I don’t break my New Year’s resolutions, because I never make any, but if I were to recommend one to readers today, it would be to try to read one genuinely good book every month, and to try to embody, in prayer, in conversation, in work and in play, something of that joy that Christians know, that joy which is in harmony with the solemn, and that can shine forth in times of sorrow as well as in times of what the world calls happiness.
What prompts me here is something I have long noticed about the current state of mass entertainment. My wife and I have recently been watching some old BBC productions of the novels of Charles Dickens. That greatest of English novelists was, as a dear friend of mine deftly put it, “in love with goodness”. It follows that if you are not in love with goodness, you should not try to put Dickens on film. There’s always Ibsen, if you want to be a grouch, highlighting grey against black. Dickens, I’ve said, never took two steps without thinking of the Gospels; they are the air he breathes. Therefore his essential mode is comic. He transcends satire. His laughter is so filled with mirth, it can raise some of his villains to a pitch of madcap wickedness, and we end up “liking” them – the boisterous fire-drinking dwarf Quilp, the ’umble hand-wringing hypocrite Uriah Heep, the “literary man with a wooden leg”, Silas Wegg. And that’s not getting to the energetic goodness of the most amiable of his saints and children: Captain Cuttle, Mrs Bagnet, Aunt Betsy Trotwood, Sam Weller, Miss Pross, Kit Nubbles – and on and on.
