Probably it will elucidate the drift of these foregoing obscure
utterances, if we here insert somewhat of our Professor's speculations
on _Symbols_. To state his whole doctrine, indeed, were beyond our
compass: nowhere is he more mysterious, impalpable, than in this of
"Fantasy being the organ of the Godlike;" and how "Man thereby, though
based, to all seeming, on the small Visible, does nevertheless extend
down into the infinite deeps of the Invisible, of which Invisible,
indeed, his Life is properly the bodying forth." Let us, omitting these
high transcendental aspects of the matter, study to glean (whether from
the Paper-bags or the Printed Volume) what little seems logical and
practical, and cunningly arrange it into such degree of coherence as
it will assume. By way of proem, take the following not injudicious
remarks:--
"The benignant efficacies of Concealment," cries our Professor, "who
shall speak or sing? SILENCE and SECRECY! Altars might still be raised
to them (were this an altar-building time) for universal worship.
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves
together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into
the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not William
the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most
undiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forbore to babble of what they
were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do
thou thyself but _hold thy tongue for one day_: on the morrow, how much
clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have those
mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut
out! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman defined it, the art of
concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought,
so that there is none to conceal. Speech too is great, but not the
greatest. As the Swiss Inscription says: _Sprechen ist silbern,
Schweigen ist golden_ (Speech is silvern, Silence is golden); or as I
might rather express it: Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.
"Bees will not work except in darkness; Thought will not work except in
Silence: neither will Virtue work except in Secrecy. Let not thy left
hand know what thy right hand doeth! Neither shalt thou prate even to
thy own heart of 'those secrets known to all.' Is not Shame (_Schaam_)
the soil of all Virtue, of all good manners and good morals? Like other
plants, Virtue will not grow unless its root be hidden, buried from the
eye of the sun. Let the sun shine on it, nay do but look at it privily
thyself, the root withers, and no flower will glad thee. O my Friends,
when we view the fair clustering flowers that overwreathe, for example,
the Marriage-bower, and encircle man's life with the fragrance and hues
of Heaven, what hand will not smite the foul plunderer that grubs them
up by the roots, and, with grinning, grunting satisfaction, shows us
the dung they flourish in! Men speak much of the Printing Press with
its Newspapers: _du Himmel_! what are these to Clothes and the Tailor's
Goose?
"Of kin to the so incalculable influences of Concealment, and connected
with still greater things, is the wondrous agency of _Symbols_. In
a Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation; here therefore, by
Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance. And
if both the Speech be itself high, and the Silence fit and noble, how
expressive will their union be! Thus in many a painted Device, or simple
Seal-emblem, the commonest Truth stands out to us proclaimed with quite
new emphasis.
"For it is here that Fantasy with her mystic wonderland plays into the
small prose domain of Sense, and becomes incorporated therewith. In the
Symbol proper, what we can call a Symbol, there is ever, more or less
distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite;
the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible,
and as it were, attainable there. By Symbols, accordingly, is man guided
and commanded, made happy, made wretched: He everywhere finds himself
encompassed with Symbols, recognized as such or not recognized: the
Universe is but one vast Symbol of God; nay if thou wilt have it, what
is man himself but a Symbol of God; is not all that he does symbolical;
a revelation to Sense of the mystic god-given force that is in him; a
'Gospel of Freedom,' which he, the 'Messias of Nature,' preaches, as he
can, by act and word? Not a Hut he builds but is the visible embodiment
of a Thought; but bears visible record of invisible things; but is, in
the transcendental sense, symbolical as well as real."
"Man," says the Professor elsewhere, in quite antipodal contrast with
these high-soaring delineations, which we have here cut short on the
verge of the inane, "Man is by birth somewhat of an owl. Perhaps, too,
of all the owleries that ever possessed him, the most owlish, if we
consider it, is that of your actually existing Motive-Millwrights.
Fantastic tricks enough man has played, in his time; has fancied himself
to be most things, down even to an animated heap of Glass: but to fancy
himself a dead Iron-Balance for weighing Pains and Pleasures on, was
reserved for this his latter era. There stands he, his Universe one huge
Manger, filled with hay and thistles to be weighed against each other;
and looks long-eared enough. Alas, poor devil! spectres are appointed to
haunt him: one age he is hag-ridden, bewitched; the next, priest-ridden,
befooled; in all ages, bedevilled. And now the Genius of Mechanism
smothers him worse than any Nightmare did; till the Soul is nigh choked
out of him, and only a kind of Digestive, Mechanic life remains. In
Earth and in Heaven he can see nothing but Mechanism; has fear for
nothing else, hope in nothing else: the world would indeed grind him
to pieces; but cannot he fathom the Doctrine of Motives, and cunningly
compute these, and mechanize them to grind the other way?
"Were he not, as has been said, purblinded by enchantment, you had but
to bid him open his eyes and look. In which country, in which time, was
it hitherto that man's history, or the history of any man, went on by
calculated or calculable 'Motives'? What make ye of your Christianities,
and Chivalries, and Reformations, and Marseillaise Hymns, and Reigns of
Terror? Nay, has not perhaps the Motive-grinder himself been in _Love_?
Did he never stand so much as a contested Election? Leave him to Time,
and the medicating virtue of Nature."
"Yes, Friends," elsewhere observes the Professor, "not our Logical,
Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might
say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to
lead us hellward. Nay, even for the basest Sensualist, what is Sense
but the implement of Fantasy; the vessel it drinks out of? Ever in the
dullest existence there is a sheen either of Inspiration or of Madness
(thou partly hast it in thy choice, which of the two), that gleams in
from the circumambient Eternity, and colors with its own hues our little
islet of Time. The Understanding is indeed thy window, too clear thou
canst not make it; but Fantasy is thy eye, with its color-giving
retina, healthy or diseased. Have not I myself known five hundred living
soldiers sabred into crows'-meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which
they called their Flag; which, had you sold it at any market-cross,
would not have brought above three groschen? Did not the whole Hungarian
Nation rise, like some tumultuous moon-stirred Atlantic, when Kaiser
Joseph pocketed their Iron Crown; an implement, as was sagaciously
observed, in size and commercial value little differing from a
horse-shoe? It is in and through _Symbols_ that man, consciously or
unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being: those ages, moreover,
are accounted the noblest which can the best recognize symbolical worth,
and prize it the highest. For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes
for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the Godlike?
"Of Symbols, however, I remark farther, that they have both an extrinsic
and intrinsic value; oftenest the former only. What, for instance, was
in that clouted Shoe, which the Peasants bore aloft with them as ensign
in their _Bauernkrieg_ (Peasants' War)? Or in the Wallet-and-staff round
which the Netherland _Gueux_, glorying in that nickname of Beggars,
heroically rallied and prevailed, though against King Philip himself?
Intrinsic significance these had none: only extrinsic; as the accidental
Standards of multitudes more or less sacredly uniting together; in
which union itself, as above noted, there is ever something mystical and
borrowing of the Godlike. Under a like category, too, stand, or stood,
the stupidest heraldic Coats-of-arms; military Banners everywhere; and
generally all national or other sectarian Costumes and Customs: they
have no intrinsic, necessary divineness, or even worth; but have
acquired an extrinsic one. Nevertheless through all these there glimmers
something of a Divine Idea; as through military Banners themselves, the
Divine Idea of Duty, of heroic Daring; in some instances of Freedom, of
Right. Nay the highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the
Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.
"Another matter it is, however, when your Symbol has intrinsic meaning,
and is of itself _fit_ that men should unite round it. Let but the
Godlike manifest itself to Sense, let but Eternity look, more or less
visibly, through the Time-Figure (_Zeitbild_)! Then is it fit that men
unite there; and worship together before such Symbol; and so from day to
day, and from age to age, superadd to it new divineness.
"Of this latter sort are all true Works of Art: in them (if thou know a
Work of Art from a Daub of Artifice) wilt thou discern Eternity looking
through Time; the Godlike rendered visible. Here too may an extrinsic
value gradually superadd itself: thus certain _Iliads_, and the like,
have, in three thousand years, attained quite new significance. But
nobler than all in this kind are the Lives of heroic god-inspired Men;
for what other Work of Art is so divine? In Death too, in the Death of
the Just, as the last perfection of a Work of Art, may we not discern
symbolic meaning? In that divinely transfigured Sleep, as of Victory,
resting over the beloved face which now knows thee no more, read (if
thou canst for tears) the confluence of Time with Eternity, and some
gleam of the latter peering through.
"Highest of all Symbols are those wherein the Artist or Poet has risen
into Prophet, and all men can recognize a present God, and worship the
Same: I mean religious Symbols. Various enough have been such religious
Symbols, what we call _Religions_; as men stood in this stage of culture
or the other, and could worse or better body forth the Godlike: some
Symbols with a transient intrinsic worth; many with only an extrinsic.
If thou ask to what height man has carried it in this manner, look
on our divinest Symbol: on Jesus of Nazareth, and his Life, and his
Biography, and what followed therefrom. Higher has the human Thought
not yet reached: this is Christianity and Christendom; a Symbol of quite
perennial, infinite character; whose significance will ever demand to be
anew inquired into, and anew made manifest.
"But, on the whole, as Time adds much to the sacredness of Symbols, so
likewise in his progress he at length defaces, or even desecrates them;
and Symbols, like all terrestrial Garments, wax old. Homer's Epos has
not ceased to be true; yet it is no longer our Epos, but shines in the
distance, if clearer and clearer, yet also smaller and smaller, like
a receding Star. It needs a scientific telescope, it needs to be
reinterpreted and artificially brought near us, before we can so much as
know that it _was_ a Sun. So likewise a day comes when the Runic
Thor, with his Eddas, must withdraw into dimness; and many an African
Mumbo-Jumbo and Indian Pawaw be utterly abolished. For all things, even
Celestial Luminaries, much more atmospheric meteors, have their rise,
their culmination, their decline.
"Small is this which thou tellest me, that the Royal Sceptre is but
a piece of gilt wood; that the Pyx has become a most foolish box, and
truly, as Ancient Pistol thought, 'of little price.' A right Conjurer
might I name thee, couldst thou conjure back into these wooden tools the
divine virtue they once held.
"Of this thing, however, be certain: wouldst thou plant for Eternity,
then plant into the deep infinite faculties of man, his Fantasy and
Heart; wouldst thou plant for Year and Day, then plant into his shallow
superficial faculties, his Self-love and Arithmetical Understanding,
what will grow there. A Hierarch, therefore, and Pontiff of the World
will we call him, the Poet and inspired Maker; who, Prometheus-like, can
shape new Symbols, and bring new Fire from Heaven to fix it there. Such
too will not always be wanting; neither perhaps now are. Meanwhile, as
the average of matters goes, we account him Legislator and wise who can
so much as tell when a Symbol has grown old, and gently remove it.
"When, as the last English Coronation [*] I was preparing," concludes this
wonderful Professor, "I read in their Newspapers that the 'Champion of
England,' he who has to offer battle to the Universe for his new King,
had brought it so far that he could now 'mount his horse with little
assistance,' I said to myself: Here also we have a Symbol well-nigh
superannuated. Alas, move whithersoever you may, are not the tatters
and rags of superannuated worn-out Symbols (in this Ragfair of a World)
dropping off everywhere, to hoodwink, to halter, to tether you; nay, if
you shake them not aside, threatening to accumulate, and perhaps produce
suffocation?"
* That of George IV.--ED.