NEW YEAR'S DAY

On the 1st of January 1882, Matthew Arnold wrote to his sister: "I think the beginning of a New Year very animating—it is so visible an occasion for breaking off bad habits and carrying into effect good resolutions." This was splendid in a man who had just entered his sixtieth year, and we all should like to share the sentiment; but it is not always easy to feel "animated," even by the most significant anniversaries. Sometimes they only depress; and the effect which they produce depends so very largely on the physical condition in which they find us. Suppose, for instance, that one is a fox-hunter, in the prime of life and the pride of health, with a good string of horses which have been eating their heads off during a prolonged frost. As one wakes on New Year's morning, one hears a delicious dripping from the roof, and one's servant, coming in with tea and letters, announces a rapid thaw. Then "the beginning of a New Year" is "animating" enough; and, while we wash and shave, we pledge ourselves, like Matthew Arnold, to "break off bad habits and carry into effect good resolutions." We remember with shame that we missed three capital days' hunting last November because we let our friends seduce us to their shooting-parties; and we resolve this year to make up for lost time, to redeem wasted opportunities, and not willingly to lose a day between this and Christmas. Such resolutions are truly "animating"; but we cannot all be young or healthy or fox-hunters, and then the anniversary takes a different colour. Perhaps one is cowering over one's study-fire, with "an air of romance struggling through the commonplace effect of a swelled face" (like Miss Hucklebuckle in "The Owlet"), or mumbling the minced remains of our Christmas turkey as painfully as Father Diggory in "Ivanhoe," who was "so severely afflicted by toothache that he could only eat on one side of his face." Not for us, in such circumstances, are "animating" visions of wide pastures, and negotiable fences, and too-fresh hunters pulling one's arms off, and the chime of the "dappled darlings down the roaring blast." Rather does our New Year's fancy lightly turn to thoughts of dentistry and doctoring. We ask ourselves whether the time has not come when art must replace what nature has withdrawn; and, if we form a resolution, it is nothing more heroic than that we will henceforward wear goloshes in damp weather and a quilted overcoat in frost.

But, it may be urged, Matthew Arnold was not a fox-hunter (at least not after his Oxford days), and yet he contrived to feel "animated" by New Year's Day. In his case animation was connected with books.

"I am glad," he wrote, "to find that in the past year I have at least accomplished more than usual in the way of reading the books which at the beginning of the year I put down to be read. I always do this, and I do not expect to read all I put down, but sometimes I fall much too short of what I proposed, and this year things have been a good deal better. The importance of reading, not slight stuff to get through the time but the best that has been written, forces itself upon me more and more every year I live. It is living in good company, the best company, and people are generally quite keen enough, or too keen, about doing that; yet they will not do it in the simplest and most innocent manner by reading. If I live to be eighty, I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications."

We have not quite come to that yet, but we are not far off it, and I should fear that the number of even educated people who occupy New Year's Day in laying down a course of serious study for the next twelve months is lamentably small. But Hunting and Health and Books are not the only topics for New Year's meditation. There is also Money, which not seldom obtrudes itself with a disagreeable urgency. We cast our eye over that little parchment-bound volume which only "Fortune's favoured sons, not we" can regard with any complacency; and we observe, not for the first time, that we have been spending a good deal more than we ought to spend, and are not far from the perilous edge of an overdrawn account. This is "animating" indeed, but only as a sudden stab of neuralgia is animating; and we immediately begin to consider methods of relief. But where are our retrenchments to begin? That is always the difficulty. I remember that after the Cattle Plague of 1865, by which he had been a principal sufferer, the first Lord Tollemache was very full of fiscal reforms. "I ought to get rid of half my servants; but they are excellent people, and it would be very wrong to cause them inconvenience. Horses, too—I really have no right to keep a stud. But nothing would ever induce me to sell a horse, and it seems rather heartless to kill old friends. Then, again, about houses—I ought to leave St. James's Square, and take a house in Brompton. But the Brompton houses are so small that they really would not accommodate my family, and it would not be right to turn the boys into lodgings." And so on and so forth, with a magnificent list of contemplated reforms, which went unfulfilled till things had righted themselves and retrenchment was no longer necessary. In the same spirit, though on a very different scale, the inhabitants of Stuccovia contemplate the financial future which lies ahead of New Year's Day. We must economize—that is plain enough. But how are we to begin?

I must have a new frock-coat very soon, and shall want at least three tweed suits before the autumn. Economy bids me desert Savile Row and try Aaronson in New Oxford Street. "Budge," says the Fiend. "Budge not," replies Self-Respect. Aaronson is remarkable for a fit "that never was on sea or land," and, though his garments are undeniably cheap, they are also nasty, and are worn out before they are paid for. Or perhaps our conscience pricks us most severely in the matter of wine. We will buy no more Pommery and Greno at 98s. a dozen, but will slake our modest thirst with a dry Sillery at 31s. But, after all, health is the first consideration in life, and, unfortunately, these cheap wines never agree with us. The doctor holds them directly responsible for our last attack of eczema or neuritis, and says impressively, "Drink good wine, or none at all—bad wine is poison to you." Drink none at all. That is very "animating," but somehow our enfeebled will is unequal to the required resolve; we hold spirit-drinking in detestation; and so, after all, we are driven back to our Pommery. "Surely," as Lamb said, "there must be some other world in which our unconquerable purpose" of retrenchment shall be realized.

Travel, again. Many people spend too much in travel. Can we curtail in that direction? For my own part, I am a Londoner, and am content with life as it is afforded by this wonderful world miscalled a city. But the Family has claims. Some of them suffer from "Liver," and whoso knows what it is to dwell with liverish patients will not lightly run the risk of keeping them from Carlsbad. Others can only breathe on high Alps, and others, again, require the sunshine of the Riviera or the warmth of the Italian Lakes. So all the ways of retrenchment seem barred. Clothes and wine and travel must cost as much as they cost last year, and the only way of escape seems to lie in the steps of the Prince Consort, who, when Parliament reduced his income from the proposed fifty thousand a year to thirty, patiently observed that he should have to give less in subscriptions.

To the Spendthrift, or even to the more modest practitioner who merely lives up to his income, the New Year, as we have seen, offers few opportunities for resolutions of reform; but I fancy that the Skinflint, and his cousin the Screw, find it full of suggestive possibilities. I remember a gentleman of "griping and penurious tendencies" (the phrase is Mr. Gladstone's) telling me when I was a schoolboy that he had resolved to spend nothing with his tailor in the year then dawning. He announced it with the air befitting a great self-surrender, but I thought, as I looked at his clothes, that he was really only continuing the well-established practice of a lifetime. The Screw, of course, is of no one place or age; and here is an excellent citation from the Diary of a Screw—Mr. Thomas Turner—who flourished in Sussex in the eighteenth century: "This being New Year's Day, myself and wife at church in the morning. Collection. My wife gave 6d. But, they not asking me, I gave nothing. Oh! may we increase in faith and good works, and maintain the good intentions we have this day taken up." Those who have tried it say that hoarding is the purest of human pleasures; and I dare say that by the end of the year good Mr. Turner's banking-book was a phantom of delight.

All these reflections, and others like unto them, came whirling on my mind this New Year's Eve; and, just as I was beginning to reduce them to form and figure, the shrill ting-ting of the church-bell pierced the silence of the night. Watch-Night. Those who are not the friends of the English Church denounce her as hidebound, immovable, and unreceptive. Here is the—or an—answer to the charge. She has borrowed, originally, from the Swedenborgians and more immediately from the Wesleyans, a religious observance which, though unrecognized in Prayer-book or Kalendar, now divides with the Harvest Festival the honour of being the most popular service in the Church of England.

"Among the promptings of what may be called, in the truest sense of the term, Natural Religion, none surely is more instructive than that which leads men to observe with peculiar solemnity the entrance upon a new year of life. It is, if nothing else, the making a step in the dark. It is the entrance upon a new epoch in existence, of which the manifold "changes and chances" prevent our forecasting the issue. True, the line of demarcation is purely arbitrary; yet there are few, even of the most thoughtless, who can set foot across the line which separates one year from another without feeling in some degree the significance of the act. It would seem that this passing season of thoughtfulness was one of those opportunities which no form of religion could afford to miss. And yet, for a long time, that which may perhaps without offence be termed Ecclesiasticism sternly refused to recognize this occasion. The line was rigidly drawn between the Civil New Year and the Church's New Year. We were told that Advent was the beginning of our Sacred Year, and that the evening before the First Sunday in Advent was the time for those serious thoughts and good resolutions which rightly accompany a New Year."

Yes-so we were taught; and there was a great deal to be said, ecclesiastically, for the teaching. Only, unfortunately, no one believed it. We went to bed quite unmoved on Saturday evening, December 1, 1906. No era seemed to have closed for us, no era to have opened: there was nothing to remember, nothing to anticipate; nothing to repent and nothing to resolve. It is otherwise to-night.[11] The "church-going bell" does not tingle in vain. Old men and maidens, young men and children are crowding in. I involve myself in an ulster and a comforter, and join the pilgrim-throng.