Nothing human is so insignificant, but that, if you will give it time and room, it will become irresistible. The plays of men become their dramas; their holidays change to holy days. The representations, through which, under various names, they have repeated to themselves the glory and the tragedy of their life,—old festivals once celebrated in Egypt far back beyond the dimmest myths of human remembrance,—the mystic drama of the Eleusinia, which we have been considering in its overwhelming sorrow developed in hurried flight, and its lofty hope through triumphal pomp and the significant symbolism of resurrection,—the epos and the epic rhapsodies,—the circus and the amphitheatre,—and even the impetuous song and dance of painted savages,—all these, which at first we may pass by with a glance, have for our deeper search a meaning which we can never wholly exhaust. Let it be that they have grown from feeble beginnings, they have grown to gigantic dimensions; and not their infantile proportions, but their fullest growth is to be taken as the measure of their strength,—if, indeed, it be not wholly immeasurable.
Upon some day, seemingly by chance, but really having its antecedent in the remotest antiquity, a company of men participate in some simple act,—of sacrifice, it may be, or of amusement. Now that act will be reiterated.
"Quod semel dictum est stabilisque rerum
Terminus servet."
The subtile law of repetition, as regards the human will, is as sure in Determination as it is in Consciousness. Habit is as inevitable as Memory; and as nothing can be forgotten, but, when once known, is known forever,—so nothing is done but will be done again. Lethe and Annihilation are only myths upon the earth, which men, though suspicious of their eternal falsehood, name to themselves in moments of despair and fearful apprehension. The poppy has only a fabled virtue; but, like Persephone, we have all tasted of the pomegranate, and must ever to Hades and back again; for while death and oblivion only seem to be, remembrances and resurrections there must be, and without end. Therefore this before-mentioned act of sacrifice or amusement will be reiterated at given intervals; about it, as a centre, will be gathered all the associations of intense interest in human life; and the names connected with its origin—once human names upon the earth—will pass upon the stars, so that the nomina shall have changed to numina, and be taken upon the lips with religious awe. So it was with these old festivals,—so with all the representations of human life in stone or upon the canvas, in the fairy-tale, the romance, and the poem; at every successive repetition, at every fresh resurrection, is evolved by human faith and sympathy a deeper significance, until they become the centres of national thought and feeling, and men believe in them as in revelations from heaven; and even the oracles themselves, in respect of their inherent meaning, as also of their origin and authority, rise by the same ascending series of repeated birth,—like that at Delphi, which, at first attributed to the Earth, then to Themis, daughter of Earth and Heaven, was at last connected with the Sun and constituted one of the richest gems in Apollo's diadem of light.
In the end we shall find that the whole world organizes about its centre of Faith. Thus, under three different religious systems, Jerusalem, Delphi, and Mecca were held to be each in its turn the omphalos or navel of the world. It follows inevitably that the main movement of the world must always be joyous and hopeful. By reason of this joy it is that every religious system has its feast; and the sixth day—the day of Iacchus—is the great day of the festival. The inscription which rises above every other is "To the Saviour Gods."
We must look at history as a succession of triumphs from the beginning; and each trophy that is erected outdoes in its magnificence all that were ever erected before it. Nothing has suffered defeat, except as it has run counter to the main movement of conquest. No system of faith, therefore, can by any possibility pass away. Involved it may be in some fuller system; its material bases may be modified; its central source become more central in the human heart, and so stronger in the world and more immediate in its connection with the eternal; but the life itself of the system must live forever and grow forever.
Still it is true that in the widest growth there is the largest liability to weakness. "Thus it is," says Fouqué, "with poor, though richly endowed man. All lies within his power so long as action is at rest within him; nothing is in his power the moment action has displayed itself, even by the lifting-up of a finger on the immeasurable world." In the very extent of the empire of an Alexander, a Cæsar, or a Tamerlane, rests the possibility of its rapid dissolution. At the giddiest altitude of triumph it is that the brain grows dizziest and there is revealed the deepest chasm of possible defeat; and the conqueror,
"Having his ear full of his airy fame,"
is just then most likely to fall like Herod from his aërial pomp to the very dust. This consciousness, revealing at the highest moment of joy its utmost frailty, led the ancients to suspect the presence of some Ate or Nemesis in all human triumphs. We all remember the king who threw his signet-ring into the sea, that he might in his too happy fortunes avert this suspected presence; we remember, too, the apprehension of the Chorus in the "Seven against Thebes," looking forward from the noontide prosperity of the Theban king to some coming catastrophe.
But it is not without us that this Nemesis waits; she is but another name for the fearful possibility which lurks in every human will, of treachery to itself. And as solemnity rises to its acme in the most sensuous manifestation of the glory of life,—so in all that most fascinates and bewilders, at the very crisis of victorious exaltation, at the very height of joyous sensibility, does this mysterious power of temptation reveal her subtlest treachery; and sometimes in a single moment does she change the golden-filleted Horæ, that are our ministers, into frightful furies, which drive us back again from triumph into flight.