Chapter 2: 1.ix

Symbolic.

How natural, in all decisive circumstances, is Symbolic
Representation to all kinds of men! Nay, what is man’s whole
terrestrial Life but a Symbolic Representation, and making
visible, of the Celestial invisible Force that is in him? By act
and word he strives to do it; with sincerity, if possible;
failing that, with theatricality, which latter also may have its
meaning. An Almack’s Masquerade is not nothing; in more genial
ages, your Christmas Guisings, Feasts of the Ass, Abbots of
Unreason, were a considerable something: since sport they were;
as Almacks may still be sincere wish for sport. But what, on the
other hand, must not sincere earnest have been: say, a Hebrew
Feast of Tabernacles have been! A whole Nation gathered, in the
name of the Highest, under the eye of the Highest; imagination
herself flagging under the reality; and all noblest Ceremony as
yet not grown ceremonial, but solemn, significant to the outmost
fringe! Neither, in modern private life, are theatrical scenes,
of tearful women wetting whole ells of cambric in concert, of
impassioned bushy-whiskered youth threatening suicide, and such
like, to be so entirely detested: drop thou a tear over them
thyself rather.

At any rate, one can remark that no Nation will throw-by its
work, and deliberately go out to make a scene, without meaning
something thereby. For indeed no scenic individual, with knavish
hypocritical views, will take the trouble to _soliloquise_ a
scene: and now consider, is not a scenic Nation placed precisely
in that predicament of soliloquising; for its own behoof alone;
to solace its own sensibilities, maudlin or other?—Yet in this
respect, of readiness for scenes, the difference of Nations, as
of men, is very great. If our Saxon-Puritanic friends, for
example, swore and signed their National Covenant, without
discharge of gunpowder, or the beating of any drum, in a dingy
Covenant-Close of the Edinburgh High-street, in a mean room,
where men now drink mean liquor, it was consistent with their
ways so to swear it. Our Gallic-Encyclopedic friends, again, must
have a Champ-de-Mars, seen of all the world, or universe; and
such a Scenic Exhibition, to which the Coliseum Amphitheatre was
but a stroller’s barn, as this old Globe of ours had never or
hardly ever beheld. Which method also we reckon natural, then and
there. Nor perhaps was the respective _keeping_ of these two
Oaths far out of due proportion to such respective display in
taking them: inverse proportion, namely. For the theatricality of
a People goes in a compound-ratio: ratio indeed of their
trustfulness, sociability, fervency; but then also of their
excitability, of their porosity, not _continent;_ or say, of
their explosiveness, hot-flashing, but which does not last.

How true also, once more, is it that no man or Nation of men,
_conscious_ of doing a great thing, was ever, in that thing,
doing other than a small one! O Champ-de-Mars Federation, with
three hundred drummers, twelve hundred wind-musicians, and
artillery planted on height after height to boom the tidings of
it all over France, in few minutes! Could no Atheist-Naigeon
contrive to discern, eighteen centuries off, those Thirteen most
poor mean-dressed men, at frugal Supper, in a mean Jewish
dwelling, with no symbol but hearts god-initiated into the
“Divine depth of Sorrow,” and a _Do this in remembrance of
me;_—and so cease that small difficult crowing of his, if he were
not doomed to it?