DEPRESSIVE CEREMONIALS.
THE Americans have succeeded in doing what we should have thought impossible,—they have spread the impres- sion of a funeral service at one and the same indivisible point of time throughout a continent. Mr. Huntington, the great builder and manager of American South-Western railways, died, and as he was very popular throughout his lines, those who had been in his employ wished to pay to his memory some special and striking honour. With the half-poetic, half- practical feeling which often distinguishes American acts, they arranged that at the moment When in New York the body of their late chief was carried from the church to the grave the trains upon the many systems of lines which he had controlled should as by some common and self-derived impulse arrest their movement. As the coffin was lifted, through thousands of miles of line covering the whole distance from the Atlantic to the Pacific every train stopped. The communication of a continent was arrested as by some super- natural command. Not a wheel turned until the body had been lowered, when, as if released by some impulse common to all, communication and ordinary life were resumed. That was a really fine idea finely carried out. The dead man had created the lines, had, as it were, given them breath, and when life stopped with him so, as in sympathy, it momently did with them. The ceremony, it is said, was really felt through the whole Huntington system of railways, and its impressiveness fully bears out the theory we have often endeavoured to defend,—that impressiveness can always be produced by an immense repetition at the same moment of the same act, however simple. Let but half a million of men turn their faces at the same moment in the same direction, and the spectator gains for that moment an impression which is almost awful in its distinctness, an impression which neither years nor events will ever quite efface. That is the point at which almost all our great ceremonies fail. There should always be in them some one moment, settled before- hand by tradition, or by agreement, or by command, at which all alike should do something, it hardly matters what, in precisely the same way. Nothing produces such a thrill, and that thrill is the secret of impressiveness. Let any one who doubts this take his stand in a church where it is the custom for all to bow simultaneously at the name of Christ, and he will at once obtain conviction. The action may be mechanical, and therefore as part of Christian worship objectionable, but of its impressiveness to the beholder there can be no sort of question. He is thrilled, if those who bow are not. The same thing was noticed in the Senate Hall of Rome the other day, when, as the King referred to his mother and his wife, the whole vast assemblage, as by a common impulse, rose and bowed to the ladies named. Every reporter instantly fixed on those bows as features in the ceremonial which it was impossible to forget, any more than any one of all who were present ever forgot the sudden spontaneous and simultaneous thrusting forward of hands when the Deputies of France assembled to make a Revolution took the " Oath of the Tennis Court."
It is in these qualities of simultaneousness and similarity that impressiveness is to be sought, rather than in elaboration. Suppose a city wishes after some death which is really felt as a universal loss to express the intensity of its grief. Let every man appear at the same moment in the streets with a veiled or, rather, a shawled face, and the sight would arouse an emotion the impression of which those who saw it would carry to their graves. That will never be done, and we mention its possibility, not as recom- mending it, but only to make our meaning clear. Or let all householders during one and the same hour hang out of each window a piece of black drapery, no matter what, and it would seem for that hour as if the city were a living entity, awful in its vastness, and steeped in melancholy gloom. The impression in a city like London would be almost terrible, one that every one would feel to be nearly unbearable for any protracted period. If in the same hour all traffic ceased, and all street noises, the total effect would be one of almost un- earthly solemnity. We do manage something of the kind on days of rejoicing for a victory, the custom of suddenly ex- hibiting flags having pretty well established itself. But one half of its effect is lost by the absence of simultaneousness, which would be obtained at once if custom prescribed that the flags should all appear at one and the same hour, or that every man who rejoiced should, when in the street by day- light, be carrying a flower. We lose by small delays and pre- mature anticipations half the effect of our vast mass, and also something else, the electric thrill which runs through a multi- tude whenever under any impulse whatever its components all perform the same visible and expected act. What that thrill is remains still unexplained, but its occurrence must be a certainty to any one who has ever seen a really great multitude suddenly stand bareheaded.
We incline to believe that as time goes on the inclination to appreciate and develop the impressiveness of ceremonial► will increase. It certainly does in America, and it will do so here also. We all imagine that we are growing realistic, but the wish to be excited, startled, surprised, if only there is no fear in the emotion, remains as strong as ever. The spread of education enables the multitude to see the joyous or sad meaning of events much more quickly, while at the same time there is a decrease in the shyness, the fear of not being understood, which formerly arrested demonstration. Nobody is ashamed now to rejoice publicly in victory or sorrow over loss, and by and by the desire to make expressions of general feeling more effective will induce men to devise methods which, once accepted, will act like commands, and, so to speak, discipline the multitude. They will learn to act on a signal, as Mr. Huntington's railwaymen had been trained to do, and the moment that faculty is acquired the power of making ceremonial impressive is acquired with it. You might even produce silence in London, silence in flashes, when it would seem to every one with hearing as if the heart of the world had stopped to listen, breathless, to some great message. The organisation of great ceremonials, coronations, triumphs, great funerals, has been studied for ages, and to make them splendid much thought is indispensable, but to secure impressiveness only one thing is needful: that all should do simultaneously some one thing. No procession that could march through the Strand would produce the electric shock that would be felt if every man in that great street at the same moment stopped and lifted his hat in air.
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