Yule

From the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore:

Yule.
This word, in various spellings, means a loosely defined midwinter period (not a single day) in the early languages of most Germanic and Scandinavian countries. Bede, writing of pagan England, mentions two months, ‘early Yule’ and ‘later Yule’, corresponding to Roman December and January; after the Conversion, ‘Yule’ was narrowed to mean either the Nativity (25 December), or the twelve days of festivity beginning on this date. The word Christmas replaced ‘Yule’ in most of England in the 11th century, but not in north-eastern areas of Danish settlement, where it survived strongly till modern times as the normal dialect term for Christmas. Nineteenth-century writers took up the word as a way of denoting the ‘Christmas of olden times’, with its lavish food and secular jollity, situated in a largely invented ‘Merrie England’.

The medieval liking for pageantry and symbolism sometimes led to Yule being impersonated (cf. Father Christmas). In 1572 the Archbishop of York ordered the Mayor and Aldermen to suppress an annual parade on St Thomas’s Day (21 December) called ‘The Riding of Yule and his Wife’, because it drew ‘great concourses of people’ away from church-going, and involved disguising. The man representing Yule carried a shoulder of lamb and a large cake of fine bread; he was accompanied by his ‘wife’, carrying a distaff, and by attendants who threw nuts to the crowd.

The Yule Log (or Clog, or Christmas Block) is mentioned in folklore collections from most parts of England, but especially the West Country and the North. It would be the largest piece of wood which could fit on the family hearth, and was usually brought in on Christmas Eve with some ceremony, and put on the fire that evening; many writers, including Herrick, say it was kindled with a fragment kept from the previous year’s log. It was also generally believed that it would be very unlucky for the family if the log was allowed to go out on Christmas Day. It is not clear when the custom arose, since the first definite references are only from the 17th century, for example Aubrey’s “In the West-riding of Yorkshire on Christmas Eve at night they bring in a large Yule-log, or Christmas block, and set it on fire and lap their Christmas ale and sing ‘Yule, Yule, a pack of new cards and a Christmas stool’”.

Victorian illustrations of a medieval Christmas often show several men hauling huge trees or stumps in with ropes, but the antiquity of the word ‘Yule’ cannot prove the custom’s age. Less well known is the custom of lighting a Yule candle on Christmas Eve, first recorded by this name in 1817. These were taller than usual candles (‘half a yard in length’), and there was a tradition of chandlers and grocers giving them to their regular customers. The custom is reported chiefly from the north of the country, but its wider range is indicated by Parson Woodeforde’s diary entries, in Norfolk, such as: ‘I lighted my large wax-candle being Xmas day during tea-time this afternoon for abt. an hour’ (25 December 1790). The pre-Reformation Church made a particular feature of candles at Christmas, and strong connections between the season and candles persist to this day. It was thought unlucky to light the Yule candle before dusk on Christmas Eve, and once alight it was not moved. As with the log, a small piece was kept ‘for luck’ in the coming year.

From ‘Cider with Rosie’

by Laurie Lee:

The week before Christmas, when snow seemed to lie thickest, was the moment for carol-singing; and when I think back to those nights it is to the crunch of snow and to the lights of the lanterns on it. Carol-singing in my village was a special tithe for the boys, the girls had little to do with it. Like hay-making, blackberrying, stone-clearing, and wishing-people-a-happy-Easter, it was one of our seasonal perks.

By instinct we knew just when to begin; a day too soon and we should have been unwelcome, a day too late and we should have received lean looks from people whose bounty was already exhausted. When the true moment came, exactly balanced, we recognized it and were ready.

So as soon as the wood had been stacked in the oven to dry for the morning fire, we put on our scarves and went out through the streets, calling loudly between our hands, till the various boys who knew the signal ran out from their houses to join us.

One by one they came stumbling over the snow, swinging their lanterns’ around their heads, shouting and coughing horribly.

‘Come carol-barking then?’

We were the Church Choir, so no answer was necessary. For a year we had praised the Lord out of key, and as a reward for this service - on top of the Outing - we now had the right to visit all the big houses, to sing our carols and collect our tribute.

To work them all in meant a five-mile foot journey over wild and generally snowed-up country. So the first thing we did was to plan our route; a formality, as the route never changed. All the same, we blew on our fingers and argued; and then we chose our Leader. This was not binding, for we all fancied ourselves as Leaders, and he who started the night in that position usually trailed home with a bloody nose.

Eight of us set out that night. There was Sixpence the Tanner, who had never sung in his life (he just worked his mouth in church); the brothers Horace and Boney, who were always fighting everybody and always getting the worst of it; Clergy Green, the preaching maniac; Wait the bully, and my two brothers. As we went down the lane other boys, from other villages, were already about the hills, bawling ‘Kingwenslush’, and shouting through keyholes ‘Knock on the knocker! Ring at the Bell! Give us a penny for singing so well!’ They weren’t an approved charity as we were, the Choir; but competition was in the air.

Our first call as usual was the house of the Squire, and we trouped nervously down his drive. For light we had candles in marmalade-jars suspended on loops of string, an d they threw pale gleams on the towering snowdrifts that stood on each side of the drive. A blizzard was blowing, but we were well wrapped up, with Army puttees on our legs, woollen hats on our heads, and several scarves around our ears.

As we approached the Big House across its white silent lawns, we too grew respectfully silent. The lake near by was stiff and black, the waterfall frozen and still. We arranged ourselves shuffling around the big front door, then knocked and announced the Choir.

A maid bore the tidings of our arrival away into the echoing distances of the house, and while we waited we cleared our throats noisily. Then she came back, and the door was left ajar for us, and we were bidden to begin. We brought no music, the carols were in our heads. ‘Let’s give ’em “Wild Shepherds”,’ said Jack. We began in confusion, plunging into a wreckage of keys, of different words and tempo; but we gathered our strength; he who sang loudest took the rest of us with him, and the carol took shape if not sweetness.

This huge stone house, with its ivied walls, was always a mystery to us. What were those gables, those rooms and attics, those narrow windows veiled by the cedar trees. As we sang Wild Shepherds’ we craned our necks, gaping into that lamplit hall which we had never entered; staring at the muskets and untenanted chairs, the great tapestries furred by dust - until suddenly, on the stairs, we saw the old Squire himself standing and listening with his head on one side.

He didn’t move until we’d finished; then slowly he tottered towards us, dropped two coins in our box with a trembling hand, scratched his name in the book we carried, gave us each a long look with his moist blind eyes, then turned away in silence.

As though released from a spell, we took a few sedate steps, then broke into a run for the gate. We didn’t stop till we were out of the grounds. Impatient, at last, to discover the extent of his bounty, we squatted by the cowsheds, held our lanterns over the book, and saw that he had written ‘Two Shillings’. This was quite a good start. No one of any worth in the district would dare to give us less than the Squire.

Steadily we worked through the length of the valley, going from house to house, visiting the lesser and the greater gentry - the farmers, the doctors, the merchants, the majors, and other exalted persons. It was freezing hard and blowing too; yet not for a moment did we feel the cold. The snow blew into our faces, into our eyes and mouths, soaked through our puttees, got into our boots, and dripped from our woollen caps. But we did not care. The collecting-box grew heavier, and the list of names in the book longer and more extravagant, each trying to outdo the other.

Mile after mile we went, fighting against the wind, falling into snowdrifts, and navigating by the lights of the houses. And yet we never saw our audience. We called at house after house; we sang in courtyards and porches, outside windows, or in the damp gloom of hallways; we heard voices from hidden rooms; we smelt rich clothes and strange hot food; we saw maids bearing in dishes or carrying away coffee-cups; we received nuts, cakes, figs, preserved ginger, dates, cough-drops, and money; but we never once saw our patrons. We sang as it were at the castle walls, and apart from the Squire, who had shown himself to prove that he was still alive, we never expected it otherwise.

We approached our last house high up on the hill, the place of Joseph the farmer. For him we had chosen a special carol. which was about the other Joseph, so that we always felt that singing it added a spicy cheek to the night. The last stretch of country to reach his farm was perhaps the most difficult of all. In these rough bare lanes, open to all winds, sheep were buried and wagons lost. Huddled together, we tramped in one another’s footsteps, powdered snow blew into our screwed-up eyes, the candles burnt low, some blew out altogether, and we talked loudly above the gale.

Crossing, at last, the frozen mill-stream - whose wheel in summer still turned a barren mechanism - we climbed up to Joseph’s farm. Sheltered by trees, warm on its bed of snow, it seemed always to be like this. As always it was late; as always this was our final call. The snow had a fine crust upon it, and the old trees sparkled like tinsel.

We grouped ourselves round the farmhouse porch. The sky cleared, and broad streams of stars ran down over the valley and away to Wales. On Slad’s white slopes, seen through the black sticks of its woods, some red lamps still burned in the windows.

Everything was quiet; everywhere there was the faint crackling silence of the winter night. We started singing, and we were all moved by the words and the sudden trueness of our voices. Pure, very dear, and breathless we sang:

As Joseph was a walking
He heard an angel sing;
‘This night shall be the birth-time
Of Christ the Heavenly King.
He neither shall be bornèd
In Housen nor in hall,
Nor in a place of paradise
But in an ox’s stall …’

And two thousand Christmases became real to us then; the houses, the halls, the places of paradise had all been visited; the stars were bright to guide the Kings through the snow; and across the farmyard we could hear the beasts in their stalls. We were given roast apples and hot mince-pies, in our nostrils were spices like myrrh, and in our wooden box, as we headed back for the village, there were golden gifts for all.

Christmas in America: European Inheritances

From Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America: A History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996):

"Shall we have Christmas?" was the way one Pennsylvanian asked the question in 1810. Throughout their colonial history and well into nationhood, not only the matter of "shall" but of "how shall" Christmas be celebrated challenged Americans. Their search for answers to these two difficult and sometimes divisive issues can be found in a chronicle of evolving customs, cultural discord, and striking invention. It begins with the first European emigres, who brought to America an ambiguous legacy concerning the holiday that was almost as old as the Christian Church itself.

Christians had wrestled for centuries with questions of if, when, and how to celebrate Jesus' birth. As a commemoration of the miracle that established the Godly paternity of Jesus, Christmas was a celebration of the event upon which the existence of Christianity depended. At the same time, the festival functioned from its inception as an end-of-year substitute for pagan rites and quickly absorbed many profane elements, ones that remain among its most attractive features. As the observance of Christmas spread, the details of its celebration became as varied as the cultures that kept it and as changeable as the history of those cultures. But the radically paradoxical mix of both the sacred and the profane remained.

The earliest Christians gave little attention to Jesus' birth. They expected the Second Coming any day, and in any case viewed birthday celebrations as heathen. As the possibility of his imminent return faded, the faithful

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took a more historical perspective and began to search for evidence of the day or even season of Jesus' birth. They found no clues in the Gospels. Nor could they locate any other reliable sources to pinpoint his nativity. Undeterred, some placed his birth on May 20 and others on April 19 or 20. Clement, Bishop of Alexandria (died c. 215), nominated November 18. Hippolytus (died c. 236) calculated that Christ must have been born on Wednesday, the same day God created the sun. The De Pascba Computus, written anonymously in North Africa about 243, posited that the first day of creation coincided with the first day of spring, on March 25, and contended that Jesus' birthday fell four days later, on March 28.

Sometime in the fourth century of the Common Era, the Roman Church began to celebrate a Feast of the Nativity and to do so on December 25. A variety of issues influenced the decision. Internally, heresies plagued Church authority. Arianism, one of the most threatening, regarded Jesus as a solely human agent of God. The Church insisted on his divinity. By assigning him one human quality -- a birthday -- it appropriated some of Arianism's appeal, but sustained Jesus' place in the Holy Trinity.

The Church had also grown concerned about the increasing popularity of pagan religions and mystery cults in Rome. Each year beginning on December 17, the first day of Saturnalia, and continuing through Kalends, the first day of January, most Romans feasted, gamed, reveled, paraded, and joined in other festivities as they paid homage to their deities. The Church's alarm deepened when Emperor Aurelian, noticing that the pagan rituals had begun to converge around Mithras, the solar god, decreed in 274 C.E. that December 25, the winter solstice on the Julian Calendar, be kept as a public festival in honor of the Invincible Sun. Rome's Christians challenged paganism directly by specifying December 25, rather than some other date, as the day for their Nativity Feast.

Exactly when the Church of Rome began to keep Christmas, however, is not known. The first extant reference to the Feast of the Nativity may be as old as 336, in the earliest list of martyrs of the Roman Church. Perhaps Christmas was celebrated even earlier. Some scholars believe that Emperor Constantine (ruled 312-337 C.E.), who had converted to Christianity and built the Vatican atop the hill where the Mithras cult worshipped the sun, may have instituted the festival.

In any case, by the middle of the fourth century, the Church had boldly declared its Nativity holy day to be observed on the same day as the winter solstice. The concurrence of the two celebrations gave the Church an opportunity to turn elements of the Saturnalia itself to Christian ends. For

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example, it used the creation of the sun, the center of the Saturnalia, to reinforce and symbolize frequent scriptural and doctrinal imagery of God as the sun, and of Jesus' role as Son of God. The creation of Christmas was thus a measure of Christianity's growing power, challenging the crowds enjoying Saturnalian revelry to join the once secretive Christians in a celebration not of the birth of the sun, but rather the birth of Jesus, the Son of God.

The overlapping of Saturnalia and the Feast of the Nativity set the terms of all future debate over the Christmas festival. Its Christian aspects, at least in their most intense form, emphasized heavenly afterlife. The heathen elements absorbed into the festival affirmed life and exalted its annual renewal. The Church made no clear separations between the two perspectives. Instead, it layered profane activities with sacred ends to answer the needs, spiritual and physical, of the total person. This combination of sacred and profane made some religious leaders uncomfortable. For example, Gregory of Nazianzen (died 389) urged that "the celebration of the [Christmas] festival [be conducted] after an heavenly and not after an earthly manner" and cautioned against "feasting to excess, dancing and crowning the doors." Indeed, the paradox of purpose forged an enduring Christmas reality. As one historian succinctly characterized it: "The pagan Romans became Christians -- but the Saturnalia remained."

The custom of honoring Jesus' birth on December 25 quickly spread to the Eastern Church. By 380, Christians in Constantinople honored it as "Theophany or the Birthday." These Christians had once observed Epiphany, January 6, as a joint Feast of the Nativity and Baptism. This was the same date that popular legends held pagan gods made themselves known to humans. "Deep in the tradition of the Church's spirituality," writes John Gunstone, "was the idea that Christ's appearance in flesh was the consummation of all epiphanies." During the Christological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries, the celebration of Epiphany spread westward, but the Roman Church, with its celebration of the Nativity set in late December and its emphasis on Jesus' incarnation and divinity, recast it to commemorate the adoration of the Magi. In Constantinople, Epiphany continued to consecrate Jesus' baptism, but the Eastern Church began to mark December 25 as the day of his birth. The dual celebration, that of birth and baptism, that had defined the old holy day ceased to exist.

Over the next thousand years, the observance of Christmas followed the expanding community of Christianity. By 432, Egyptians kept it. By the end of the sixth century, Christianity had taken the holiday far northward

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and into England. During the next two hundred years in Scandinavia it became fused with the pagan Norse feast season known as Yule, the time of year also known as the Teutonic "Midwinter." Sometime around the Norman incursion in 1050, the Old English word Christes maesse (festival of Christ) entered the English language, and as early as the twelfth century "Xmas" had come into use. From the thirteenth century on, nearly all Europe kept Jesus' birth.

The tension between the folk and ecclesiastical qualities of the holy day did not ease with the advance of Christmas-keeping. Documents of the Middle Ages, Tristram Coffin has noted, were "fat with decrees against the abuses of Christmas merriment," an indication "that people at large [were] doing just what they ha[d] always done and paying little attention to the debates of the moralists." Some clergy stressed that fallen humankind needed a season of abandon and excess, as long as it was carried on under the umbrella of Christian supervision. Others argued that all vestiges of paganism must be removed from the holiday. Less fervent Christians complained about the unreasonableness of Church law and its attempts to change custom. Yet the Church sustained the hope that sacred would eventually overtake profane as pagans gave up their revels and turned to Christianity.

These conflicts continued during the Protestant Reformation, but with little promise of resolution. In England, the Anglican Church repeatedly, but with little success, tried to gain control over the day. Its custom had been to begin Christmas on December 16 (known as "O Sapientia") and celebrate for nine days. But during King Alfred's reign (871-899 C.E.), a law passed extending the celebration to twelve days, ending on Epiphany.

Celebrants devoted much of the season to pagan pleasures that were discouraged during the remainder of the year. The annual indulgence in eating, dancing, singing, sporting, card playing, and gambling escalated to magnificent proportions. By the seventeenth century, under the reigns of the Tudors and Stuarts, the Christmas season featured elaborate masques, mummeries, and pageants. In 1607, King James I insisted that a play be acted on Christmas night and that the court indulge in games. One account of an evening's "moderate dinner" noted a first course of sixteen dishes. In 1626, the Duke of Buckingham found that the captains, masters, boatswains, gunners, and carpenters of three ships had abandoned their service in favor of Christmas revels, leaving their vessels prey to any enemy. In

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1633, the four Inns of Court presented a masque, The Triumph of Peace," at a cost of £20,000.

It fell to Puritan reformers to put a stop to the unholy merriment and to bend arguments over the proper keeping of Christmas into an older and more basic one -- whether there should even be an observance of the day. Defying the decision of the Anglican Convocation of 1562 to maintain the church calendar, the Puritans struck Christmas, along with all saints' days, from their own list of holy days. The Bible, they held, expressly commanded keeping only the Sabbath. That would be their practice as well.

In taking the offensive against Christmas-keeping, Puritans distributed colorful diatribes against the excesses of the holiday. Philip Stubbes's Anatomy of Abuses (1583) condemned revelous celebrants as "hel hounds" in a "Deville's daunce" of merriment. William Prynne's Histriomastix (1633) inveighed against plays, masques, balls, and the decking of houses with greens. "Into what a stupendous height of more than pagan impiety. . . have we not now degenerated!" he lamented. Christmas, he thought, ought to be "rather a day of mourning than rejoicing," not a time spent in "amorous mixt, voluptuous, unchristian, that I say not pagan, dancing, to God's, to Christ's dishonour, religion's scandal, chastities' shipwracke and sinne's advantage."

Even as Puritan condemnation of Christmas intensified, the economic and social upheaval of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century had begun to alter English life. The standing social order, along with the paternalism of its manor system, was crumbling. Christmas, in its role as a part of the old structure, could not escape unscathed. In some years, the lavish celebrations lapsed. In many cases, the emphases of the holiday changed. It transformed, in the words of J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue, into "a symbol for hospitality towards the poor, an understanding between the different levels of society, and happier and more prosperous times in now neglected villages." King Charles I (1625-1649) went so far as to direct his noblemen and gentry to return to their landed estates in midwinter in order to keep up their old style of Christmas generosity.

The rise of Oliver Cromwell's Puritan Commonwealth dealt another staggering blow to England's Christmas celebrations. Parliament outlawed seasonal plays in 1642. It ordered that the monthly fast, which coincidentally fell on Christmas in 1644, be kept. Parliament purposely met on every Christmas from 1644 to 1652. In 1647, it declared Christmas a day of penance, not feasting, and in 1652 "strongly prohibited" its observance.

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Ministers who preached on the Nativity risked imprisonment. Churchwardens faced fines for decorating their churches. By law, shops stayed open on Christmas as if it were any regular business day.

Yet resistance was not uncommon. One year, protesting Londoners decorated churches and shops with swags of bay, rosemary, box, holly, privit, and ivy, only to watch the Lord Mayor and City Marshal ride about setting fire to their handiwork. The populace "so roughly used" the merchants who ventured to open shop in 1646 that the shopkeepers petitioned Parliament for protection. In Canterbury, when the Lord Mayor ordered that the markets be kept open that Christmas, a "serious disturbance ensued . . . wherein many were severly hurt."

It was within this particularly turbulent era that English Christmas customs entered early Virginia and New England. Most settlers and adventurers arriving in the New World welcomed Christmas as a day of respite from the routines of work and hardship. Some observed it, at least in part, as a holy day. Others attempted to feast. On Christmas, 1608, Captain John Smith and his men, having endured for "six or seven dayes the extreame winde, rayne, frost and snow" as they traveled among the Indians of Virginia colony, "were never more merry, nor fed on more plentie of good Oysters, Fish, Flesh, Wild-foule, and good bread; nor never had better fires in England." Maryland-bound passengers aboard the Ark in 1633 "so immoderately" drank wine on Christmas that "the next day 30 sickened of feve[r]s and whereof about a dozen died afterward."

Only Dissenters tried to ignore the holiday. The Mayflower Pilgrims, who arrived at Plymouth in December 1620, spent Christmas building "the first house for commone use to receive them and their goods." Within a year, however, the Pilgrims themselves had to face dissent. On the morning of December 25, 1621, less reform-minded newcomers to the colony "excused them selves and said it wente against their consciences to work on that day." Governor William Bradford allowed the "lusty yonge" Englishmen to rest, saying he "would spare them till they were better informed." But at noon he found them playing games in the street. Angered, Bradford told the frolickers that it ran against bis conscience that they should play while others worked. If they desired to keep Christmas as a matter of devotion they should stay in their houses, he said, "but ther should be no gameing or revelling in the streets." Nor did the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony observe Christmas. Governor John Winthrop

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entered nothing in his diary on his first Christmas in America in 1630, and in succeeding years he attempted to suppress the holiday.

In the early non-English settlements, sparse evidence points to a more traditional attitude toward the holiday. In 1604, for instance, French settlers of St. Croix Island, off the coast of Maine, held religious services and spent the remainder of Christmas Day playing games. In 1686 LaSalle's French colony on Garcita Creek celebrated what was probably the first Christmas in Texas. "[W]e first kept the Christmas Holy-Days. The Midnight Mass was sung, and on Twelve-Day, we cry'd The king drinks . . . tho' we had only Water...."

As the first settlements grew into more established communities, patterns of Christmas celebration peculiar to the colonies began to appear. Geographic separation from European homelands, the proximity of disparate religious and ethnic groups to each other, and the hardship of new beginnings disrupted old habits and holidays. In Dutch New Amsterdam, early in the seventeenth century, eighteen languages could be heard among the 500 or so inhabitants. Numerous Christmases abounded, persisting as an expression of individual heritages. In large towns, where various groups lived close together, the common ground for celebration could often be found in public and secular rather than in potentially divisive religious areas. Thus, Christmas, although widely celebrated, retained little importance in society as a whole precisely because of religious and cultural diversity.

Particularly in the middle colonies, a wide range of ethnicities and religions prevented a shared ecclesiastic and religious holiday. Pennsylvania Quakers scorned Christmas as adamantly as Puritans did. Huguenots, Moravians, Dutch Reformed, and Anglicans, who also lived in the colony, all kept Christmas in their own way. Shortly after Americans had won their independence, Elizabeth Drinker, a Quaker herself, divided Philadelphians into three categories. There were Quakers, who "make no more account of it [Christmas] than another day," those who were religious, and the rest who "spend it in riot and dissipation."

"Frolicking," the name many gave to this sort of boisterous Christmas and New Year's fun, could be found throughout the colonies. In the New England countryside, revelous intruders entered houses with a speech and swords at Christmas time. Far into the eighteenth century, masked merrymakers roved Pennsylvania's Delaware Valley "making sport for everyone." Southerners shot guns, a custom similar to one practiced in northern England.

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The antecedents to this seasonal phenomenon have been traced to Roman times, when early Christians, seeking to ridicule pagan superstition and the Roman custom of masquerading, masked themselves on New Year's Day. Many, however, flagged in their intent and joined in the heathens' frolics. Church officials attempted to persuade members to desist, but failed. In time, even clergy could be found in full disguise, taking part in miracle and mystery plays performed during the Christmas season.

The convention of disguising, or mumming, and performing plays and skits dispersed throughout nearly all European countries. In England, beginning under the reign of Edward III (1327-1377), it became a form of royal entertainment. It peaked in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when elaborate dress and formal presentations, such as Ben Johnson's Masque of Christmas and that in Shakespeare's Henry VIII, were the order of the season. Enthusiasm for court masques diminished thereafter, dampened by the Puritan Directory. But the tradition of masquerading and mumming continued to thrive in more rustic forms. In parts of England, householders, family, guests, and servants donned masks and painted their faces or darkened them with soot to become "guisers," "geese-dancers," or "morris dancers." Often they dressed as animals. Sometimes men and women exchanged clothes with each other. Disguised, they played crude tricks on one another, or went from house to house and entered without permission. There they might dance, sing, feast, and act "a rude drama," mocking propriety and challenging the social order.

American colonists engaged in similar antics, though usually without the performance of even a rudimentary play. They concentrated instead on disguises, noisy good humor, and chaotic peregrinations through neighborhoods. Across the land, revelers, almost always males, gathered to shoot off firecrackers and guns, paraded with musical instruments, call from house to house in garish disguise, and beg for food and drink on December 25 and, in some places, on New Year's.

Such frolics, drawn from the custom of English Anglicans, as well as those of Swedish, German, and other settlers, were especially prominent in New York and Pennsylvania. Samuel Breck remembered maskers from his Pennsylvania childhood in the late eighteenth century. "They were a set of the lowest blackguards," he wrote, "who, disguised in filthy clothes and ofttimes with masked faces, went from house to house in large companies, . . . obtruding themselves everywhere, particularly into the rooms that were occupied by parties of ladies and gentlemen, [and] would demean themselves with great insolence." As the elder Breck and his friends

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played cards, Samuel had watched the mummers "take possession of a table, seat themselves on rich furniture and proceed to handle the cards, to the great annoyance of the company." He could only get rid of them by "giv[ing] them money, and listening) patiently to a foolish dialogue between two or more of them . . ."

Usually an informal code regulated the mummers' reception. According to one set of rules, "the proper custom" had been to ask the uninvited guests "into the house and regale them with mulled cider, or small beer, and home-made cakes," or "give the leading mummers a few pence as a dole, which . . . they would 'pool,' and buy cakes and beer." One never "address[ed] or otherwise recognize[d] the mummer by any other name than the name of the character he was assuming.

In New York, the calling ritual varied slightly. Men had gone from house to house, firing their guns, on New Year's Day since "time immemorial." At each place, after being invited in for food and drink, the men of the household joined them. "[T]hus they went on increasing their numbers until the whole neighborhood had been saluted and visited. . . . " The remainder of the day the shooters engaged in contests of marksmanship and other sports. At least one, the "very barbarous amusement" of "Shooting Turkeys," required a keen eye and sharp betting skills.

The southern colonies, largely rural and unhampered by Quaker and Puritan dissenters and whose white population was comparatively less diverse, cultivated Christmases of a very different sort. Decentralized living, a dearth of women, and a high death rate kept the holiday at bay during the first decades of settlement. As social and political conditions stabilized, southerners began to look to England for models of dress, manner, and social behavior. Their Christmas, like that of the English manor, evolved as an interval of leisure rather than a set of rituals assigned to one particular day. During the season, Virginians, Carolinians, and Marylanders especially enjoyed dancing, but also engaged in card playing, cock fighting, nine-pins, and horse racing. Anglicanism, the established religion in most of the planting colonies, did not pressure its members into sacred observance.

While southerners may have aspired to recreate a sense of the English Christmas, its authentic reproduction eluded them. No pre-Revolutionary account mentions boars' heads or wassail bowls, mummers or waits. In England those traditions had been on the wane when John Smith first ventured through Virginia, and by the 1650s had been mortally threatened

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by Cromwell's Parliament. A French traveler, who along with his entourage of nearly twenty stopped unannounced at the Virginia home of Colonel William Fitzhugh in 1680, left one of the few accounts from the seventeenth century. "[T]here was good wine and all kinds of beverages, so there was a great deal of carousing," the visitor wrote. For entertainment, Fitzhugh provided "three fiddlers, a jester, a tight-rope walker, and an acrobat who tumbled around." When the travelers left the next day, Fitzhugh sent wine and punch to the river's edge for them and then lent them his boat.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, tales of Virginia Christmases had spread back to England and began to create an aura of romance around the South. "All over the Colony, a universal Hospitality reigns," London Magazine reported in 1746; "full Tables and open Doors, the kind salute, the generous Detention, speak somewhat like the old Roast-beef Ages of our Fore-fathers. ... Strangers are fought after with Greediness, as they pass the Country, to be invited."

Evidence of eighteenth-century Christmas celebrations is nearly as scarce as for the seventeenth. Best known is the Christmas chronicled by Philip Vickers Fithian, a Presbyterian tutor from New Jersey. Fithian spent a single Christmas season, in 1773, at Nomini Hall, a plantation owned by Robert Carter, one of the wealthiest Tidewater planters. The first sign of the season he recorded occurred on Monday, December 18; students barred one of Fithian's colleagues from teaching school until "twelfth-day" (January 6), a custom known throughout the British Commonwealth. However, Fithian continued to teach, noting proudly that his "scholars are a more quiet nature, and have consented to have four or five Days now, and to have their full Holiday in May next. . . . "

Excitement built as the holiday approached. "Nothing is now to be heard of in conversation, but the Balls, the Fox-hunts, the fine entertainments, and the good fellowship . . . ," Fithian wrote on the 18th. His entry for Christmas Day began, "Guns fired all round the House," after which the various "Servants" who regularly attended him greeted him with "Joyful Christmas." He rewarded them with the expected small change and a donation to a "Christmas Box." As for Christmas dinner, Fithian noted that it "was no otherwise than common yet as elegant" as any he had ever attended. Not until the following Sunday, December 26, did he and the Carters go to church. The minister "preach'd from Isaiah 9.6 For unto us a child is Born &c. his sermon was fifteen Minutes long! very fashion-

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able—," but few attended. Fithian reopened his school the following Wednesday, December 29. The holidays at Nomini Hall had ended.

Not all southerners partook of the sumptuous Christmases reported in London or witnessed by Fithian. Neither ritually exacting nor regularly held, the holiday on each plantation seemed to have its own style of celebration. In 1709, William Byrd began Christmas by attending church, where he "received the sacrament with great devoutness." Afterward, he dined on roast beef with friends and "in the evening we were merry with nonsense and so were my servants. . . . " The following year he spent Christmas quite differently, reading a sermon and dining alone. Thomas Jefferson rarely mentioned Christmas. George Washington frequently spent his holiday hunting and settling such year-end financial matters as renewing the terms of indenture for his servants, and attending church.

Perhaps, as Julian Boyd has suggested, the Enlightenment, which uprooted superstitions and redefined social classes, prevented a precise duplication of an English Christmas. Indeed, there may even have been some attempt to rationalize the Christmas festival. In December 1739, the Virginia Gazette briefly recounted a history of the holiday, noting that some Christians "celebrate this Season in a Mixture of Piety and Licentiousness," others "in a pious Way only," others "behave themselves profusely and extravagantly alone." The last category was comprised of the many who "pass over the Holy Time, without paying any Regard to it at all." The writer concluded that "On the whole, they who will be over-religious at this Time, must be pardoned and pitied; they who are falsely religious, censured; they who are downright criminal, condemned; and the Little Liberties of the old Roman December, which are taken by the Multitude, ought to be overlooked and excused, for an Hundred Reasons. . . . "

This broadly permissive approach to Christmas contrasted sharply with prevailing attitudes in New England. Like their forebears in England, the Puritan leaders of New England sought to expunge the holiday altogether. Their struggle betokened a broader battle against growing numbers of non-Puritans in the region and periodic intervention in religious affairs on the part of the Crown.

The entry of non-Puritans began at the founding of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, and increasingly presented a problem as displaced English workers, many of them Anglican, bolstered the labor-short economies. At first, Puritans relied on what one historian called the "infor-

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mal pressure of like minded co-religionists" to quell the observance of Jesus' birth. But this strategy proved inadequate. In 1659, in an atmosphere of tension over Anglicanism, other heresies, new trade, and general disarray, the Massachusetts Bay General Court banned the keeping of Christmas by "forebearing of labour, feasting, or any other way." The law aimed to prevent the recurrence of further, unspecified "disorders" which had apparently arisen in "seurerall places ... by reason of some still observing such Festiualls," and provided that "whosoeuer shall be found observing any such day as Xmas or the like . . . " would be fined.

Pressure from England contributed to the troubled atmosphere. All of the once forbidden holiday rites had begun to be practiced once again during the Restoration in Britain, in forms more extreme than before. As early as 1665, Charles II demanded that Massachusetts rescind its anti-Christmas law to reflect these changes. Finally in 1681, Massachusetts issued a repeal, citing as a reason that a ban on Christmas would be a derogation of the King's honor. Still, in 1686, Puritan militants barred newly appointed English Governor Andros from holding his Christmas services in their meeting house and forced him to move to the Boston Town Hall.

The renewed English fervor for the raucous excesses of Christmas began to wane almost as rapidly as it had revived, while New England's Puritan leadership gave little indication that it had gained much tolerance for the holiday. "[M]en dishonour Christ more in the 12 days of Christmas than in all the 12 months besides," wrote Increase Mather in his diary. He reiterated the case against Christmas in A Testimony Against Several Profane and Superstitious Customs Now Practiced by Some in New England, a tract published in England in 1687. "In the Apostolical times," Mather wrote, "the Feast of the Nativity was not observed. ... It can never be proved that Christ was born on December 25. ... The New Testament allows of no stated Holy-Day but the Lords-day. ... It was in compliance with the Pagan saturnalia that Christmas Holy-dayes were first invented. The manner of Christmas-keeping, as generally observed, is highly dishonourable to the Name of Christ."

Increase's son Cotton escalated the rhetoric against the holiday by making more explicit the fearful connection between Christmas and sin. He even linked it to Salem's witchcraft. "On the twenty-fifth of December it was," he wrote, "that Mercy [Short] said, They were going to have a Dance; and immediately those that were attending her, most plainly Heard and Felt a Dance, as of Barefooted People, upon the Floor. . . . " Mather

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later denounced the holiday in more general terms. "I hear a Number of people of both Sexes, belonging, many of them to my Flock, who have had on Christmas-night, this last Week, a Frolick, a revelling Feast, and Ball, which discovers their Corruption, and has a Tendency to corrupt them yett more, and provoke the Holy One to give them up into eternal Hardness of Heart."

Despite his strong tone, Cotton Mather did not forthrightly condemn Christmas itself. Like Bradford, who in 1621 had stopped the newcomers' street revelry, he expressed more concern for the liberties taken during the celebration of Christmas than for the fact of celebration. Calling the merrymaking an "affront unto the grace of God," he tacitly turned the question of "should" to one of "how" to hallow Jesus' birth. "Can you in your consciences think that our holy saviour is honored by mirth, by long eating, by hard drinking, by lewd gaming, by rude revelling, by a mass fit for none but a Saturn or a Bacchus, or the light of Mahametan Romandon?" he asked. "Shall it be said that at the birth of our Saviour ... we take the time to please the hellish legions and to do actions that have much more of hell than of heaven in them?"

In all, Christmas became a point at which Puritan piety and autonomy grated against English custom, British authority, and Anglican influence. Bostonians, for example, openly repudiated Anglicanism by refusing to close their businesses on Christmas. "Carts come to Town and Shops open as is usual," Judge Samuel Sewall noted on December 24, 1685 (and nearly every year after). That same year Sewall smugly noted that he thought the British colonial officials were "vexed . . . that the Body of the People profane it [Christmas]," and thanked God that there was "no Authority yet to compell them [i.e. Puritans] to keep it." The Crown-appointed governor twice took Sewall aside in 1722 to discuss recessing the General Court on Christmas. Sewall opposed adjournment, but suggested (after a discussion with Cotton Mather) that the matter be voted on by the Council and Representatives. The governor took the opposite side, arguing that "All kept Christmas" except the Puritans. Provoked, Sewall responded: "the Dissenters came a great way for their/Liberties and now the [Anglican] Church had theirs, yet they could not be contented, except they might Tread all others down." Ultimately, the governor ignored Sewall's entreaty and closed the court on Saturday until the following Wednesday, December 26.

Others besides the British government challenged the Puritans on Christmas. Holiday rituals in observing churches attracted a fair number of

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putative Calvinists at Christmastide. Ebenezer Miller, graduate of Harvard but recently ordained an Anglican, Sewall noted in 1727, "keeps the day in his New church at Braintrey: people flock thither." On another occasion he spoke to a Mr. Newman "about his partaking with the French church on the 25th of December, on account of its being Christmas, as they abusively call it." Congregational ministers countered by ordering fasts on Christmas Day and tried in other ways to show their disregard for the festival. One spent the Sunday preceding Christmas outlining his proof that the celebration of Jesus' birth was "Popery and prelatic tyranny, a destroyer of consciences."

In the end, whether slowly in New England or more rapidly in the middle colonies and the South, the forces of pluralism and the need for social harmony shaped and encouraged Christmas celebration. Yet its status as a holiday remained haphazard and varied widely. Like the colonies in general on the eve of the Revolution, regions and communities were as notable for their different approaches to the holiday as for their commonalities. It would take the project of nation-building in the wake of the Revolution to begin to define an American conception of Christmas.

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Christmas in England: Another View

Also see this history by John Storey.

From A Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2000):

Christmas has a complex and much debated history. There is no scriptural clue to the date of Christ’s birth; the Early Church celebrated it (if at all) on 6 January, and the first document setting it on 25 December is a Roman calendar of AD 354. Possibly it was a conscious takeover of a Roman festival, ‘The Birthday of the Unconquered Sun’, honouring Mithras and other sun-gods. This dating had become standard throughout Western Europe well before Augustine’s mission to England; it was not devised to match Anglo-Saxon midwinter festivals. The Council of Tours (AD 567) ruled that the twelve days from the Nativity to the Epiphany would be a work-free period of religious celebration, and this became English law in AD 877. The word ‘Christmas’ itself only appears in 1038; previously the festival period had been called Yule, a native word for the midwinter season.

Medieval manorial records show villeins were not required to work during the Twelve Days; the lord of the manor provided a communal feast, and his tenants and subjects gave him gifts, normally farm produce. The pattern was varied; some wealthy landowners apparently kept open house, feeding and entertaining all comers, while others concentrated on their own local people. By Tudor times, Christmas at court and on the estates of the nobility was characterized by increasingly splendid banquets, balls, plays, masques, and mummings, often co-ordinated by a ‘Lord of Misrule’.

This official (also found at Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, the Inns of Court, and some civic corporations, such as the City of London) combined the roles of planning committee, master of ceremonies, jester, and mock king; sometimes he was accompanied (or replaced) by an Abbot of Unreason, who parodied the Church in the same way as the Lord parodied the court. They are first mentioned (under various titles) in the 15th century, and were conspicuous at the courts of Henry VIII and Edward VI; at the accession of Mary (1553) they vanished from the court, and rapidly went out of fashion elsewhere, except among young men at the universities and Inns of Court. A far less expensive domestic equivalent, the ‘King of the Bean’ chosen by lot on Twelfth Night, remained popular. To Victorians, the Lord of Misrule, despite his relatively brief and socially exclusive existence, came to symbolize a jovial role-reversal for which there is little or no evidence.

Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries Puritans waged a well-documented campaign against saints’ days and other religious festivals, as unscriptural and as encouraging gluttony, drunkenness, sexual licence, and public disorder. In the 1640s Christmas became a major target; in June 1647 Parliament finally banned Easter, Whitsun, and Christmas, but each successive year of the Puritan reign saw major disturbances in various parts of the country, and increasingly draconian enforcement. John Evelyn’s Diary for 25 December 1657 records his own arrest for attending a Communion service in London: ‘. . . the Chapell was surrounded with souldiers; all the communicants and assembly surpriz’d & kept prisoners by them . . . These wretched miscreants held their muskets against us as we came up to receive the Sacred Elements, as if they would have shot us at the altar . . .’ This policy proved counter-productive; the fate of Christmas became a rallying-point for anti-Puritan feeling, and a symbol of lost freedoms. After the Restoration most aspects of the celebration were revived, though with wide variations in the degree of lavishness even by the wealthy. As the festival was now no longer a bone of contention, documentary sources become fewer.

The diaries of 18th- and early 19th-century rural clergy take little notice of Christmas, though regularly noting money distributed to the poor around this time. Bell-ringing is sometimes mentioned, and drunkenness complained of. The tradition of charitable hospitality was still strong; thus William Holland, a Somerset parson, on 25 December 1799, had:

dinner by myself on spratts and fine woodcock. The kitchen was tolerably well lined with my poor neighbours, workmen, &c. Many of them staid till past ten o’clock and sang very melodiously. Sent half-a-crown to our Church Musicians who had serenaded the family this cold morning at five o’clock. (Holland, ed. Jack Ayres, 1984)

Many traditional visiting customs occurred at this season: mumming of various kinds, sword dancing, Hooden Horses, Old Tup, Plough Stots, wassailing, and waits. This concentration may reflect the importance of midwinter festivals in the remote past, but practical factors were important too; there was a lull in farmwork, potential audiences had gathered in gentry households, and the tradition of Christmas hospitality and generosity ensured a good welcome for performers. At least one custom, thomasing, was specifically aimed at soliciting alms.

What is regarded as the archetypal Christmas was forged in the second half of the 19th century by popular writers such as Charles Dickens and Washington Irving, using a combination of indigenous elements, imported ones, and new ones, in response to a widespread opinion that Christmas was no longer what it had once been, and something should be done. Their reinvention harked back to a romantic ideal of the lost golden age of ‘Merrie England’ -- perhaps specifically to Walter Scott’s description of a medieval baron’s Christmas in his best-selling poem Marmion (1808). Key elements in their vision were the Lord of Misrule, Boar’s Head, Yule Log, and the squire’s lavish display of hospitality in his ‘baronial hall’. Models for more homely celebration were sometimes sought abroad. As early as 1821 a correspondent in the Gentleman’s Magazine (pp. 505–8) praised a Christmas custom in the north of Germany ‘which cannot be too strongly recommended and encouraged in our own country’: children make or buy little presents for their parents and each other, which they lay out on Christmas Eve under ‘a great yew bough’ in the parlour, decked with tapers and streamers; next day the parents bring presents for the children. Written twelve years before Victoria married Albert, this shows court influence was not the only route by which German models impinged on English customs.

This ‘new’ Christmas evolved gradually by an astute combination of existing elements (e.g. carols, mince-pies, holly and mistletoe, candles, ample food and drink, hospitality to neighbours) with recent importations and inventions (presents, crackers, turkey, greetings cards, the tree, Father Christmas/Santa Claus as gift-bringer), each of which has its own history. [...] But many of these took a long time to filter down to the poorer sections of society; it can be argued that the ‘Victorian’ Christmas only became truly the norm after the Second World War.

Some commentators describe this reinvention as if it had been consciously aimed at taming the working classes and imposing ‘respectability’ on their boisterous and drunken traditions. Concern for public morals was certainly one factor, but commercialism was powerful too; cheap illustrated periodicals spread the fashion, and industry was eager to supply cards, toys, and other presents. It is significant that the new elements are conspicuously secular; the stress on charity was the only one with real religious underpinnings.

‘The Invention of the English Christmas’

From John Storey, ‘The Invention of the English Christmas’ in Sheila Whiteley (ed.) Christmas, Ideology and Popular Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), notes on request:

The ‘traditional’ English Christmas was invented between the 1830s and 1880s. Its invention was directly connected to the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation and only indirectly connected to religion. To claim that the English Christmas was invented in the nineteenth century is to raise the objection that the Nativity was then almost two thousand years old. Although the Nativity may well have been two thousand years old, it and Christmas are not really the same thing.

Constantine the Great, who was Roman Emperor between AD 285 and 337, established Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire in AD 325. In AD 336 the new Christian Church of Rome established 25 December as the date of the Nativity, the central event in the developing Christian calendar. There is absolutely no scriptural evidence for this date. Moreover, ‘historical’ evidence suggested other dates, including 1 January, 6 January, 21, 28 and 29 March, 9, 19 and 20 April, 20 May, 29 September and 18 November (Harrison 1951: 15; Restad 1995: 4). So why 25 December? The answer is a rival religion called Mithraism. At the centre of this religion is Mithras, the god of light, whose birthday, the Day of the Birth of the Unconquered Sun (Dies Solis Invicti Nati), is 25 December. Mithraism, like Christianity, spread throughout the Roman Empire in the first three centuries AD and competed with Christianity as a potential state religion. As Payam Nabarz explains:

The Roman Mithraic practice was one of the greatest rivals to early Christianity for many reasons. As well as being a popular pagan religion practised by the Roman Army, it had many similarities to Christianity. These similarities frightened the Christian forefathers, as it meant that years before the arrival of Christ, all the Christian mysteries were already known. To combat

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this, certain Christian writers said that the Devil, knowing of the coming of Christ in advance, had imitated them before they existed in order to denigrate them. As Christianity gained in strength and became the formal religion of the Roman Empire, the cult of Mithras was one of the first pagan cults to come under attack. (2005: 12–13)

The attack on Mithraism launched by the Christian Church consisted of three strategies. First, Christians should separate themselves from the rival religion. When this strategy did not work, they adopted a second. As Manfred Clauss observes, ‘When such evasions seemed impossible, they effected a take-over, as in the case of the observance of Sunday and the festival of the god’s birth on 25 December’ (2000: 169). An account from the fourth century makes clear the reason for the fixing of the Nativity as 25 December: ‘But when the teachers of the Church realised that Christians were allowing themselves to take part [in the celebrations of the Day of the Birth of the Unconquered Sun], they decided to observe the Feast of the true Birth on the same day’ (quoted in Clauss 2000: 66). Therefore, it seems quite clear that the intention of the Christian Church was to overlay Mithraic rituals and ceremonies with Christian significance. This became a common strategy. In the sixth century Augustine was sent as a missionary to Britain. During the course of his work he received a letter from Pope Gregory advising him to ‘accommodate the ceremonies of the Christian worship as much as possible to those of the heathen, that the people might not be much startled at the change’ (quoted in Harrison 1951: 28). The third strategy was bloody persecution: what Clauss calls ‘the Christians’ fanatical intolerance’ (2000: 170). As Nabarz points out, ‘In the fifth century of the Common Era, temples of Mithras – like most other pagan temples – were destroyed, and in some places churches were built on top of them’ (2005: 13). A letter written around the year 400 provides an example: ‘Did not your kinsman Gracchus . . . destroy a cave of Mithras a few years ago when he was prefect of Rome? Did he not break up and burn all the monstrous images there? . . . Did he not send them before him as hostages, and gain for himself a baptism in Christ?’ (quoted in Clauss 2000: 170).

Although it is clear that 25 December is not the actual date of the Nativity, it is possible to acknowledge this and to claim that it does not matter, as the date was chosen to celebrate the Nativity without any corresponding claim that this is the factual date of Christ’s birth. In other words, we do not know when he was born but we have chosen a date to celebrate his birth. Whatever the argument, the fact remains that the fixing of the Nativity by the Roman state was as much a political act as a theological one.

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The circumstances of its origins have made it a problematic festival for some Christians. The Puritans, for example, the ideological engine behind the defeat of the army of Charles I, were literal readers of the Bible. Finding no evidence there for Christmas Day, they argued for its removal from the Christian calendar. Following the conclusion of the English Civil War, which established the Commonwealth or English Republic, Christmas was banned by Act of Parliament on 3 July 1647. On 24 December 1652 Parliament proclaimed, perhaps in the face of some ongoing resistance, that ‘no observance shall be had of the five and twentieth of December, commonly called Christmas day; nor any solemnity used or exercised in churches upon that day in respect thereof ’ (quoted in Hearn 2004: 15). The ban remained in place until 1660. Parliament sat on Christmas Day, churches remained closed and soldiers were instructed to ensure that shops were open. Christmas was decriminalised as a religious holiday with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 but it did not return as popular festival. As Michael Harrison observes:

Christmas came back . . . but he came back wearing something of the sober manner of the men who had temporarily driven him out. Old Christmas, in the twenty years [sic] that he had been officially outlawed, had lost much of his former jauntiness. It was a quieter Christmas who came back. (1951: 146)

By the first decades of the nineteenth century, what is now our major annual festival had almost disappeared. As J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue point out:

Christmas, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, was neither a major event in the Christian calendar nor a popular festival. Few magazines or newspapers referred to the festal day in any detail and many ignored it completely. In 1790 the leader writer in The Times had asserted that, ‘within the half century this annual time of festivity has lost much of its original mirth and hospitality’ and that newspaper’s attention to the festival over the next half century bears witness to its general decline; in twenty of the years between 1790 and 1835 The Times did not mention Christmas at all, and for the remaining years its reports were extremely brief and uninformative. (2000: 40)

On 26 December 1826 The Times carried the following report: ‘The due observance of Christmas-day was strictly enforced in the City yesterday, the Lord Mayor having given positive orders to the city officers, not to permit any shops to be open for the transaction of business . . . The order was strictly complied with in general.’ The fact that the Lord Mayor of London felt obliged to enforce due observance clearly suggests that

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Christmas was not really being observed. Further evidence of its decline is provided by responses to the Factory Act of 1833, which granted workers 8.5 days’ holiday a year, plus Good Friday and Christmas Day. More enlightened factory owners allowed their workers to vote on which days they might have as holidays. Here is an example of the outcome of one such vote in 1833:

[T]hey put it to the vote who were for Good Friday and who were for Easter Monday . . . the same with regard to Christmas-Day; in our part of the country Christmas-Day is not esteemed a workman’s holiday, but New Year’s day is, and the same process has been gone through of informing them that they were entitled to a holiday on Christmas-Day, and they have uniformly expressed a desire to take New Year’s day in lieu of it. (Quoted in Cunningham 1980: 61–2)

The Bolton Chronicle reports a very similar attitude almost twenty years later in 1851:

Not long ago the natal day of the Redeemer was pretty generally disregarded in this town, and a holiday was generally observed on New Year’s Day. Now, though a holiday takes place on Christmas Day, the beginning of the New Year is looked upon as the Christmas season, and the inhabitants betake themselves to their festivities accordingly. (Quoted in Hudson 1997: 115)

In some rural areas it took even longer for the new invention to take hold. As late as 1867, a book on Lancashire folklore observed: ‘In some rural parts of Lancashire it [Christmas Day] is now little regarded, and many of its customs are observed a week later – on the eve and day of the New Year’ (quoted in Golby and Purdue 1981: 16).

Inventing Christmas

Commerce

Christmas was invented first and foremost as a commercial event. Everything that was revived or invented – decorations, cards, crackers, collections of carols, going to a pantomime, visiting Santa Claus and buying presents – all had one thing in common: they could be sold for profit. Therefore, it does not make historical sense to bemoan the fact that Christmas is too commercial; it was invented as a commercial festival. It was commercial from the very start. Part of what was being celebrated was the achievements of industrial capitalism – conspicuous consumption in a market economy.

Carol singing, for example, has a long history but it is only in the 1830s and 1840s that collections began to be made of old songs and new songs written with a specific focus on Christmas. Significant collections include William Sandys’s Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern (1833) and H. R. Bramley and John Stainer’s Christmas Carols Old and New (1871). In these and other collections, recently composed carols easily outnumber the ancient or the old. Although the Christmas tree had been introduced into England by German migrants in the late eighteenth century, it is generally accepted that it was the London Illustrated News’s depiction of Queen Victoria’s tree in December 1848 which popularised the practice. The first Christmas card was produced in 1843. Within forty years, helped by the introduction of the 1⁄2d postage stamp, Christmas cards were in mass circulation. As The Times made clear in 1883 and applicable to the invention as a whole:

This wholesome custom has been . . . frequently the happy means of ending strifes, cementing broken friendships and strengthening family and neighbourhood ties in all conditions of life. In this respect the Christmas card undoubtedly fulfils a high end, for cheap postage has constituted it almost exclusively the modern method of conveying Christmas wishes, and the increasing popularity of the custom is for this reason, if no other, a matter for congratulations. (Quoted in Golby and Purdue 2000: 70)

By the 1890s the Post Office was already finding it difficult to deal with the annual increase in mail. Significantly, like the first Christmas card, most cards ignored the Nativity and depicted instead evergreens, snowscapes, children playing, Father Christmas and robin redbreasts, providing further evidence of the decentred position of Christianity in the new Christmas celebrations.

Christmas crackers were invented by Tom Smith in 1846. Around the same period the pantomime first became associated with Christmas, its content becoming based on nursery tales. By the 1870s music hall stars were beginning to play the leading roles, anticipating the practice of contemporary pantomimes featuring pop and soap stars. Again, it is in the 1840s that Christmas presents first begin to be given at Christmas rather than at New Year. It is also at around this time that giving Christmas presents begins to lose its links to patronage: that is, giving as a confirmation of social status, giving without expectation of reciprocation. What is gradually established instead is an economy of giving amongst equals.

Father Christmas/Santa Claus is a latecomer to the new festivities. Significantly, he does not feature in the key ideological text of the new invention, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). He gradually

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emerges, mostly from the USA, between the 1860s and 1930s, most significantly in the drawings of Thomas Nast and the illustrations of Haddon H. Sundblom. The evolution of his image finally stops with Sundblom’s Coca-Cola advertisements, which first appeared in 1931. Before then he might appear dressed in green, purple, blue or white. Moreover, he may appear human or as an elf. Although Coca-Cola did not invent Father Christmas/Santa Claus, it can claim to have finally fixed his identity. By the 1880s his presence is an important addition to the new department stores, where it is now possible to buy Christmas decorations.

By this time Christmas shopping, undoubtedly the central event in the new invention, is taking place a month or six weeks before Christmas Day. Two accounts from 1885 make this very clear:

The presentation of ‘boxes’ and souvenirs is the same in America as in England . . . everybody expects to give and receive. A month before the event the fancy stores are crowded all day long with old and young in search of suitable presents, and every object is purchased . . . If the weather is fine, the principal streets are thronged. (Quoted in Miall 1978: 11)

The note of preparation for the great festival . . . was sounded early in November when the windows of the stationers, the bookshops, and the railway stalls became suddenly gay with the coloured plates of Christmas numbers innumerable, has increased in volume as time went on. Now, on the eve of the great day, there is not a street in the capital containing a shop, from its broadest thoroughfare to its narrowest by-way, that has not decked its windows for the Christmas market. (11–12)

What the new urban middle class invented was a Christmas with a firm emphasis on commercialism. Its central organising figure was Santa Claus/Father Christmas and not Jesus Christ. If a nativity was being celebrated, it was the birth of a market economy underpinned by the new power of industrialisation. The profoundly commercial-secular nature of the invention has made possible its incredible international success. Even an officially atheist society like the People’s Republic of China has no difficulty in embracing the festival.

‘God Bless Us, Every One’: The Politics of Charity

Charity is central to the Christmas invented by the new urban middle class. If what was invented was commercial out of instinct, it was charitable out of a sense of fear and guilt. The 1840s in England were known as the ‘hungry forties’, a period of economic slump, political unrest and

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intense suffering and misery among the working class (Cole and Postgate 1976).

The first Christmas card, commissioned by Sir Henry Cole and designed by J. C. Horsley, has at its centre not the Nativity but a representation of a typical middle-class family sitting down to Christmas dinner. On one side of the card we see the poor being given food, while on the other side they are being given clothes. The implication is quite clear; the celebration of the middle-class Christmas must include a consideration of the less fortunate. This argument is even more explicit in the text which is at the very heart of the invention of Christmas as an event organised around charity, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, first published on 19 December 1843. The enormous popularity of the story of Scrooge’s social redemption, not just as a novel (in its tenth edition by December 1844) but

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in theatre productions and public readings, made this the central text in the invention of Christmas. But to be clear, A Christmas Carol did not invent Christmas, as has been claimed by the Sunday Telegraph (18 December 1988), when it described Dickens as ‘the man who invented Christmas’. His most recent biographer has made the same claim in slightly more guarded phrasing: ‘Dickens can be said to have almost singlehandedly created the modern idea of Christmas’ (Ackroyd 1990: 34). But what Dickens did do was to popularise what was being invented; in particular, he made material its organising ideology of charity. As Golby and Purdue say of Dickens’s novel: ‘in it Christmas becomes a bridge between the world as it is and the world as it should be’ (2000: 45). The novel points ‘to the social problems of the present and anxieties about the future’ (45). When Dickens gave a reading of the novel in Boston on Christmas Eve 1867, it produced among his American audience what we might call the novel’s ideal reader:

Among the multitude that surged out of the building came a Mr and Mrs Fairbanks (the former was the head of a large-scale factory), who had journeyed from Johnsburg, Vermont, for the occasion. Returning to their apartments in Boston, Mrs Fairbanks observed that her husband was particularly silent and absorbed in thought, while his face bore an expression of unusual seriousness. She ventured some remark which he did not appear to notice. Later, as he continued to gaze into the fire, she inquired the cause of his

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reverie, to which he replied: ‘I feel that after listening to Mr Dickens’s reading of A Christmas Carol tonight I should break the custom we have hitherto observed of opening the works on Christmas Day’. Upon the morrow they were closed. The following year a further custom was established, when not only were the works closed on Christmas Day, but each and every factory hand received the gift of a turkey. (Quoted in Golby and Purdue 2000: 48)

[p.25]

[...] Scrooge has to learn what his former partner Marley had learned too late: ‘The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!’ (Dickens 1985: 62). Scrooge is, to use a phrase from Matthew Arnold, ‘drugged with business’ (quoted in Storey 1985: 224). As if speaking directly to Scrooge, Arnold argued: ‘Money-making is not enough by itself. Industry is not enough by itself . . . The need in man for intellect and knowledge, his desire for beauty, his instinct for society, and for pleasurable and graceful forms of society, require to have their stimulus felt also, felt and satisfied’ (ibid.).

[p.27]

St. Bartholomew

Today is the feast day of St. Bartholomew. Flayed alive and beheaded, his emblem is a butcher’s knife and he is the patron saint of leatherworkers and tanners. Earlier this month Christians remembered St. Lawrence whose martyrdom involved being grilled over a slow fire, emblem: gridiron and patron saint of cooks.

The associations are made so direct that they serve as aide-mémoires to the sacrifices the Saints made and that Christians may ever be called upon to make. In the centuries of Christian growth the idea that Christians may have to give their lives to preserve a country’s Christian character or take the faith to new lands was at the heart of the culture. I think I read that more homes in pioneer America had a copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs than any other book. What a contrast with today. St. Bartholomew sacrificed himself; today’s Church leaders sacrifice their nations for their own status.

Geoffrey Ashe: The Saints and the Kings

Geoffrey Ashe, Mythology of the British Isles (Methuen Publishing Ltd., 2002)


The English Inheritance: The Saints and the Kings [pp. 299-303]

Gregory, a Roman monastic founder, afterwards pope, was walking one day through the city’s slave market. He noticed some fair-haired, blue-eyed lads and asked what country they had come from. They were heathen Angles from Deira, the southerly portion of Northumbria. ‘Not Angles but angels,’ Gregory commented, ‘if they had the Faith.’ He planned a mission and even set out himself, but was prevented, first by a message from the Pope saying he was needed in Rome, later by his own election to the papacy.


As pope he dispatched a mission led by another monk, Augustine, which arrived in the island in 597. Augustine made his first contact with King Aethelbert of Kent, at that time Bretwalda. Aethelbert’s queen, Bertha, a Frankish Christian princess, had ensured that he would be granted a hearing. Aethelbert received the clergy in the open, because he feared that if he met them indoors they could use magic against him. With growing trust, however, the king housed them at Canterbury and finally adopted the new religion. While he made no attempt to impose it on his Kentish subjects, they gradually conformed. Augustine founded a Canterbury bishopric which was to become the Church’s headquarters in England. Progress, however, was slow and slight. Aethelbert arranged a conference with the Welsh bishops, but they had little interest in evangelising the old enemy, and Augustine’s attitude estranged them. They declined to cooperate in expanding his mission. Overtures to other kings by his aides and successors established only limited bridgeheads.


Many suppose that St Augustine converted England. Many even suppose that there were no Christians in this island before 597. The latter belief is manifestly false, and the former, though not manifestly so, is false none the less. Augustine’s only solid success was in Kent, and England’s Christianisation came from several sources, over nearly a hundred years.


The most promising extension from Kent, which happened in 625, was almost totally abortive. A priest from Canterbury, Paulinus, travelled north as chaplain to Aethelbert’s daughter, who was marrying the Northumbrian king Edwin, the fifth Bretwalda. After much wavering, Edwin summoned a council to debate a change in religion. He was persuaded when a councillor compared human life to the flight of a sparrow through firelight in a hall from darkness into darkness again - and urged the value of a doctrine that shone light into the obscurity before and after. But Edwin and his nobles had not been Christian very long when a Welsh invasion threw the north into anarchy. Edwin fell in battle, the queen and Paulinus fled, and hardly any of the neophyte Christians remained. The northern Angles’ true conversion was due to Celtic monks from Columba’s community, led by the humble and endearing St Aidan. They came at the invitation of King Oswald, who had taken refuge in Iona during the invasion, become a Christian there on the Celtic model, and returned to clear out the Welsh.


Oswald reigned at Bamburgh, formerly Din Guayrdi, perhaps the home of Lancelot. Once, when he and Aidan were at dinner, the king’s almoner reported that a number of his poor subjects were outside. Oswald handed the almoner a silver dish and told him to give them the food on it, and break up the dish itself so that each could have a fragment of silver. Aidan touched the king’s right hand and exclaimed, ‘May this hand never perish!’ and it never did; after his death it was enshrined in a silver casket and remained uncorrupted. Oswald died fighting Welsh and heathen Mercians in Shropshire, where Oswestry, Oswald’s Tree, commemorates a cross he set up. Miracles were worked by earth from the spot where he fell, and pilgrims carried so much away that they scooped out a pit. Oswald was revered as a saint in many places. He is the celestial patron of Zug in Switzerland.


The differences between Romans and Celts, notably over the fixing of Easter, came to a head in 663 at the Synod of Whitby. This was held at a religious community of Celtic type, with inmates of both sexes under an abbess, St Hilda. Oswald’s brother Oswy, who had followed him as king of Northumbria, presided. Wilfrid, abbot of Ripon and a strong advocate of Roman ways, appealed to the practice of the Church everywhere else, in conformity with the Pope, St Peter’s successor. As he put it, ‘The only people stupid enough to disagree are these Scots and their obstinate adherents the Picts and Britons, who inhabit only a portion of these two islands in the remote ocean.’ Colman, for the Celts, cited St Columba and others.


Arguments and precedents were tossed back and forth, till Wilfrid quoted Christ’s words to Peter, appointing him as the gatekeeper of heaven. Oswy turned to Colman: ‘Is it true that Our Lord said this to Peter?’ Colman acknowledged that it was. Oswy persisted: ‘Did he say anything like that to Columba?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then,’ said Oswy, with a smile of relief at having found a way to close the dispute, ‘I must rule in favour of Peter, or he may not let me in.’ So Rome won. Peripheral rumblings and mutterings lingered on, but the Church in England was henceforth united in its administration and practice, and governed from Canterbury.


Meanwhile, the slowly advancing West Saxons, themselves Christianised, had reached Glastonbury. The British monastery passed peaceably into their hands. It was the first institution in which the old and new people came together, with Christian continuity from ‘Arthurian’ times. Kings of Wessex made it a temple of reconciliation. After a while it attracted Irish scholars. The way was prepared for that fusion of traditions which gave the medieval Abbey its role in the formation of Arthurian legend.


Glastonbury’s first major patron was King Ine, a successor of Cerdic. In the ninth century it was a successor of Ine, Alfred the Great, who set England on course towards political unity, for which religious unity had laid the foundation. Alfred’s name, ‘Elf-rede’, hints at inspiration from good fairies. When he was crowned in Wessex, the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had been overrun by marauding Danes, and little remained of Wessex itself. It was told in later days how Danish victories reduced Alfred to a wandering resistance leader; how he refused to give up; how he spied out the camp of the Danish chief Guthrum disguised as a minstrel; how he took refuge in Athelney in the Somerset marshlands near Glastonbury; how, when deep in thought, he let a cottager’s fire burn some cakes which she had set him to watch, not knowing who he was; how the Virgin Mary appeared to him with words of encouragement; how he raised a final army, routed Guthrum at Ethandune, and forced him to retreat; how he commemorated the struggle by having a White Horse cut, or even two; how he recovered southern England and founded a navy. Let it be added that because he kept Wessex in being when the rest of the kingdoms were effaced from the map, his heirs were able to extend their domain with no rivals, and to become sovereigns of a united England, destined, for better or worse, to draw the Welsh and Scots into a united Britain.


****


What may be called the ‘St Augustine delusion’ is the last of the modern myths requiring notice, and one of the stubbornest. In its crude form it really does assert that there were no Christians in Britain till 597, and then Augustine arrived, and converted all of the population that mattered. The crudity is sometimes toned down, but much of the delusion persists. An ironic feature is its stark contradiction of the other myth about Britain’s early Christianity, that a separate and admirable Celtic Church flourished over most of the British Isles, till intrusive ‘Romans’, who had never had any jurisdiction before, enslaved and perverted it.


Neither account is anywhere near to being true. Augustine’s Kent was at one pole of the conversion process, Aidan’s Northumbria at the other, and the rest of the kingdoms were subjected to various influences over a long period, some from Kent itself and the continent, some from the north, some from Ireland. The Historia Brittonum claims that despite the Welsh bishops’ holding back, a Cymric northerner named Rhun, a son of Urien, played a leading role in the first Northumbrian mission and officiated in some way at the baptism of Edwin.


Anglo-Celtic Christianity had much to be said of it, and the uniformity following Whitby brought both gain and loss. Thanks largely to the redoubtable Wilfrid, rapid advances were made in art and architecture. The appointment in 669 of a learned Greek, Theodore of Tarsus, as Archbishop of Canterbury, helped to give the Church a firm structure and intellectual force. In the early eighth century, Bede of Jarrow was easily the foremost scholar in Europe. But the freer, more imaginative Celtic spirit lost ground. The prevalence of the continental outlook, with its fierce rejection of the old gods and all that went with them, may be part of the reason why the Anglo-Saxons fell so far short of Celtic achievement in the creation of mythology.


Alfred the Great was genuinely extraordinary. Besides his dogged resistance to the Danes, and final triumph at Ethandune (probably Edington near Westbury, where the horse is), he gave the crown of the West Saxons a new kind of lustre, and impressed himself on history as a personality. When at peace, he lived in a modest-sized manor at Cheddar, not only hawking and hunting but acquiring enough expertise in both pursuits to give advice to his falconers and kennelmen. He collected Anglo-Saxon poems and songs, welcomed travellers, and listened to their reports of distant countries. To promote his subjects’ education he founded a school for the sons of nobles (sending his own to it) and brought foreign scholars to his court, including a Welshman, Asser, who became his biographer. Part of his programme was to inform the people about their own past, and to this end he sponsored a compilation of traditions which was the first version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. He learned Latin, and presided over the translation of important books into ‘the language which we can all understand’ - an obvious thing to do, yet nobody had done it, and it was many years before anything comparable was done abroad.


He issued a code of laws drawn from the best of Kent and Mercia, as well as Wessex. Those he added himself were humane, limiting the custom of blood-feud, for instance. It will be remembered that according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, he copied laws from the ancient Britons; not so, but proof of the prestige which his code still possessed in Geoffrey’s time. That had been shown already by its adoption or imitation in other parts of England and Wales. To plan his work he invented a kind of clock, a graduated candle inside a transparent casing, which admitted air but kept out draughts so that the candle burned at a regular rate.


Several Welsh princes placed themselves under Alfred’s protection or became allies. Thanks to the Danes’ extinction of the other kingdoms, and their own waning, his son and daughter established their rule in Mercia, and his grandson Athelstan took over Northumbria. Athelstan routed a coalition of Scots, Irish and Norse, and was uncontested sovereign of the whole of England.


Alfred deserved the honour of a national epic, yet no one composed it. As a hero of legend Arthur leaves him so far behind that there is no comparison. The few Alfred legends, such as the anecdote of the cakes - probably bannocks - and his acceptance of the housewife’s rebuke, suggest that he was recalled as not only ‘great’, but human, good-natured and free from pride. Still, he had to wait a long time for a poetic celebration with any value. It came at last in G. K Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse, which conserves popular fiction about the Uffington horse being Alfred’s, by acutely postulating a pre-Alfred original which he restored. The Ballad is a perceptive and colourful mini-epic, with passages as fine as any poetry in English inspired by Arthur. Alfred’s companions in the poem rightly include representatives of Celtic and Roman traditions as well as Anglo-Saxon.

Kathleen Raine on William Blake

This essay was published in book form with the title ‘William Blake’ under the auspices of the British Council, by Longmans, Green & Co., London, in 1951.

William Blake

by Kathleen Raine

When Alexander Gilchrist published, in 1863, thirty-six years after the death of that great man, his Life of William Blake, he found it necessary to justify himself, in the very first paragraph, for writing of a painter and poet ignored by biographical dictionaries, and passed over in silence by critics of poetry and painting alike. Gilchrist, in quoting the opinions of Fuseli and Flaxman that ‘the time would come when the finest of Blake’s designs would be as much sought after and treasured . . . as those of Michael Angelo now’ was exposing the critical reputations of these two distinguished artists to a grave risk -- a risk, as it happens, that they have triumphantly survived; for during the first half of this century, Blake’s reputation both as poet and painter has so risen, that it is doubtful whether the discovery of a new drawing by Michaelangelo could have caused more widespread delight, than the discovery, in 1949, of a new Blake painting, among the lumber of an English country house in Devonshire. (Many of Blake’s finest paintings have lain as lumber for a hundred years, and many are irretrievably lost.) The name of Michaelangelo, indeed, seems to recur in connexion with Blake in an odd way; for Blake himself once described a mystical diagram by Jacob Boehme as equal to Michaelangelo, the painter he himself chose as his measure of supreme greatness; and if to-day the name of William Blake stands with those of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton among English poets; and occupies a place altogether unique among English painters, it remains as difficult to explain why this should be so, as why Boehme’s diagram should be as great as Michaelangelo. Blake, as a painter, is clearly no more the equal of the depictor of Adam, than as a master of language, he can be compared with Chaucer or Milton, still less with Shakespeare; and yet, all these strange comparisons remain just. The genius of William Blake remains one of the most remarkable and potent that England has ever produced. One might go so far as to say that Blake is one of the half-dozen greatest men of genius of the modern world. But, if one were asked to point to one single example of his work that could be compared to the paintings in the Sistine Chapel, or to King Lear, one could scarcely name the Job engravings, exquisite as these are, or the Songs of Innocence and Experience, trifles, fragile as bubbles on a running stream, that flash off visionary wisdom as radium gives off electrons. It is, in some indescribable way, the total phenomenon of William Blake, the vision behind the poems, the engravings, the aphorisms and the life of that obscure and saintly man, that somehow conveys a whole imaginative world whose dimensions seem almost boundless. It is a question of human stature; Blake was one of those spiritual presences that are felt in the world, let them immure themselves within Carmelite walls, hide themselves in beggar’s rags, or leave behind them, like the creator of the Book of Job, not even a name.

William Blake was born on 28 November 1757, the second son of a respectable hosier in Broad Street. A Londoner of Londoners, he spent his childhood in the very heart of the city where, but for two or three years spent in the country, he lived his entire life. From his boyhood, he knew the pulse of the great city that he called ‘a human awful wonder of God’. He lived the greater part of his life in or near Soho. Blake’s poor rooms, once described by Samuel Palmer as ‘more attractive than the abode of princes’, were in Fountain Court, an alley between the Strand and the river, near the Coal Hole Tavern, that still remains; Fountain Court itself has been long since demolished.

Blake lived and died close to the beating heart of London. He loved to be near the river, at Lambeth, or Battersea, or the Strand. Friendship took him out as far as Hampstead, where, as an old man, he used to visit Linnell the painter, to be met by the Linnell children, or seen back to the coach by them, through the country lanes, by the light of a hurricane lamp; but even at Hampstead he felt himself on alien ground, so far from the Thames, that great artery of London, visible manifestation of the River of Life that so often appears in his poems and in his designs.

London was to Blake both home and school, both Pandemonium and Celestial City. Golgonooza, the ‘spiritual fourfold London’ is the theme and the setting of his prophetic visions of the spiritual destiny of ‘the Giant Albion’, the English race. The blood of human suffering ran down its walls; and heaven was so near at hand that the old visionary once touched it, so he said, with his walking-stick. Blake knew every pulsation of the great heart of the city, the vital centre of England -- England in the years of her still growing power, and the years of the more terrible growing power of the machine, whose cancer was to fasten so fatally upon the body and soul of the Giant Albion as the nineteenth century advanced.

To those who know London to-day, it is hard to realize that a London boy might have found green fields, elm-trees, lanes and footpaths and ponds within walking distance of Soho; the great cancerous proliferation of bricks and mortar that extends now for so many miles round a city, many of whose features remain much as Blake knew them, has utterly obliterated the trees and cornfields of Peckham Rye, where, as a young boy, Blake saw angels walking among the harvesters. Dulwich Village, Camberwell, Newington Butts, Sydenham, and Blackheath, to Croydon and beyond, rural haunts of Blake’s early youth, have been submerged in Greater London; Battersea, where he courted his wife, the illiterate daughter of a market-gardener, is a densely populated working-class district; only the church, where William Blake was married to one of the exemplary wives of literary history, still stands, as it did then, on a little muddy promontory on the south bank of the river. Looking upstream from Battersea Church you see an industrial landscape, across the silver or sombre river, on which the traditional swans still float, among tugs and barges, or paddle in the mud of the Battersea or Chelsea banks; but in the church itself, there remains a window on which is painted a lamb, the work of the vicar who married William and Catherine Blake -- a piece of symbolic coincidence significant enough for those familiar with the depth of meaning that Blake attached to the symbol of the Lamb of God.

It is often those who live between town and country, or for whom country scenes are a memory of childhood, a symbol of the lost Eden, who have the keenest and most poignant sense of pastoral beauty. It was after leaving for the first time his lakes and mountains that Wordsworth realized the intensity of his relationship with them; D. H. Lawrence, living in an industrial town, but on the fringe of the country, wrote of bluebell-woods, lapwings, and hayfields with an intensity of sensation never surpassed. Gerard Manley Hopkins had almost, so it seems, to banish himself from the natural world in order to write about it with the passion of a lover separated for ever from his beloved. And so it is that Blake’s pastoral world, of the Songs of Innocence, The Book of Thel, the woodcuts illustrating Thornton’s translation of Virgil Pastorals, has the double intensity of the natural world, seen and known and loved in every detail, and of a Lost Paradise, radiant in the golden visionary distance of memory in which Traherne saw his fields of orient and immortal wheat, and Wordsworth the tree loved in boyhood. Blake, from his very childhood, knew two worlds, city and country: the innocence of green fields, and the experience of industrial revolution; a pastoral heaven, and a hell of ‘dark satanic mills’. It is characteristic of his whole philosophy that he took both into account. A less courageous soul might well have hated the city and loved the fields, or, like Dr. Johnson, loved the coffeehouses and shrunk from the solitudes of nature. Blake felt with full intensity the martyrdom of the toiling, suffering humanity of London, and he loved fields, green mountains, summer trees; but he saw the human spirit at work alike amid the furnaces of hell and the fountains of paradise. He desired to see a ‘marriage’ of heaven and hell, and, for him, the innocence of pastoral man did not seem lost in the satanic mills; the hell of experience is, for Blake, only the turning of the Wheel of Life; the indestructible purity of the human spirit returns, at the end of the circle of destiny, to its original innocence again; the furnaces of the fallen world become once more the fountains of Eden. It seems likely that much of Blake’s vision of a reconciliation of two contraries -- of good and evil, innocence and experience, arose out of his own early memories of city squalor and suffering, side by side with the world of hay-fields and harvesters under the hedgerow elms of Kent, on the south bank of the Thames.

Blake’s father the hosier must have been a kindly and sensible man, for he appears to have done everything in his power to enable his remarkable son to follow his bent. Blake, at his own request, never went to school; instead, he used to spend hours in the print-shops, where he spent his pocket-money on engravings of the Italian masters; or wandering off into the outlying country lanes. It is a great thing for a boy to have his freedom, as Wordsworth also had his, during those years in which poets gather the impressions and sensations upon which they draw, to the end of their lives. When the time came for Blake to decide upon his career, it was the son’s wish, it seems, to save his father expense; Blake himself chose to be apprenticed as an engraver, rather than enter upon the more precarious career of a pure artist. He was accordingly apprenticed to Basire, with whom he learned one of those skilled crafts that, before the Industrial Revolution, lent a dignity to manual work that the machine has largely destroyed. The engraver’s skill formed a bridge between craftsmanship and the higher branches of art, that has since been removed by the mechanization of so many processes once performed by engravers.


Blake never lost his link with the common people, or the men who work with their hands; and however high the flights of his imagination, he remained, all his life, a humble engraver working for his bread, with the skill of his hands. It is recorded that, when no money remained to pay their simple household expenses, Mrs. Blake used to set an empty plate before her husband at dinner-time and that he would then turn (with the remark ‘Damn the money!’) from his prophecies and visions of other worlds, and take up his graver to work on some humble task. Drawing tureens and tea-services for the Wedgwoods’ catalogue of the Etruria pottery was one such humble piece of hack-work that Blake performed (the drawings he made still survive). We may regret that Blake was not able to devote himself entirely to his creative genius as painter and poet -- and he himself felt bitterly enough on this question, and suffered both sorrow and indignation on account of the frustration of his genius by poverty and the neglect of his contemporaries; but it may be that the gain is as great as the loss. Blake lived, both geographically and socially, in the very heart of England; a poor Londoner and a man of the people, he was, besides, the friend of many of the greatest artists of his day -- Fuseli and Flaxman, and, later, Varley, Linnell, and Samuel Palmer; he met Sir Joshua Reynolds, visited Lady Caroline Lamb, where he met Coleridge; and knew Wordsworth’s friend Crabb Robinson the diarist. There were few aspects of London life, high or low, that were entirely unknown to him; as a young man he was an ardent revolutionary, and is said to have helped Tom Paine to escape from England with his life. In what better situation could a self-elected prophet of England, whose special role in our imaginative history was to read the signs of the times, have found himself, than between the worlds of artists and the world of artisans, between city and fields, and, historically, between the rural England of the eighteenth century, and the industrialized England of the nineteenth? Blake was a prophet not by inspiration alone, but by direct knowledge, and personal experience, of the most significant happenings in the social history of his country, and of his century.

As Basire’s apprentice, it fell to Blake’s task to make drawings of many of the monuments of kings and queens in Westminster Abbey, and these Gothic tombs and effigies deeply influenced his style as an artist. The Gothic stress on line was all-important to Blake, who insisted always on linear design, on clear outline, as against the chiaroscuro school favoured by Sir Joshua Reynolds. ‘Nature has no outline, but imagination has’, he wrote. Line, for Blake, is the hallmark of imagination; and it is remarkable that stress on line is a characteristic of religious art, from the cave-drawings of the stone age to the Gothic, from Buddhist Chinese art to El Greco. ‘Line is essence’, according to a contemporary artist, Cecil Collins -- essence as against appearance, or accident, which is the subject-matter of, say, the French impressionists, an essentially secular school; and it is remarkable that Blake, the greatest religious artist that England has produced, should have gone back, to find his next-of-kin, to medieval art, the product of a Christianity still irrational and imaginative. For Blake, the secular and the spiritual were undivided and in Westminster Abbey he recognized the work of artist-craftsmen, like himself, for whom ‘everything that lives is holy’ -- a world still unsecularized, and dominated by a single hierarchy of values that included, as Blake’s did, both heaven and earth in a single vision -- a religious conception not separate from, but underlying, the whole of life.

Blake’s earliest, and to this day his most widely known, and best loved, poems -- the Poetical Sketches, and the Songs of Innocence and Experience -- were written during his late boyhood, and the years of his early married life. The Poetical Sketches, most of them written in his teens, were published with the help of friends, the Rev. Mathew, a fashionable preacher, and his wife, ‘the accomplished Mrs. Mathew’, who for a while took Blake up, and whose literary salon no doubt inspired the poet to write, in an irreverent mood, his satire A Voyage to the Moon. It was Flaxman who took Blake to the Mathews’ salon in Rathbone Place, where it is on record that he recited, and also sang, his songs -- for, besides illustrating them with designs, the poet composed music to them which, unfortunately, was never written down, and so has been for ever lost. Blake’s imagination could express itself, with almost equal facility, in two arts, and perhaps a third; a fact not, perhaps, surprising, when we consider the specific nature of his genius, of which more will later be said.

Blake was married in 1782, when he was twenty-five, and went to live at 23 Green Street, near the Strand, where he was the humble neighbour of Reynolds and Hogarth, and of his own friend, Flaxman; but two years later, finding life in Green Street too expensive, he returned to Broad Street, where he lived next door to the family hosiery business that was carried on, after their father’s death, by Blake’s elder brother James. A younger brother, Robert, joined the young couple at this time, as William’s pupil in draughtsmanship -- indeed Robert was a promising artist, and several of his designs were for a long time mistaken for his brother William’s work. To his brother’s great grief, Robert died a year or two later. Blake, who had nursed him constantly during his illness, saw his spirit ‘ascending heavenwards, through the matter-of-fact ceiling, “clapping its hands for joy” -- a truly Blake-like detail’, as Gilchrist remarks. This much-loved brother, so Blake believed, often visited him, in spirit, throughout his life; and it was Robert’s spirit who gave Blake the secret of the process by which he produced those miraculously beautiful illuminated pages of his poems, printed and coloured by hand by the poet and his wife, and sold to the few purchasers who wanted to possess those most beautiful books, in which poems, lettering, and design are all the work of a single mind and a single vision. The illuminated copies of the Songs are the most remarkable books made in England, perhaps, since the illuminated missals of the Middle Ages, and belong to the earlier tradition of craftsmanship that rises to the level of imaginative art (or an imaginative art that includes craftsmanship), that Caxton’s printing-press virtually brought to an end. In vision and in technique alike, Blake was close to the Gothic middle ages; but what saves Blake’s books from the charge of preciosity that invalidates most modern hand-made hand-painted books is that he published his poems in that way not from choice but from necessity: no publisher would print them!

After Robert’s death Blake left Broad Street for neighbouring Poland Street, where he lived for five years. There he wrote and illustrated the Book of Thel and the Marriage of Heaven and Hell -- works of the purest genius, strangely alien, one might now think, from the spirit of the disreputable Soho street that has gone steadily down in the world since Blake’s day; and in 1793, the poet and his wife moved to Lambeth, to a little pleasant one-storied house, with a vine growing in its garden. All lovers of Blake’s designs must have noticed how often the free-flowing linear vine appears, with its tendrils and leaves, bordering a page, or filling a vacant line of the Prophetic Books. It is said by Gilchrist that the poet would never allow his own vine to be pruned -- one of those symbolic stories, like the tradition that Shakespeare never blotted a line, that has served as a text for critics of Blake’s unconfined and prolific genius. The other story -- of Blake and his wife reading Paradise Lost together under that same vine, in the undress of Eden -- might be true, and will always be repeated, for it is entirely in keeping with the poet’s intransigent innocence, and his wife’s literal willingness to follow her husband wherever his visions might lead him -- as she did, for better and for worse, throughout his life. What is certain is that the years at Lambeth were happy ones -- ‘lovely Lambeth’ is a recurring phrase in the Prophetic Books; ‘There is a grain of sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find’ -- a refuge of love and peace where the poet and his wife, a childless but devoted pair, happy in their work and in their companionship -- could live in peace untroubled, as yet, by the shadow of deepening poverty and neglect that was to overcast Blake’s later years. In Lambeth Blake wrote and engraved the Visions of the Daughters of Albion -- a great plea for sexual freedom, soon to be followed by America, an even more fundamental defence of liberty and revolution, whose theme is derived from the American War of Independence. In these two books we first meet some of the personages of Blake’s pantheon, ‘Red Orc’, the spirit of enchained passion; the ‘shadowy female’, Vala, cruel goddess of nature; Urthona, or Los, the spirit of prophecy and of history; Oothoon, and the daughters of Albion, those nymphs, not of springs and forests, but of looms and mills, suffering and toiling at the cruel machines of the Industrial Revolution. In each successive book -- Ahania, Urizen, The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem -- the characterization of the figures of his pantheon -- some dozen major deities, and various ‘sons’ and ‘daughters’ who reduplicate certain of the leading figures -- become ever more distinct in character and potency, and, in the accompanying designs, their features are drawn with unforgettable clearness; the chained puer eternus, Orc; Los, that proletarian Apollo, god of prophecy and poetry, and ‘lord of the furnaces’; Urizen, the elderly, bearded, anxious god of rational knowledge, with his heavy, brass-bound books and iron pen; Enitharmon, the poetic muse, who gives aesthetic form to the poetic conceptions of Los; Tharmas, the ‘rough demon of the waters’, deity of sensory life and the forms of nature; and Enion the earth-mother, now age-bent, wandering among the graves, now a child in the garden of love. It has long been customary to dismiss these visionary beings with their uncouth names, as mere figments of Blake’s fancy; but as we become more and more familiar with their potencies and natures, with their place in the total myth that, year by year, Blake built up, so do they come -- for those, at any rate, who find it natural to think in symbolic terms -- to seem the most viable symbolism available to us. They are unmistakably English; gods and goddesses, they yet belong to the modern world; they include in their range the rationalism of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, the Industrial Revolution, and they are rooted, besides, in the tradition of Christianity. Once familiar with these figures, they come to seem as native as Hamlet, King Lear, or Milton’s Satan.

As Blake became ever more deeply immersed in the visions that he describes in the Prophetic Books, so he moved, as poet and as artist, into a poetic world that was to remain incomprehensible to the general public for a hundred years and more. His prophecies were, in his own day, closed books, to which the present generation, with our modern science of psychology, is the first to possess any key.

As Blake matured in his genius, so he outgrew his contemporaries; he was never to have any book of his prophecies published, greatly to his own grief, for these, he knew, concerned England and her spiritual well-being. His designs were likewise considered wild, and mad, by all but a small circle. Blake could never reconcile himself to his isolation, or understand why things that for him were clear, should, to the general public, seem incomprehensible. ‘Truth cannot be so spoken as to be understood and not be believed’, he wrote; and in the long run the truths that he spoke have come to be understood and believed. Blake to-day is rapidly becoming what Bunyan was before him, a household prophet in England. The lyric that prefaces his last Prophet Book, Jerusalem, is sung in Women’s Institutes up and down what remains of England’s green and pleasant land; his Prophecies, once thought unintelligible even by those who admired him most, are the subject of an ever-increasing literature of critical books, as a newly discovered continent in our literature, a territory of untold wealth and vast extent, yielding already rich harvests of wisdom for those who have persisted in their study of them. But, so far were these great works on which Blake was engaged from enabling him to earn a living, or a literary reputation, that by 1800 he found himself in some perplexity as to how he could live. Often he found himself forced to engrave the designs of artists far inferior to himself in invention, whose more insipid and conventional work was acceptable to their contemporaries. It is hard now to realize that Flaxman was ranked, in his own day, far higher than Blake; and that engraving Stothard’s pedestrian work, that now seems scarcely worth a glance, except for the interest of his being a contemporary of Blake, should have provided Blake, during the years of his early creative energy, with the means of earning a living. Many men of genius have been poor and obscure, but surely no man of equal genius has ever suffered, as Blake suffered, the daily and explicit humiliation of working in the service of artists inferior to himself. Blake learned a deep humility; but one is glad to know that his patience was not always exemplary, and that his outraged genius was apt to burst out in violent protest. Even Blake’s one patron was blind to the genius of the man whom he wished to help, and no doubt considered himself a far better poet than Blake. The laughable, humiliating, and yet, after all, not unkindly story of Blake’s relationship with Hayley must be told, if only because it was through Hayley that Blake spent the only years of his life that he lived outside London, at Felpham, on the Sussex coast.

Hayley, the biographer of Cowper, was a country squire with literary leanings. On Flaxman’s kindly suggestion, he proposed to employ Blake to engrave a portrait of Cowper for his biography, to design and engrave illustrations to his (Hayley’s) poems, to be sold as broadsheets for Blake’s benefit, and in various other tasks. He also, apparently, set himself to make up for Blake’s want of education, by reading him Pope Homer and other improving works, of an evening. (Blake’s scathing comments were confided to his notebooks, and his lifelong dislike of the Greeks may be in no small measure the result of these sessions with his patron.) So it was that during the years spent by Blake at Felpham -- the years when he was engaged on the great visionary poems Milton, and Jerusalem, later engraved and printed by hand, with their accompanying designs -- the great poet was busy illustrating Hayley’s worthless verses, listening to his views on poetry, and, so it seems, putting up with what patience he could summon with Hayley’s good advice on his own work. What seems particularly to have angered Blake was Hayley’s attempts to persuade the loyal Mrs. Blake that her husband must be made to see reason. ‘Natural friends are spiritual enemies’, Blake concluded with some bitterness and much truth -- for Hayley’s good will towards Blake, and wish to help him, is as certain as his utter inability to understand, or gauge the stature of this great man of genius whom chance had brought to his door. The relationship between artist and patron demands a measure of greatness and of humility on both sides. It is unfortunate that Hayley’s petty vanity about his own poems should have blinded him to the genius of Blake, who finally found the relationship insupportable, and returned to London, and to years of deepening neglect.

Those three years in the pretty cottage that Hayley lent him were not, even so, unhappy ones; for Blake saw angels descending on a ladder from heaven to his cottage, and the visions that came to him by the sea were among the most radiantly beautiful that he ever had. In his leafy garden he saw fairies among the leaves, and his description of a fairy’s funeral is a piece of rural lore that might have come from Shakespeare’s England. In that same garden occurred a very different incident, belonging to a more modern, and grimmer world. Blake, coming one day into his enchanted garden, innocent haunt of fairies and angels, found there a cruder figure from the World of Experience, a soldier -- ugly symbol of this world’s tyranny and brutality -- whom the gardener had asked to come in as his assistant. Blake asked the soldier to leave; the man refused. Blake’s poetic rage became inflamed, and he turned the soldier out of the garden by main force. The soldier retaliated by charging Blake with sedition, in particular with having spoken the words, ‘Damn the King; damn all his subjects, damn his soldiers, they are all slaves’ -- words that might have cost Blake his life. Blake denied having spoken them; and at the Quarter Sessions, at his trial, one old man, years later, remembered his flashing eye, as he denied the false charge. Hayley, the spiritual enemy, was on this occasion a valuable natural friend -- the squire may have cut a small figure in the eyes of the angels, but he was influential enough in the county of Sussex, perhaps, to save Blake’s natural life.

It is likely, since he denied it, that Blake did not speak the seditious words attributed to him; but there is seldom smoke without fire, and the prophet’s burning revolutionary zeal, his ardent spiritual presence must have been felt at Felpham; the mere look in his flashing eye must have struck consternation into the villagers and local soldiery, and brought down upon him one of those petty village persecutions, like that which befell D. H. Lawrence and his wife during the 1914 war. (Lawrence and his wife were falsely charged with signalling to the enemy from their cottage on the Cornish coast.) There is a certain poetic justice in both these false charges, brought against two prophets whose fiery zeal was directed against so much that was corrupt in English society; and the yokels who dimly sensed their power and the revolutionary trend of their very thoughts -- in Blake’s flashing eye, or in Lawrence’s red beard -- were right, as the scribes and pharisees are always right, in detecting the spiritual presence of the inspired enemy of false values. Neither were guilty of the actions with which they were charged, but both were guilty (if that is the word) of treason, not against England, but against the Lord of this World, more fundamental than their accusers could have known.

Blake returned to London in 1804 and for the next seventeen years he lived at No. 17 South Moulton Street, only a few yards from Oxford Street, within a mile of the house where he was born. Again he set to work, as an engraver, to earn his living, while he worked, in his spare hours, on the printing of his Prophetic Books, by the laborious process of engraving each plate, with its writing and designs, by hand. He painted many pictures, both in tempora, a medium that he preferred to oils, and water-colour, and sold some to a few constant buyers, Butts and Cumberland being chief among them at that time. In 1808, Blake, then at the height of his powers, impatient at the neglect of his genius, goaded into action by the theft by Stothard of his idea for a painting of the Canterbury Pilgrims, made one last attempt to appeal to ‘the public’, who would, he felt, be less blind to his message than the intellectuals of the day. The same mistake has been made by artists both before and since; but what could have been more understandable, in a prophet who knew that his work was of deep concern to the Sons and Daughters of Albion, the English nation? The one exhibition of Blake’s paintings, including the Canterbury Pilgrims, and a number of other important works, many of them now lost, was held in his brother the hosier’s house in Broad Street, and although few members of the public seem to have visited it, there remains, from that famous exhibition, Blake Descriptive Catalogue, the finest and longest of Blake’s prose writings, a work full of penetrating and profound criticism, psychological subtlety, visionary wisdom, and poetic eloquence. Crabb Robinson, the diarist, bought four copies when he visited the exhibition, one of which he gave to Charles Lamb. He must have been one of the very few purchasers for that famous work was already extremely rare by the time Gilchrist came to write his Life. The exhibition was, of course, a financial failure, and did nothing to arrest Blake’s decline into obscurity. Curiosity took a few -- like Crabb Robinson -- to see the works of the eccentric visionary, but no disciple stayed to listen, or attempted to understand his wisdom. Blake was to have no disciples, as painter or as poet, until the last years of his life, when the sun of his greatness came, as it were, from behind a cloud. Blake, as an old man, was the much-loved master of a group of distinguished young painters and Linnell, Calvert, Richmond, Tatham, Samuel Palmer, and Varley were his friends. To these younger painters, Blake’s poor room in Fountain Court -- to which he had moved from South Moulton Street a few years before his death -- was known as ‘the Interpreter’s House’, after the character in A Pilgrim’s Progress. George Richmond -- one of the youngest of this group -- afterwards used to say that being with Blake was ‘as if he were talking to the Prophet Isaiah’. Blake, like Job, emerged, at the end of his life, into a period of creative fruitfulness and radiant peace. It was Linnell who commissioned him to work on the finest completed work of his life -- the Job engravings, followed by the illustrations to Dante, on which he was at work when he died, in 1827, a few months before his seventieth birthday.

Describing Blake as an old man, Samuel Palmer wrote, ‘In him you saw at once the Maker, the Inventor; one of the few in any age: a fitting companion for Dante. He was energy itself, and shed around him a kindling influence; an atmosphere of life, full of the ideal. To walk with him in the country was to perceive the soul of beauty through the forms of matter; and the high, gloomy buildings between which, from his study window, a glimpse was caught of the Thames and the Surrey shore, assumed a kind of grandeur from the man dwelling near them. Those may laugh at this who never knew such a one as Blake; but of him it is the simple truth.

‘He was a man without a mask, his aim single, his path straight forwards, and his wants few; so he was free, noble, and happy.’

Blake was buried in Bunhill Fields -- the burial place of Bunyan and Defoe -- in a common grave, that can no longer be traced, for there was no headstone to mark the spot where so great a man was buried. Nor, indeed, would the omission greatly have troubled Blake, for whom the mortal body was only ‘an excrementitious husk or covering over my immortal’. It was not until long after the resting-place of his mortal body had been forgotten, that Blake’s greatness began to be recognized by the public to whom, in his Descriptive Catalogue, he had appealed in vain.

In what, then, does Blake’s peculiar greatness consist? Among English artists his place is unique. His work is on a small scale; the Job engravings, his most perfect work, in his mature style, measure but a few inches; and yet in energy and beauty the human forms that he has depicted in them can without absurdity be compared with those of Michaelangelo. There is always, in the human form as Blake conceives it, a vitality more than sensual, that seems to lift the human body from the ground, free it from the limitations of gravity. His human bodies are not like the aspiring figures of Baroque art, that seem to be pulled upwards by the force of heavenly gravitation acting against the downward pull of earth; they seem, rather not subject to any stresses and strains at all, freely-moving spiritual beings, passing through air and fire unhindered. Blake was, as a young man, a Swedenborgian; and to Blake, as to the Swedish visionary, the material body of man is not his real body. According to Swedenborg, the Resurrection of the Body is a resurrection from, and not a resurrection of, the material body. Blake saw the soul of his brother Robert rising through the ceiling when he died; he saw, in his imagination, the clean bodies of the London chimneysweeps, who wash in the river of life and play in the sun. It is the imaginative immortal body of man that Blake represents. To occultists, like Yeats, or A.E., as to Swedenborg, the existence of such a body is a matter of faith. Blake himself says that (earthly) ‘body is that portion of Soul perceived by the five senses’; and he represents, in his designs to his Prophetic Books, in the Job and Dante illustrations, in every human form that he ever drew, the soul of man, bounded within that magic line drawn by imagination, but not to be found in nature. The ‘visionary forms’ of Pitt, and of Nelson, are the themes of two of his more ambitious compositions; but in truth all his forms of lamb or lion, flower or tendril, child or man, are visionary. When we look at Blake’s drawings, we look at the forms of spiritual beings; and the most voluptuous nudes, painted in satin texture, seem lifeless in comparison with these figures whose very essence is their imaginative immortality.

As a colourist, Blake is the father of the water-colour school of Samuel Palmer and his friends. The pages of the Songs of Innocence and Experience that Blake used to colour by hand for the few purchasers of the book, are even smaller than the Job designs; but they are of a delicacy and lyricism of colour quite unlike anything else. The colour-washed pages of the Book of Thel or the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with their gold and silver illuminated lettering, delicate tendril and leaf, create the illusion of a world fit for spirits to inhabit. Even the tiny woodcuts that illustrate Virgil Pastorals have that quality of belonging to eternity and not to time, a world wholly conceived by the imagination, and in which the senses but play the part of instruments. Not that Blake imagines an ‘other world’, or spiritual forms unrelated to the bodies they inhabit; on the contrary, his genius lay in his ability to see the body as an expression of soul, the natural forms of the temporal world as expressions of eternal archetypes. ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’, he wrote; and no artist more disliked the vague and the abstract. Minute particulars he always insisted, were all important. A spirit, or a vision, is not ‘a cloudy vapour, or a nothing’ and ‘he who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his perishing and mortal eye can see does not imagine at all’. It is precisely because his forms are imaginary that they have clear and distinct outline; for the senses, so Blake believed, have not the power of revealing form; like Coleridge, he realized the esemplastic’ power belongs to the imagination alone -- ‘Nature has no outline, but imagination has. Nature has no tune, but imagination has’. Describing his elaborate symbolic painting entitled ‘A Vision of the Last Judgment’, Blake wrote: ‘I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation and that to me it is hindrance and not Action; it is as the dirt upon my feet, No part of Me. “What”, it will be Question’d, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” Oh no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host, crying “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty”. I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro’ it and not with it!’ The ‘I’ who looks through, and not with, the organ of sense is the Self of the Upanishads, known to mystics both Platonic and Christian as existing beyond the conscious self; Blake himself called it the Divine Humanity. The imagination is, for Blake, as for Coleridge, the divine presence in man; and his theory of the imagination is thus one that makes him, in the only significant sense, a religious artist -- probably the only English religious artist of significance since the anonymous craftsmen of the Middle Ages, whom Blake in so many respects resembled.

As a poet Blake is perhaps greater than he is as an artist. The small scale and technical limitations of his work as an artist must always make him seem provincial -- not in vision, but in achievement -- in comparison with the great masters of Italy or France or Spain; but as a poet, in the tradition of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton, he was working in a poetic medium that helped, rather than hindered, his genius. Blake, as a lyrical poet, is unsurpassed. His Songs have often been compared to those of Shakespeare; and one might say that lyrical form poetry is what outline is in drawing, or melody in music -- the contour drawn by imagination, the trace of spiritual life. His vocabulary is as simple as that of a child, and his symbols -- rose, sunflower, lion, lamb, beetle, ant, little girl, or little boy -- are few, and universal. It is (as with his woodcuts, one inch by two inches, or the colour-washed pages that illustrate his poems) a question of transparency. Every lyric is a window into the imaginative world, and even in these early poems his roses and lambs are more than metaphorical, they are archetypal, symbols that focus multiple meanings, soundings into the unconscious, into the universal source of myth and oracle; hence their power. Simple as nursery-rhymes, they are as profound as the Gospels, whose symbolism of corn, bread, wine, and fishes was firm enough foundation for an enduring civilization. Indeed the symbols upon which great religious and enduring civilizations are founded are always of Blake-like simplicity and universality, as common as the sun and stars, comprehensible to the unlearned, but for ever incomprehensible to the unwise.

Of Blake’s later poems, little can be said within the compass of this essay. For long they were considered the inchoate ramblings of a disordered mind; they lack, indeed, the lyrical felicity of the Songs, and in order to read them with understanding we must lay aside the poetic habits of two thousand years, and rediscover a part of the poetic art that has gradually been lost, as our Western civilization has advanced and perfected its one-sided mode of thought, and discarded the mythological for the rational. One might say that there are two levels of symbolism employed, simultaneously, in all the greatest poetry: an upper, linguistic layer, whose symbolic counters are words -- words, the perfected instruments of conscious thought. The metaphysical poets excelled in the extracting of multiple meanings from words placed and held in complex intellectual tensions as elaborate as magnetic fields. The mere ‘beauty’ of words has been exploited by the Victorian poets -- Tennyson and his contemporaries excelled in this relatively trivial, but still delightful art, which to-day still passes for the be-all and end-all of poetry among many persons who (rightly if this were so) hold poetry in some contempt. But there is, besides the texture of words, whether intellectual or sensual, a lower, symbolic layer in the greatest imaginative poetry that has little to do with words at all. Freud and Jung have convinced us, clearly enough, that there are regions of the mind that think, not in terms of words at all, but in a picture language of symbols. The unconscious is innocent of words, but it formulates its desires and fears, its primordial but profound statements of living experience, in those symbolic forms that haunt our dreams. For the most part such symbolism is fragmentary, for the art of using symbols to their full potency has, with our long-established habits of verbal thought, been largely lost. Yet the myths of primitive races, and of our own antiquity, move far more in this non-linguistic, symbolic layer of poetry than in the verbal. Ballad and legend and fairy-tale deal almost wholly in this non-linguistic symbolism, irreducibly poetic, and independent of the words in which the symbols are described. Talking animals like the Black Bull of Norroway; the sleeping princess, or king, in the underground palace; the grail, the magic child, dragon, and holy tree, are counters in the pre-verbal poetic language of which myths are made, and which we ourselves still speak, though without understanding or control, in our dreams. Such symbols may be painted, put into dance or mime, told in prose or verse, and always they remain magical.

The greatest achievement of the first half of the twentieth century will perhaps prove to have been the first elucidation given by Freud and his successors of regions of the human mind that had remained closed since antiquity -- the discovery of the extent, and significance, of the unconscious, or what is so-called; for it is not unconscious at all times -- in dreams, for instance -- or to all men. What in most men is latent, is consciously experienced by visionaries and imaginative poets of the stature of Shakespeare, Coleridge, or Blake. As we learn more of the nature of the unconscious, its laws and contents, so we are beginning to relearn the dead language of symbolism, spoken with such moving and poetic power by the framers of myths, the inventors of gods and goddesses. The languages of myth and poetry spring from a single source, at the level at which these symbols are created, and they express not rational concepts, but resonant potencies that sound the very depths of our souls, stirring overtones of meaning that extend beyond the narrow spectrum of conscious thought. This is the language that Blake speaks in his Prophetic Books. Blake had the gift, apparently artless, of making any medium a transparent lens, or window, through which his vision shines. His poems, woodcuts, engravings, or water-colour drawings all reveal the same imaginative world, peopled by beings that seem to have an existence in their own right, as have the Homeric gods or the Christian Holy Family. As the Greeks wrote about the gods, so Blake wrote about, or drew, or engraved, the real existing figures of his imaginative world; and we recognize them, as we do Apollo or the Blessed Virgin, as if they had an actual existence, independent of art, independent, almost, of Blake himself. Perhaps they are our own lost Pantheon, the ancient gods and goddesses of England, rediscovered by Blake in South Molton Street, Lambeth, Battersea, and Hampstead, and restored to us (unlike some members of the Irish pantheon, who refused baptism at the hands of St. Patrick), Christianized one and all. Blake combined the symbolic imaginative genius of antiquity, and the psychological insight of modern man. In the latter respect, he was a hundred years in advance of his time; his reasonable and calm attitude to his visions is more akin to the intellectual honesty of a twentieth-century scientist than to the pious obscurantism of the devout; and yet his visions retain the quality of holiness, that has at all times characterized the religions of mankind, and that fulfils an irreducible need of the human soul. Never, I suppose, in human history, has mythology been so meagre, symbolic thought so little understood, as at the turn of the century into which Blake was born. The indigenous gods of Celt and Saxon had long since been forgotten -- perhaps to our permanent imaginative impoverishment; and the rationalized and denaturized version of Christianity that remained at the beginning of the nineteenth century was all but devoid of symbolism and useless as a medium of imaginative thought. It is indeed astonishing that at such a time, Blake should have created, from his own visionary imagination, a pantheon as rich, varied, and complex as that of any primitive race; created some dozen gods and goddesses, defined their potencies, set the whole pantheon in motion, with all the subtle relation and interrelation of these imaginative forces set forth with all the penetration of a psychologist of the school of Freud or Jung. These beings that he has created have arisen from the depths of the poet’s unconscious, in all the energy and beauty of life, violent, shape-shifting forms of the eternal powers that mould man, the impulses that determine and control our life, from beyond the little world known to our reason.

It is not possible to read the Prophetic Books merely as exercises in the use of language; on the linguistic level, except for some fine passages, they are disappointing, as compared with the early lyrics; they must be read as myth. As such they are among the greatest poetry in any modern language, and stand beside the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, or James Joyce. The art of reading myth, as myth, must be re-learned if we are fully to understand such figures as Shakespeare’s Caliban, Ariel, or Lear, Joyce’s Anna Livia, or Blake’s Four Zoas; but, that taste once formed, we come to look, in poetry, for the gods and their symbols, and if we do not find them, the finest verse seems insipid, as if lacking a necessary dimension. Once we become accustomed to this pre-verbal interplay of symbol and the personified potencies of the eternal human archetypes, we come to find it a necessary part of any art, and in its absence, poetry of words alone, however felicitous, can no longer satisfy us.

It is now, perhaps, clear why Blake should have worked with equal facility in two media. The poetic process in which he excelled was neither verbal nor visual; it was symbolic and mythological. He was a creator not of pictures, not of verbal rhetoric, but of symbols, whose potency does not depend solely on the medium through which they are expressed. We recognize Urizen, or Los, or Vala, in Blake’s designs, or in his descriptions; a phrase, or a line, becomes enough, when we have learned Blake’s symbolic vocabulary, to evoke the archetype -- just as, for Christians, two crossed sticks tell the whole story of their religion. That such an uprushing fountain of spiritual energy should have broken through the crust of eighteenth-century rationalism, in the works of Coleridge, Shelley, Goethe, and, above all, of Blake, is a fact whose great significance has not, even now, been fully realized. There remains, in the closed books of Blake -- books first published only in this century and still in process of de-coding -- ‘a great world of delight, closed to your senses five’. Its very dimensions have, so far, blinded us to it; for it is easier to appreciate a single metaphor, than to encompass a whole pantheon of gods and the world they inhabit.

There is still another respect in which we must consider Blake; he is perhaps the greatest Christian prophet of the modern world. Blake, so far as we know, attended services in the Church of England only three times in his life -- on the occasions of his baptism, his marriage, and his burial; for he held organized religion in low esteem. As a young man he was a follower of Swedenborg, and a member of his New Church. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a commentary on, and criticism of, Swedenborg; Jacob Boehme, St. Teresa, and the Kabbala were other principal sources of Blake’s religious thought, and he appears to have known something of Gnosticism and of the Hindoo religion. Just as, in art, he went back to the Gothic tradition, so, in religious thought, he swept aside all that was reputable and established in his day, and, with his unfailing grasp of essentials, saw the whole edifice of Western rationalism, theist and atheist alike, as so much dust in the balance, in the matter of religious truth. His religious wisdom he drew from the same source as his painting and his poetry -- the human imagination, which he called, indifferently, the Bosom of God, the Saviour, the Divine Humanity, and Jesus. Imagination was, for Blake, the divine presence in man. Like contemporary psychologists, he distinguished clearly between the selfhood (the ego as we should say) and the ‘humanity’, the real man of which the ego is only a part. Like mystics of all times and places, and like contemporary psychologists, Blake’s spiritual aim was a widening of consciousness, a destruction of the selfhood, that would enable the real humanity to come into being. In this religious empiricism he was more akin to a Buddhist, or a contemporary psychologist, than to the devout and the moralistic of his own day or of ours. To anyone, mystic or psychologist, who has realized the extent of the human soul, the partial and superficial nature of the ego, conventional morality must seem to be almost entirely unrelated to the true nature of man. Good and evil, as we conceive them, have little meaning in the world of the gods and goddesses, of the unconscious regions of the psyche, that obey laws unknown to reason and convention. Blake, therefore, became, as Swedenborg had never become, the courageous prophet of a new morality, a ‘Marriage’ of Heaven and Hell, of ‘reason’ and ‘energy’, one might say of the conscious and the unconscious halves of man’s original wholeness. A wholly new conception of the nature of man implies a new morality -- as modern psychologists have likewise discovered. Current ideals of sexual chastity, for example, Blake saw -- as Freud was later to see them -- as a hypocritical pretence, and the repression of the energies of body or mind as a violence done to the ‘divine humanity’. Legalistic morality is, for Blake, the greatest of spiritual evils. His Jesus is the Divine Humanity -- the potential human Self that lies beyond the conscious ego and its moral formulations, ruler of the Kingdom of Heaven whose order is latent in every soul, and whose realization in life is the task and toil of man.

Blake’s spiritual technique, or discipline, is no less modern than his view of the nature of man. Painting, music, and poetry, were, for him, three ways of ‘conversing with paradise’ -- of awakening, and bringing into consciousness and reality, the latent contours of the Divine Humanity. It was the function, after all, of the symbolism of old religious myths, to reach those hidden springs, and poetry, as Blake understood it, is the real mythology, the real spiritual language, of modern man. Blake’s religious teaching, at once too simple and too revolutionary for the orthodox, appeals to our particular kind of honesty, and stands the test alike of experience and of our present scientific knowledge. There are many who are prepared to accept Blake’s imaginative interpretation of Christianity in an age when theology, a rational formulation, has become discredited in the light of our humbler modern conception of the scope of the human reason, and of the processes of thought. ‘Everything that lives is holy’ is Blake’s creed; and in his fundamental criticism of orthodox Christianity, made in the fragments called The Everlasting Gospel, he constantly affirms that the unique contribution of Christianity to morality is the idea of the forgiveness of sins. What is most remarkable is the psychological soundness of Blake’s intuitive conclusions about the nature of the human soul, and its redemption. Combining as he did the intellectual honesty of a scientist with a saint’s sense of the holy, Blake stands as a bridge between the religious intuitions of the past, and the psychological science of the present day. Take him as one will -- as artist, poet, or religious revolutionary, Blake is a figure whose stature overtops all but the greatest men of genius that England -- or for that matter, the Western world -- has known.

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