Evening Star Newspaper, December 23, 1934, Page 67

“THE - SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. €., DECEMBER 23, 1}034. 3 A PHILOSOPHER LOOKS ON CHRISTMAS HE difference between Christmas and most modern games or sports is essentially this: Christmas is frivo- lous on top and serious underneath while sport is serious on top and frivolous underneath. The first is like finding froth on the top of strong ale; the second is like finding unliberated gases bubbling at the bottom of a much heavier drink. The old games of Christmas were all conceived with the idea of men making fools of themselves, but this alone involves a rather solemn preliminary problem about whether they are fools already. But the idea was that of the Saturnalia, or dignity becoming undignified, and that is exactly the difference between Saturnalia and Satan- ism. Solid and solemn city men, let us say, were required to take part in the game of honey pots, which involves sitting on the floor hunched up in a squatting attitude at the risk of being rolled over, as if the fairies had indeed turned them into pots of honey instead of leaving them with the dismal distinction of having pots of money. SOME great millionaire, equipped with the brain of steel and the will of iron which are part of the apparatus of his profession, might none the less be required to play one of the old nursery games. He might be condemned to play- ing puss in the corner, instead of playing pluto- crat in the corner, in whatever wheat corner or milk corner he might be at the moment bene- fiting mankind. The very rich uncle, commonly empowered to fling his handkerchief like & sultan, would have the handkerchief tied round his head in the game of blindman's buff, and would fall over chairs and barge into big and hard pieces of furniture and experience every such joyful activity to the good of his soul and the great and increasing pleasure of his poor relations. The whole idea of these old childish games was to make anybody look childish, and the results were not only great fun but often really funny. But if you had the antiquarian curiosity to ask why there was this tradition of people being childish you would trace it back to a tremendous, a mysterious and even a paradoxical doctrine that on this strange night even God became a child: If we look at the games now generally sub- stituted for the games of Christmas we shall find the exact contrary. We shall find that the basis is entirely trivial, but that the tower of solemnity erected on that trifle is as enormous as the Tower of Babel. I would not make any antithesis between golf and God, lest some of the most serious Scotsmen should be tempted to deny their Creator. But if I may take the game of golf as typical I think it is a fairly illuminat- ing type. THE actual aim and origin of golf is to put a very small pellet in a very small pocket. There is nothing large or elemental or imaginative about the materials of the thing; it is not throwing a great rock into a great abyss. It possesses about the correctitude of putting a pill back into a pill box, and rather less than the excitement of blowing a pea out of a pea shooter. That, I mean, is what it is in itself. But when we come to consider what has been made of it, we are faced with an array of awful and almost appalling intellectual responsibilities which make me shudder even as I touch upon the topic. I see rising before me the grave faces of three gray-haired Scots, as I have been on the links at North Berwick, and I know despite their expression that they cannot be discussing Calvin or the shorter catechism or the metaphysics of Mr. Macnobbin, that bold young Presbyterian minister who has studied Kant in Berlin, because if they were discussing these things they would occasionally smile. As they never smile at all, I know they are talking about golf. Something of this may be put down to the native solemnity of Scotland, but it is a grave slander and error to suppose that people in Scotland have no sense of humor. Moreover, it is quite as bad in England, and I imagine everywhere else. Nobody, of course, would dare to make a game of golf, but nobody even dares to treat it as a game. Nobody can be sportive about such a sport; nobody (I need hardly say) would venture to be amused by such an amusement. Nobody really enjoys it as people enjoy a game, but above all nobody forgets it as people forget a game. Did you ever hear gray-headed merchants arguing for hours about what they ought to have done in their capacity of honey pots on Christmas day? Did you ever hear & wealthy uncle who had been blinded for blind man’s buff telling the other uncles that he ought to have turned to the right, instead of the left and run after his nephew Jack, instead of his niece Joan? Did you ever behold a hard-headed business man becoming a bore before your very eyes, while he explained that in playing hunt the slipper he once nearly got the slipper and that it was not really fair that he lost it? ET there is no more real intellectual ime portance about putting a ball in a hole than about capturing a slipper from a crowd of children. The natural destiny of & game is to be enjoyed and to be forgotten. It is horribly certain that modern games are not forgotten, and it is allowable to doubt whether they are in this sense enjoyed. An enormous super- structure of work and worry and specialism and expenditure has been reared above these grown-up games, though their substantial sub- Ject matter is‘every bit as slight and trivial as that of the childish games. I wonder whether the time will come when a man has to pay about 10 guineas to join the Puss-in-the-Corner Club, or has to purchase a Famed English Author Says the Holiday Is Frivolous on Top but Serious Underneath. He Contrasts the Fun of Christmas Games With the Solemnity of Those We Play the Rest of the Year. Gilbert K. Chesterton. BY GILBERT K. CHESTERTON huge aparatus in order to hunt the slipper, or must wait till he is a very wealthy man to play hide and seek. It may seem unfair that I have selected the noble Scottish game as my example, for it has many superiorities over other games, espe- cially in that it is played over great landscapes like the awful game of war. But in one respect it emphasizes the exaggeration more than other games. A great cricketer does not go to the L IR RO JC RO I U R R0 0 JC R0 0 JC QA U JJK Q0 JC JCJU JCJC R U K B B 2 B 2 2 A CHRISTMAS LIBRARY TR S 3 o o o o o o S kS kO ko o BY EDWIN TRIBBLE. EORGE L. RADCLIFFE, United States Senator-elect from Maryland, is a book collector who is more in- terested in what books have to say to him than in the joy of possession. An active financier, he is executive director for one of America’s largest security and bonding companies, he reads everything published pertaining to Christmas and adds it to his library, but he has not yet found time to assemble and catalogue his thousand vol- umes or his cards, magazines, carols and illus- trations. He doesn’t know how or why he started collecting Christmas books. He has never known anyone who had such a collec- tion, although a bookseller in London told him & man in California has one, Mr. Radcliffe is a native of Maryland’s jagged Eastern Shore. He remembers Christmas at his farm home as quiet and uneventful. Even then, though, he liked to recall things he had read in old English books about the season. He thought of Yule logs burning bright and long, of servants and townsmen making their curtsies before their masters and receiving what must have been the first debt moratoria and in some cases the pleasant and unusual sensation of sitting at the banquet table while their lords and ladies served them - heavy, steaming Christmas pies. He owned and treasured a few books on Christmas. When he went away to study for his doctor of philosophy degree at Johns Hop- kins and his law degree at the University of Maryland, he saved them. Occasionally he bought another. About 20 years ago he found he had several hundreds of all kinds, periods and degrees of value. Some were books every- body has, some were curiosities and some could be bought if booksellers could locate them. When he saw items he didn't have he bought them and gradually his collection started build- ing itself. The growing Radcliffe library contained many books on Maryland history, but the finan- cier's main interest was his Christmas books. their findings in his line. If he saw & he liked he bought it, although he might ve one like it at home. In fact, it was hard to remember just what he did have. Rare items as such did not interest him. He has never cared for first editions or manu- scripts. Sometimes the books cost him only 50 oents, sometimes $40 or $50. He doesn’t remember the names of the books same old things in the same old way and he Continued on Ninth Page. wicket followed by a cart containing 15 differe ent kinds of bat, nor a tennis player hastliy snatch rackets of seven different shapes to reply to seven different volleys. In any case, the point is that modern games, remaining frivolous in foundation, have be- come preposterousl” pretentious and complie cated in superstructure. And I hold that one of the many lessons that the old Christmas tradition—or if you like, the old Christmas legend—has still to teach the world is the power of starting amusements which lead to an old liberty, instead of to a new slavery, Christmas taught people to feast on a feast day and to be as funny as possible while the fun was going, and it did this because there was a real reason for doing it. But our modern fun has grown more solemn than solmenity itself, because there is no reason for it at all Peace On Earth Continued from First Page demned cell; and most of the time we forget about this incalculable spiritual power. But at Christmas, each year, we re- discover it. We remember where it comes from; we see it symbolized in those little Christmas customs that we all observe; and in the magnificent cadences of that deathless story from Bethlehem we realize its eternal truth. ACING this, we then discover some- j thing else: That the great battles, the battles which decide the world’s destiny, are fought out in men’s hearts and minds. It is there that the great decisions are made; everything that happens afterward simply ratifies them. Where are the legions that held the world in thrall, while the heavens opened over that sheepfold? Blown dust on the winds of time, these 1 centuries; blood= less shadows, marching through oblivion with the shades of all the other armies man has raised. And the vision that those legions mocked? It still livés, imperishable and ageless, in millions upon millions eof hearts, lightening the fear and discour- agement of unnumbered generations of men. All of the world’s armies have nob killed it, all the world’s fleets have not touched it. It is above change and beyond time. Slowly, year by year, it increases. Human nature does change; it is a denial of all that we live by to say that it does not. Generation by generation and century by century, men come a little bit closer to a realization of the fact that they can make this world precisely what they want it to be, if they have the faith and courage to try. As we realize that, we find that the star that blazed in the Eastern sky is still shining. The smoke from the navies and the dust-clouds from the parade grounds may obscure it, but they cannot cut off its light entirely. And so we can celebrate our Christmas, and reread the old promise of peace and human brotherhood, in spite of the war clouds. For that star will continue to give us its light in the future as in the past. Year by year the light will grow a little bit brighter, and as it does so we shall become a little bit better able to see the tragic stupidity of trying to con- duct human society by the rules of the tiger-cage. Then we shall be able to see this story of manger and wise men and sheepfold, not as a beautiful old story or as a lovely but impractical ideal, but as a guide for human affairs, a miraculous dis- closure of eternal truth. And in that day, looking about us, we shall discover that we have begun to build the city of God. Not in Her Contract “Jump, lady, jump!” shouted the fireman, holding the life net to the movie star who stood at the sixth-story window with the flames raging behind her. “I'll do nothing of the sort,” she shouted back. “Tell the director to send my double here at once.” e