By George Orwell
The thought of Christmas raises almost automatically the thought of
Charles Dickens, and for two very good reasons. To begin with, Dickens
is one of the few English writers who have actually written about
Christmas. Christmas is the most popular of English festivals, and yet
it has produced astonishingly little literature. There are the carols,
mostly medieval in origin; there is a tiny handful of poems by Robert
Bridges, T.S. Eliot, and some others, and there is Dickens; but there
is very little else. Secondly, Dickens is remarkable, indeed almost
unique, among modern writers in being able to give a convincing picture
of happiness.
Dickens
dealt successfully with Christmas twice in a chapter of The Pickwick
Papers and in A Christmas Carol. The latter story was read to Lenin on
his deathbed and according to his wife, he found its 'bourgeois
sentimentality' completely intolerable. Now in a sense Lenin was right:
but if he had been in better health he would perhaps have noticed that
the story has interesting sociological implications. To begin with,
however thick Dickens may lay on the paint, however disgusting the
'pathos' of Tiny Tim may be, the Cratchit family give the impression of
enjoying themselves. They sound happy as, for instance, the citizens of
William Morris's News From Nowhere don't sound happy. Moreover and
Dickens's understanding of this is one of the secrets of his power
their happiness derives mainly from contrast. They are in high spirits
because for once in a way they have enough to eat. The wolf is at the
door, but he is wagging his tail. The steam of the Christmas pudding
drifts across a background of pawnshops and sweated labour, and in a
double sense the ghost of Scrooge stands beside the dinner table. Bob
Cratchit even wants to drink to Scrooge's health, which Mrs Cratchit
rightly refuses. The Cratchits are able to enjoy Christmas precisely
because it only comes once a year. Their happiness is convincing just
because Christmas only comes once a year. Their happiness is convincing
just because it is described as incomplete.
All efforts to
describe permanent happiness, on the other hand, have been failures.
Utopias (incidentally the coined word Utopia doesn't mean 'a good
place', it means merely a 'non-existent place') have been common in
literature of the past three or four hundred years but the 'favourable'
ones are invariably unappetising, and usually lacking in vitality as
well.
By far the best known modern Utopias are those of H.G.
Wells. Wells's vision of the future is almost fully expressed in two
books written in the early Twenties, The Dream and Men Like Gods. Here
you have a picture of the world as Wells would like to see it or thinks
he would like to see it. It is a world whose keynotes are enlightened
hedonism and scientific curiosity. All the evils and miseries we now
suffer from have vanished. Ignorance, war, poverty, dirt, disease,
frustration, hunger, fear, overwork, superstition all vanished. So
expressed, it is impossible to deny that that is the kind of world we
all hope for. We all want to abolish the things Wells wants to abolish.
But is there anyone who actually wants to live in a Wellsian Utopia? On
the contrary, not to live in a world like that, not to wake up in a
hygenic garden suburb infested by naked schoolmarms, has actually
become a conscious political motive. A book like Brave New World is an
expression of the actual fear that modern man feels of the rationalised
hedonistic society which it is within his power to create. A Catholic
writer said recently that Utopias are now technically feasible and that
in consequence how to avoid Utopia had become a serious problem. We
cannot write this off as merely a silly remark. For one of the sources
of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and
too-comfortable world.
