At any rate, one can remark that no Nation will throw-by its work, and deliberately go out to make a scene, without meaning something thereby.  For indeed no scenic individual, with knavish hypocritical views, will take the trouble to soliloquise a scene:  and now consider, is not a scenic Nation placed precisely in that predicament of soliloquising; for its own behoof alone; to solace its own sensibilities, maudlin or other?—­Yet in this respect, of readiness for scenes, the difference of Nations, as of men, is very great.  If our Saxon-Puritanic friends, for example, swore and signed their National Covenant, without discharge of gunpowder, or the beating of any drum, in a dingy Covenant-Close of the Edinburgh High-street, in a mean room, where men now drink mean liquor, it was consistent with their ways so to swear it.  Our Gallic-Encyclopedic friends, again, must have a Champ-de-Mars, seen of all the world, or universe; and such a Scenic Exhibition, to which the Coliseum Amphitheatre was but a stroller’s barn, as this old Globe of ours had never or hardly ever beheld.  Which method also we reckon natural, then and there.  Nor perhaps was the respective keeping of these two Oaths far out of due proportion to such respective display in taking them:  inverse proportion, namely.  For the theatricality of a People goes in a compound-ratio:  ratio indeed of their trustfulness, sociability, fervency; but then also of their excitability, of their porosity, not continent; or say, of their explosiveness, hot-flashing, but which does not last.

How true also, once more, is it that no man or Nation of men, conscious of doing a great thing, was ever, in that thing, doing other than a small one!  O Champ-de-Mars Federation, with three hundred drummers, twelve hundred wind-musicians, and artillery planted on height after height to boom the tidings of it all over France, in few minutes!  Could no Atheist-Naigeon contrive to discern, eighteen centuries off, those Thirteen most poor mean-dressed men, at frugal Supper, in a mean Jewish dwelling, with no symbol but hearts god-initiated into the ’Divine depth of Sorrow,’ and a Do this in remembrance of me;—­and so cease that small difficult crowing of his, if he were not doomed to it?

Chapter 2.1.X.

Mankind.

Pardonable are human theatricalities; nay perhaps touching, like the passionate utterance of a tongue which with sincerity stammers; of a head which with insincerity babbles,—­having gone distracted.  Yet, in comparison with unpremeditated outbursts of Nature, such as an Insurrection of Women, how foisonless, unedifying, undelightful; like small ale palled, like an effervescence that has effervesced!  Such scenes, coming of forethought, were they world-great, and never so cunningly devised, are at bottom mainly pasteboard and paint.  But the others are original; emitted from the great everliving heart of Nature herself: