CHAPTER III.

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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 Paperbags or the Printed Volume) what little seems logical and practical, and cunningly arrange it into such degree of coherence as it will By way of proem, take the following not injudicious

assume.

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 per'plexities, 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.

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'Bees will not work except in darkness; Thought will not work 'except in Silence: neither will Virtue work except in Secrecy. 'Let not thy right hand know what thy left hand doeth! Neither 'shalt thou prate even to thy own heart of "those secrets known to all." Is not Shame the soil of all Virtue, of all good man'ners, 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 6 we view the fair clustering flowers that over-wreathe, for exam'ple, the Marriage-bower, and encircle man's life with the fra'grance and hues of Heaven, what hand will not smite the foul 'plunderer that grubs them up by the roots, and, with grinning, 'grunting satisfaction, shews us the dung they flourish in! Men เ speak much of the Printing Press with its Newspapers: du Him'mel! what are these to Clothes and the Tailor's Goose?"

of

'Of kin to the so incalculable influences of Concealment, and 'connected with still greater things, is the wondrous agency Symbols. In a Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: 'here, therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes 'a doubled 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 embodi'ment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to 'blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, at'tainable there. By Symbols, accordingly, is man guided and 'commanded, made happy, made wretched. He everywhere finds

'himself encompassed with Symbols, recognised as such or not ' recognised: 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 embodi'ment 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 has man '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 hagridden, be'witched; the next, priestridden, befooled; in all ages, bedevil'led. 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 in'deed grind him to pieces; but cannot he fathom the Doctrine of Motives, and cunningly compute these, and mechanise 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 coun'try, in which time, was it hitherto that man's history, or the his'tory of any man, went on by calculated or calculable "Motives ?" 'What make ye of your Christianities, and Chivalries, and Re'formations, and Marseillese 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.'

us;

'Yes, Friends,' elsewhere observes the Professor, 'not our Lo'gical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over 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 Fan'tasy; the vessel it drinks out of? Ever in the dullest exist'ence, 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 colours with its own hues 'our little islet of Time. The Understanding is indeed thy win'dow, too clear thou canst not make it; but Fantasy is thy eye, 'with its colour-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 be 'ing those ages, moreover, are accounted the noblest which can 'the best recognise symbolical worth, and prize it the highest. For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dim'mer 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 sig 'nificance these had none: only extrinsic; as the accidental Stan'dards of multitudes more or less sacredly uniting together; in 'which union itself, as above noted, there is ever something mys'tical 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 secta'rian 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 Di'vine 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 6 an accidental extrinsic one.

'Another matter it is, however, when your Symbol has intrin'sic 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, su'peradd 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 mean'ing? 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.

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Highest of all Symbols are those wherein the Artist or Poet 'has risen into Prophet, and all men can recognise a present God, and worship the same: I mean religious Symbols. Various 'enough have been such religious Symbols, what we call Reli'gions; 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,