m of gentleness.
It is still an instinct in many Christian places to turn Christmas
into a general orgy--to make it a day on which one bows down and
worships the human maw. (And there are worse things in the world than
brandy-sauce.) On the other hand, there is also the instinct to make
of the day a door into a new world of neighbourliness. It is the only
day in the year on which many men speak humanly to their servants and
open their eyes to the cheerful lives of children and simple people.
Hypercritical youth will deny that man has a right to confine his
neighbourliness to a single day in the year any more than he has a
right to confine his sanctity to the Sabbath. But we who have ceased
to exact miracles from human nature are glad to have even a single day
as a beginning. Socialism, we may admit, depends upon the extension of
the Christmas festival into the rest of the year. It demands that the
relations between man and man shall be, as far as possible, not
shopkeeping relations, but Christmas relations. In other words, it
aims at a society in which the little conquests of gain will cease to
be the chief end of time, and men will no more think of cheating each
other than Romeo would think of cheating Juliet. Nor is there any
other side of the new civilisation which will be more difficult to
build than this. This is the very spirit of the new city. Without it
the rest would be but a chaos of stones and mortar--a Gehenna of
purposeless machinery.

It is an extraordinary fact that the rediscovery of Christmas in the
nineteenth century was not followed sooner by the rediscovery of the
limitations of individualism. Dickens himself, the incarnation of
Christmas, did not realise till quite late in life what a denial
modern civilisation is of the Christmas spirit. Even in _Hard Times_,
where, as Mr Shaw pointed out, he expresses the insurrection of the
human conscience against a Manchesterised society, he offers us no
hope except from the spread of a sort of Tory benevolence. Perhaps,
however, it does not matter how you label benevolence so long as it is
the real thing and is not merely another name for that most insidious
form of egotism--patronage. That Dickens was pugnaciously benevolent
in all his work--except when he was writing about Dissenters and
Americans--was one of the most fortunate accidents in the popular
literature of the nineteenth century. He did not, perhaps, dramatise
the secret mystery of human brotherho