd:
      That glory's self should serve our griefs and fears,
      And free Eternity submit to years--"{39}

such are the wondrous paradoxes celebrated in his glowing imagery. The
contrast of the winter snow with the burning |81| heat of Incarnate
Love, of the blinding light of Divinity with the night's darkness, indeed
the whole paradox of the Incarnation--Infinity in extremest
limitation--is nowhere realized with such intensity as by him. Yet,
magnificent as are his best lines, his verse sometimes becomes too like
the seventeenth-century Jesuit churches, with walls overladen with
decoration, with great languorous pictures and air heavy with incense;
and then we long for the dewy freshness of the early carols.

The representative Anglican poets of the seventeenth century, Herbert and
Vaughan, scarcely rise to their greatest heights in their treatment of
Christmas, but with them as with the Romanists it is the mystical note
that is dominant. Herbert sings:--

   "O Thou, whose glorious, yet contracted, light,
      Wrapt in night's mantle, stole into a manger;
    Since my dark soul and brutish is Thy right,
      To man, of all beasts, be not Thou a stranger.

    Furnish and deck my soul, that thou may'st have
    A better lodging than a rack or grave."{40}

And Vaughan:--

   "I would I had in my best part
    Fit rooms for Thee! or that my heart
          Were so clean as
          Thy manger was!
    But I am all filth, and obscene:
    Yet, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make clean.

    Sweet Jesu! will then. Let no more
    This leper haunt and soil thy door!
          Cure him, ease him,
          O release him!
    And let once more, by mystic birth,
    The Lord of life be born in earth."{41}

In Herrick--how different a country parson from Herbert!--we find a sort
of pagan piety towards the Divine Infant which, |82| though purely
English in its expression, makes us think of some French _Noëliste_ or
some present-day Italian worshipper of the _Bambino_:--

   "Instead of neat enclosures
    Of interwoven osiers,
    Instead of fragrant posies
    Of daffodils and roses,
    Thy cradle, kingly Stranger,
        As gospel tells,
        Was nothing else
    But here a homely manger.

    But we with silks not crewels,
    With sundry precious jewels,
    And lily work will dress Thee;
    And, as we dispossess Thee
    Of clouts, we'll make a chamber,
        Sweet Babe, for Thee,
        Of ivory,
    And plaster'd round with amber."{42}

Poems such as Herrick's to the Babe of Bethlehem reveal in their writers
a certain childlikeness, an _insouciance_ without irreverence, the spirit
indeed of a child which turns to its God quite simply and naturally,
which makes Him after its own child-image, and sees Him as a friend who
can be pleased with trifles--almost, in fact, as a glorious playmate.
Such a nature has no intense feeling of sin, but can ask for forgiveness
and then forget; religion for it is rather an outward ritual to be duly
and gracefully performed than an inward transforming power. Herrick is a
strange exception among the Anglican singers of Christmas.

Milton's great Nativity hymn, with its wondrous blending of pastoral
simplicity and classical conceits, is too familiar for quotation here; it
may be suggested, however, that this work of the poet's youth is far more
Anglican than Puritan in its spirit.

Sweet and solemn Spenserian echoes are these verses from Giles Fletcher's
"Christ's Victory in Heaven":-- |83|

   "Who can forget--never to be forgot--
    The time, that all the world in slumber lies,
    When, like the stars, the singing angels shot
    To earth, and heaven awakèd all his eyes
    To see another sun at midnight rise
      On earth? Was never sight of pareil fame,
      For God before man like Himself did frame,
    But God Himself now like a mortal man became.

    A Child He was, and had not learnt to speak,
    That with His word the world before did make;
    His mother's arms Him bore, He was so weak,
    That with one hand the vaults of heaven could shake,
    See how small room my infant Lord doth take,
      Whom all the world is not enough to hold!
      Who of His years, or of His age hath told?
    Never such age so young, never a child so old."{43}

The old lullaby tradition is continued by Wither, though the infant in
the cradle is an ordinary human child, who is rocked to sleep with the
story of his Lord:--

   "A little Infant once was He,
        And strength in weakness then was laid
    Upon His virgin-mother's knee,
        That power to thee might be conveyed.
            Sweet baby, then, forbear to weep;
            Be still, my babe; sweet baby, sleep.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Within a manger lodged thy Lord,
        Where oxen lay and asses fed;
    Warm rooms we do to thee afford,
        An easy cradle or a bed.
            Sweet baby, then, forbear to weep;
            Be still, my babe; sweet baby, sleep."{44}

When we come to the eighteenth century we find, where we might least
expect it, among the moral verses of Dr. Watts, a charming cradle-song
conceived in just the same way:-- |84|

   "Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber,
        Holy angels guard thy bed!
    Heavenly blessings without number
        Gently falling on thy head.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Soft and easy is thy cradle;
        Coarse and hard thy Saviour lay.
    When His birthplace was a stable,
        And His softest bed was hay.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Lo He slumbers in His manger
        Where the hornèd oxen fed;
    --Peace, my darling, here's no danger;
        Here's no ox a-near thy bed."{45}

It is to the eighteenth century that the three most popular of English
Christmas hymns belong. Nahum Tate's "While shepherds watched their
flocks by night"--one of the very few hymns (apart from metrical psalms)
in common use in the Anglican Church before the nineteenth century--is a
bald and apparently artless paraphrase of St. Luke which, by some
accident, has attained dignity, and is aided greatly by the simple and
noble tune now attached to it. Charles Wesley's "Hark, the herald angels
sing," or--as it should be--"Hark, how all the welkin rings," is much
admired by some, but to the present writer seems a mere piece of
theological rhetoric. Byrom's "Christians, awake, salute the happy morn,"
has the stiffness and formality or its period, but it is not without a
certain quaintness and dignity. One could hardly expect fine Christmas
poetry of an age whose religion was on the one hand staid, rational,
unimaginative, and on the other "Evangelical" in the narrow sense,
finding its centre in the Atonement rather than the Incarnation.

The revived mediaevalism, religious and aesthetic, of the nineteenth
century, produced a number of Christmas carols. Some, like Swinburne's
"Three damsels in the queen's chamber," with |85| its exquisite verbal
music and delightful colour, and William Morris's less successful
"Masters, in this hall," and "Outlanders, whence come ye last?" are the
work of unbelievers and bear witness only to the aesthetic charm of the
Christmas story; but there are others, mostly from Roman or
Anglo-Catholic sources, of real religious inspiration.[34] The most
spontaneous are Christina Rossetti's, whose haunting rhythms and delicate
feeling are shown at their best in her songs of the Christ Child. More
studied and self-conscious are the austere Christmas verses of Lionel
Johnson and the graceful carols of Professor Selwyn Image. In one poem
Mr. Image strikes a deeper and stronger note than elsewhere; its solemn
music takes us back to an earlier century:--

   "Consider, O my soul, what morn is this!
        Whereon the eternal Lord of all things made,
    For us, poor mortals, and our endless bliss,
        Came down from heaven; and, in a manger laid,
        The first, rich, offerings of our ransom paid:
    Consider, O my soul, what morn is this!"{46}

Not a few contemporary poets have given us Christmas carols or poems.
Among the freshest and most natural are those of Katharine Tynan, while
Mr. Gilbert Chesterton has written some Christmas lyrics full of colour
and vitality, and with a true mystical quality. Singing of Christmas, Mr.
Chesterton is at his best; he has instinctive sympathy with the spirit of
the festival, its human kindliness, its democracy, its sacramentalism,
its exaltation of the child:--

   "The thatch of the roof was as golden
        Though dusty the straw was and old;
    The wind had a peal as of trumpets,
        Though blowing and barren and cold. |86|

    The mother's hair was a glory,
        Though loosened and torn;
    For under the eaves in the gloaming
        A child was born."{47}

Thus opens a fine poem on the Nativity as symbolizing miracle of birth,
of childhood with its infinite possibilities, eternal renewal of faith
and hope.

|87| |88| |89|




CHAPTER IV

CHRISTMAS IN LITURGY AND POPULAR DEVOTION


    Advent and Christmas Offices of the Roman Church--The Three Masses of
    Christmas, their Origin and their Celebration in Rome--The Midnight
    Mass in Many Lands--Protestant Survivals of the Night
    Services--Christmas in the Greek Church--The Eastern Epiphany and the
    Blessing of the Waters--The _Presepio_ or Crib, its Supposed
    Institution by St. Francis--Early Traces of the Crib--The Crib in
    Germany, Tyrol, &c.--Cradle-rocking in Mediaeval Germany--Christmas
    Minstrels in Italy and Sicily--The _Presepio_ in Italy--Ceremonies
    with the _Culla_ and the _Bambino_ in Rome--Christmas in Italian
    London--The Spanish Christmas--Possible Survivals of the Crib in
    England.

[Illustration:

THE NATIVITY.

From Add. MS. 32454 in the British Museum

(French, 15th century).]

From a study of Christmas as reflected in lyric poetry, we now pass to
other forms of devotion in which the Church has welcomed the Redeemer at
His birth. These are of two kinds--liturgical and popular; and they
correspond in a large degree to the successive ways of apprehending the
meaning of Christmas which we traced in the foregoing chapters. Strictly
liturgical devotions are little understanded of the people: only the
clergy can fully join in them; for the mass of the lay folk they are
mysterious rites in an unknown tongue, to be followed with reverence, as
far as may be, but remote and little penetrated with humanity. Side by
side with these, however, are popular devotions, full of vivid colour,
highly anthropomorphic, bringing the mysteries of religion within the
reach of the simplest minds, and warm with human feeling. The austere
Latin hymns of the earlier centuries belong to liturgy; the vernacular
Christmas poetry of later ages is largely associated with popular
devotion.

|90| Liturgiology is a vast and complicated, and except to the few, an
unattractive, subject. To attempt here a survey of the liturgies in their
relation to Christmas is obviously impossible; we must be content to
dwell mainly upon the present-day Roman offices, which, in spite of
various revisions, give some idea of the mediaeval services of Latin
Christianity, and to cast a few glances at other western rites, and at
those of the Greek Church.

Whatever may be his attitude towards Catholicism, or, indeed,
Christianity, no one sensitive to the music of words, or the suggestions
of poetic imagery, can read the Roman Breviary and Missal without
profound admiration for the amazing skill with which the noblest passages
of Hebrew poetry are chosen and fitted to the expression of Christian
devotion, and the gold of psalmists, prophets, and apostles is welded
into coronals for the Lord and His saints. The office-books of the Roman
Church are, in one aspect, the greatest of anthologies.

Few parts of the Roman Breviary have more beauty than the Advent[35]
offices, where the Church has brought together the majestic imagery of
the Hebrew prophets, the fervent exhortation of the apostles, to prepare
the minds of the faithful for the coming of the Christ, for the
celebration of the Nativity.

Advent begins with a stirring call. If we turn to the opening service of
the Christian Year, the First Vespers of the First Sunday in Advent, we
shall find as the first words in the "Proper of the Season" the
trumpet-notes of St. Paul: "Brethren, it is high time to awake out of
sleep; for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed." This, the
Little Chapter for the office, is followed by the ancient hymn, "Creator
alme siderum,"{1} chanting in awful tones the two comings of |91|
Christ, for redemption and for judgment; and then are sung the words that
strike the keynote of the Advent services, and are heard again and again.

   "_Rorate, coeli, desuper, et nubes pluant Justum_
    (Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down the
          Righteous One).
    _Aperiatur terra et germinet Salvatorem_
    (Let the earth open, and let her bring forth the Saviour)."

_Rorate, coeli, desuper_--Advent is a time of longing expectancy. It is a
season of waiting patiently for the Lord, whose coming in great humility
is to be commemorated at Christmas, to whose coming again in His glorious
majesty to judge both the quick and the dead the Christian looks forward
with mingled hope and awe. There are four weeks in Advent, and an ancient
symbolical explanation interprets these as typifying four comings of the
Son of God: the first in the flesh, the second in the hearts of the
faithful through the Holy Spirit, the third at the death of every man,
and the fourth at the Judgment Day. The fourth week is never completed
(Christmas Eve is regarded as not part of Advent), because the glory
bestowed on the saints at the Last Coming will never end.

The great Eucharistic hymn, "Gloria in excelsis," is omitted in Advent,
in order, say the symbolists, that on Christmas night, when it was first
sung by the angels, it may be chanted with the greater eagerness and
devotion. The "Te Deum" at Matins too is left unsaid, because Christ is
regarded as not yet come. But "Alleluia" is not omitted, because Advent
is only half a time of penitence: there is awe at the thought of the
Coming for Judgment, but joy also in the hope of the Incarnation to be
celebrated at Christmas, and the glory in store for the faithful.{3}

Looking forward is above all things the note of Advent; the Church seeks
to share the mood of the Old Testament saints, and she draws more now
than at any other season, perhaps, on the treasures of Hebrew prophecy
for her lessons, antiphons, versicles, and responds. Looking for the
glory that shall be revealed, she awaits, at this darkest time of the
year, the rising |92| of the Sun of Righteousness. _Rorate, coeli,
desuper_--the mood comes at times to all idealists, and even those
moderns who hope not for a supernatural Redeemer, but for the triumph of
social justice on this earth, must be stirred by the poetry of the Advent
offices.

It is at Vespers on the seven days before Christmas Eve that the Church's
longing finds its noblest expression--in the antiphons known as the
"Great O's," sung before and after the "Magnificat," one on each day. "O
Sapientia," runs the first, "O Wisdom, which camest out of the mouth of
the Most High, and reachest from one end to another, mightily and sweetly
ordering all things: come and teach us the way of prudence." "O Adonai,"
"O Root of Jesse," "O Key of David," "O Day-spring, Brightness of Light
Everlasting," "O King of the Nations," thus the Church calls to her Lord,
"O Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, the Desire of all nations, and their
Salvation: come and save us, O Lord our God."{4}

At last Christmas Eve is here, and at Vespers we feel the nearness of the
great Coming. "Lift up your heads: behold your redemption draweth nigh,"
is the antiphon for the last psalm. "To-morrow shall be done away the
iniquity of the earth," is the versicle after the Office Hymn. And before
and after the "Magnificat" the Church sings: "When the sun shall have
risen, ye shall see the King of kings coming forth from the Father, as a
bridegroom out of his chamber."

Yet only with the night office of Matins does the glory of the festival
begin. There is a special fitness at Christmas in the Church's keeping
watch by night, like the shepherds of Bethlehem, and the office is full
of the poetry of the season, full of exultant joy. To the "Venite,
exultemus Domino" a Christmas note is added by the oft-repeated
Invitatory, "Unto us the Christ is born: O come, let us adore Him."
Psalms follow--among them the three retained by the Anglican Church in
her Christmas Matins--and lessons from the Old and New Testaments and the
homilies of the Fathers, interspersed with Responsories bringing home to
the faithful the wonders of the Holy Night. Some are almost dramatic;
this, for instance:-- |93|

 "Whom saw ye, O shepherds? speak; tell us who hath appeared on the earth.
  We saw the new-born Child, and angels singing praise unto the Lord.
  Speak, what saw ye? and tell us of the birth of Christ.
  We saw the new-born Child, and angels singing praise unto the Lord."

It is the wonder of the Incarnation, the marvel of the spotless Birth,
the song of the Angels, the coming down from heaven of true peace, the
daybreak of redemption and everlasting joy, the glory of the
Only-begotten, now beheld by men--the supernatural side, in fact, of the
festival, that the Church sets forth in her radiant words; there is
little thought of the purely human side, the pathos of Bethlehem.

It was customary at certain places, in mediaeval times, to lay on the
altar three veils, and remove one at each nocturn of Christmas Matins.
The first was black, and symbolised the time of darkness before the
Mosaic Law; the second white, typifying, it would seem, the faith of
those who lived under that Law of partial revelation; the third red,
showing the love of Christ's bride, the Church, in the time of grace
flowing from the Incarnation.{5}

A stately ceremony took place in England in the Middle Ages at the end of
Christmas Matins--the chanting of St. Matthew's genealogy of Christ. The
deacon, in his dalmatic, with acolytes carrying tapers, with thurifer and
cross-bearer, all in albs and unicles, went in procession to the pulpit
or the rood-loft, to sing this portion of the Gospel. If the bishop were
present, he it was who chanted it, and a rich candlestick was held to
light him.[36] Then followed the chanting of the "Te Deum."{6} The
ceremony does not appear in the ordinary Roman books, but it is still
performed by the Benedictines, as one may read in the striking account of
the monastic Christmas given by Huysmans in "L'Oblat."{7}

|94| Where, as in religious communities, the offices of the Church are
performed in their full order, there follows on Matins that custom
peculiar to Christmas, the celebration of Midnight Mass. On Christmas
morning every priest is permitted to say three Masses, which should in
strictness be celebrated at midnight, at dawn, and in full daylight. Each
has its own Collect, Epistle, and Gospel, each its own Introit, Gradual,
and other anthems. In many countries the Midnight Mass is the distinctive
Christmas service, a great and unique event in the year, something which
by its strangeness gives to the feast of the Nativity a place by itself.
Few Catholic rites are more impressive than this Midnight Mass,
especially in country places; through the darkness and cold of the
winter's night, often for long distances, the faithful journey to worship
the Infant Saviour in the splendour of the lighted church. It is a
re-enactment of the visit of the shepherds to the cave at Bethlehem,
aglow with supernatural light.

Various symbolical explanations of the three Masses were given by
mediaeval writers. The midnight celebration was supposed to represent
mankind's condition before the Law of Moses, when thick darkness covered
the earth; the second, at dawn, the time of the Law and the Prophets with
its growing light; the third, in full daylight, the Christian era of
light and grace. Another interpretation, adopted by St. Thomas Aquinas,
is more mystical; the three Masses stand for the threefold birth of
Christ, the first typifying the dark mystery of the eternal generation of
the Son, the second the birth of Christ the morning-star within the
hearts of men, the third the bodily birth of the Son of Mary.{8}

At the Christmas Masses the "Gloria in excelsis" resounds again. This
song of the angels was at first chanted only at Christmas; it was
introduced into Rome during the fifth century at Midnight Mass in
imitation of the custom of the Church of Jerusalem.{9}

It is, indeed, from imitation of the services at Jerusalem and Bethlehem
that the three Roman Masses of Christmas seem to have sprung. From a late
fourth-century document known as |95| the "Peregrinatio Silviae," the
narrative of a pilgrimage to the holy places of the east by a great lady
from southern Gaul, it appears that at the feast of the Epiphany--when
the Birth of Christ was commemorated in the Palestinian Church--two
successive "stations" were held, one at Bethlehem, the other at
Jerusalem. At Bethlehem the station was held at night on the eve of the
feast, then a procession was made to the church of the Anastasis or
Resurrection--where was the Holy Sepulchre--arriving "about the hour when
one man begins to recognise another, _i.e._, near daylight, but before
the day has fully broken." There a psalm was sung, prayers were said, and
the catechumens and faithful were blessed by the bishop. Later, Mass was
celebrated at the Great Church at Golgotha, and the procession returned
to the Anastasis, where another Mass was said.{10}

At Bethlehem at the present time impressive services are held on the
Latin Christmas Day. The Patriarch comes from Jerusalem, with a troop of
cavalry and Kavasses in gorgeous array. The office lasts from 10 o'clock
on Christmas Eve until long after midnight. "At the reading of the Gospel
the clergy and as many of the congregation as can follow leave the
church, and proceed by a flight of steps and a tortuous rock-hewn passage
to the Grotto of the Nativity, an irregular subterranean chamber, long
and narrow. They carry with them a waxen image of an infant--the
_bambino_--wrap it in swaddling bands and lay it on the site which is
said to be that of the manger."{11}

The Midnight Mass appears to have been introduced into Rome in the first
half of the fifth century. It was celebrated by the Pope in the church of
Santa Maria Maggiore, while the second Mass was sung by him at Sant'
Anastasia--perhaps because of the resemblance of the name to the
Anastasis at Jerusalem--and the third at St. Peter's.{12} On Christmas
Eve the Pope held a solemn "station" at Santa Maria Maggiore, and two
Vespers were sung, the first very simple, the second, at which the Pope
pontificated, with elaborate ceremonial. Before the second Vespers, in
the twelfth century, a good meal had to |96| be prepared for the papal
household by the Cardinal-Bishop of Albano. After Matins and Midnight
Mass at