35}

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

* * * * *

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

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

The singing of sacred carols by country people continued, indeed, but the
creative artistic impulse was lost. True carols after the Reformation
tend to be doggerel, and no doubt many of the traditional pieces printed
in such collections as Bramley and Stainer's[33]{37} are debased