SYMBOLS.
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.