TOPICS OF THE DAY.
PUBLIC FESTIVITIES : THE DAY AFTER.
THE Royal City show is over ; the decorations and barriers along " the line of the procession" have dropped off; the stream of business, diked out for the day, has resumed its course , and folks are prone to moralize on the " vanity and vexation of spirit." The moralizing is very commonplace, as the censors always allow when the first Black-Monday kind of gloom has passed away ; and it is mixed up with a good deal that is false : but still it recurs. Now, there is not apt to be that spontaneous and uniform recurrence of what is merely false ; and therefore we may guess that there is also some truth in these retrospective strictures after a feast. The pageant over, you are let behind the scenes : the gewgaw, the tinliel and trumpery, and broken scraps, present an aspect of comfortless disorder—raise the melancholy reflection that the glories of life are all transitory, and that the enjoyment of the hour only harbingers decay. The smooth gravel pathway, specially laid down for the pageant, becomes on the morrow detestable mud, burdening the pa- tience with a longing for the scavenger. The splendour was super- ficial; now we see within, and find all "hollow," mere "dust and ashes." So moralizes the uneasy and philosophical clerk, going back after the smiling idleness of the 28th to the sombre industry of the 29th. Yet it may be doubted whether his "sober reality" is more real than the pageant. " Within " and " without " are human terms, having reference only to human eyes ; and the external show is as real as the internal. Beauty is everywhere, if we do but look close enough. The lovely pearl of the nautilus, the varied rainbow-tints that deck the shells of the "creatures in the sea's entrall," are hidden, not only by the sounding sea that presses the bed upon which they lie, but by the slimy mantles of their own that revolt our sense ; and those unspeakable beauties, existing in num- ber infinite, are not meant to be seen by mortal—their detection is by accident. The very mud to which the royal path has turned is part of" the great globe itself "—the very substance of a planet— of a satellite on one of those suns that blaze in the firmament : it is, in the estimation of any philosophy, a more intimate part of something grander than kings—of the globe which has lived longer than the human race—of that which is among the resplendent deni- zens of the ether. Look closely into the squalidest part of this refuse after the show, and you see that it is as splendid as the gayest ; that which we conventionally call "under the surface " is as open to the universe as the top of St. Paul's is; that which we call " real," in contradistinction to the show, as much eludes any final test of reality. You can scarcely define the difference between the "show " and the "reality." We have no more reason to think that we are independent of our senses, that we have come to some bare and pleasureless " reality," on the 29th than on the 28th. The difference is in our humour : we are gay on the 28th, and that which we then see we call gay ; we are dull on the 29th, and that which we see is dull : as in our moodiness we are sceptical of what has gone, we begin to think that that was unreal; and it follows of course that what we now see, its opposite, is the "real." So we say. But what is " real " ? Does it mean something in its nature so all- sufficing that it makes its essence known to us, needing no search to find out its worth, leaving no room for the assumption of ficti- tious attributes? If so, what on earth is real ; since every step of inquiry rewards diligence with the correction of false notions, the disclosure of new powers and beauties, the promise of fresh de- lights if the pursuit of investigation be continued ? Of what have we mastered the knowledge so completely that its "reality" is known to us ?
Yet, we say, the reflection comes back after every feast, and therefore must have some genuine cause inherent in such occa- sions. It may arise in part from the fact, that while on the 28th (to stick to the present instance) the spectator was betrayed into a merely observant and unreflecting state of mind, and at the same time into a state so pleasant as to involve the desire for its continuance, on the 29th he is deprived of the exciting cause of observation, tossed from the objective to the subjective state of mind, from the perceptive to the sceptical; and at the same time reminded that these effeminate pleasures—effeminate in the sense that they are passive, not active—are transitory. He suc- cumbs to the jarring dislocation of ideas ; fatigue succeeds excite-
ment; and he relieves his ill-humour by moralizing. Let his mind be roused, and again it finds an object ; the refuse of the feast may
itself become a pageant ; the renewed trudge of tradesmen city- ward, where late the monarchy of England made its path, recalls the resistless progress of England—its peaceful rule, and its illi- mitable path of commerce—that mighty pageant which daily "puts a girdle round the globe," with all mankind for spectators. That the 28th has passed and the 29th has come, one striking act per- formed, reminds him of a march more stately than that of yester- day—the march of history—of the volume in which that was but a sentence. That the day has died, reminds him that decay is the prelude of birth—a vast succession, in which the child ever sur- passes the parent. Thus he remembers, that it is only his lazy and imperfect sense which viewed the pageant of the 28th as finer than the quiet which followed ; for the unseen majesties of the 29th exhaust the imagination to trace them.
It is in part the morbid reaction of over-excitement which makes us discontented after the play. But still it is not always so: there
are some feasts and holydays so pregnant of delight, that even sitter they are gone they suffice to the memory ; the "thing of beauty"
is truly "a joy for ever." In what consists the difference between these two kinds of pleasure ? Perhaps it arises, in the case of those which we look back upon grudgingly, from some discordance between the apparent causes and the expected effects. Where vast cost, for instance, has been bestowed, we expect a proportionate return of delight ; and we do not always wait to ask whether our means have been skilfully laid out. Most people remember some "delightful party," the memory of which survives unfadingly ; and usually it will be found that the delightfulness lay in some inci- dents which made the result exceed the expectation—some com- bination of chances which made everybody pleasant—the talk all witty, the dancing gay, the music in tune, the friendships strength- ened and multiplied; and the satisfaction is often in an inverse ratio to the pounds sterling and preparatory trouble expended. If a mere trifle of money and the trouble of going to the place of meeting produced such full and abiding delight, calculates the holy- day-maker on the eve of some high day, what ought not the hun- dreds of thousands sterling, the thousands upon thousands of dress- makers, cooks, carpenters, policemen, soldiers, cabinet ministers, courtiers—and indeed a perfectly national store of resources—to produce ? The 29th comes ; nothing remains but the mud and the hereditary "Sir" before Alderman MAGNAY'S name ; and the festive financier asks what has been got for the cost ? Perhaps, if the countless thousands sterling had been laid out in some way different from a mere coach-show, with a more cunning skill in popular wsthetics, the delight and admiration would have been more lasting, the commemoration more memorable. Possibly. But the multitude has tastes so various and conflicting, that it is impossible to gratify all ; a common taste is therefore selected for gratification, necessarily low in the scale ; but as it is the best that can be under the circumstances, it is vulgarly held to be absolutely the best, and its real insufficiency is set down vaguely to the "vanity" of all worldly matters. When monarchs and statesmen and mer- chants conspire to vie with the stage-shows of Astley's amphi- theatre, they betray the dignity of the mighty powers which they represent : but, as we have no pathway running from house to house in the upper stories where each man holds the real abode of his heart and mind, so they necessarily go down to the level of the street, where all have common footing. Like a god descending upon earth, the giant power that pervades the globe is obliged to assume a baser shape to become visible to the grosser sense of the multitude. The common understanding and taste must be better trained before more exalted appeals can be made to them at large; and when that is the case, we may have commemorations more worthily typifying what is commemorated, more full in delight, more pregnant with immortal thoughts.
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