or can do is to show it as it is. But in those
stories of his Dickens said to his readers, Let us make believe so-and-
so; and the result was a joint juggle, a child's-play, in which the
wholesome allegiance to life was lost. Artistically, therefore, the
scheme was false, and artistically, therefore, it must perish. It did
not perish, however, before it had propagated itself in a whole school of
unrealities so ghastly that one can hardly recall without a shudder those
sentimentalities at secondhand to which holiday literature was abandoned
long after the original conjurer had wearied of his performance.

Under his own eye and of conscious purpose a circle of imitators grew up
in the fabrication of Christmas stories. They obviously formed
themselves upon his sobered ideals; they collaborated with him, and it
was often hard to know whether it was Dickens or Sala or Collins who was
writing. The Christmas book had by that time lost its direct application
to Christmas. It dealt with shipwrecks a good deal, and with perilous
adventures of all kinds, and with unmerited suffering, and with ghosts
and mysteries, because human nature, secure from storm and danger in a
well-lighted room before a cheerful fire, likes to have these things
imaged for it, and its long-puerilized fancy will bear an endless
repetition of them. The wizards who wrought their spells with them
contented themselves with the lasting efficacy of these simple means;
and the apprentice-wizards and journeyman-wizards who have succeeded them
practise the same arts at the old stand; but the ethical intention which
gave dignity to Dickens's Christmas stories of still earlier date has
almost wholly disappeared. It was a quality which could not be worked so
long as the phantoms and hair-breadth escapes. People always knew that
character is not changed by a dream in a series of tableaux; that a ghost
cannot do much towards reforming an inordinately selfish person; that a
life cannot be turned white, like a head of hair, in a single night, by
the most allegorical apparition; that want and sin and shame cannot be
cured by kettles singing on the hob; and gradually they ceased to make
believe that there was virtue in these devices and appliances. Yet the
ethical intention was not fruitless, crude as it now appears.

It was well once a year, if not oftener, to remind men by parable of the
old, simple truths; to teach them that forgiveness, and charity, and the
endeavor for