On this page
-
Text (1)
-
Untitled Article
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
-
-
Transcript
-
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.
Untitled Article
gatherings , at Jerusalem , from all the country , at Pascal and Pentecost , would . .. be dead forms , and want the vitality of the antique enthusiasm . And so is the Catholic religion outworn in Europe . Its spell is broken ; much more by commerce , than by
Protestantism . Hut we are hastening towards another stage . It is only for a time that the artisan is less poetical than the savage . With the progress of intelligence , he must become much more so . He already begins to feel the beauty of a statue or a painting which his great-great-grandfather would have worshipped , and which his grandfather would have kicked into a bonfire , in honour , as
the squire told him , of the house of Hanover ; shouting , ' Down with the Pope and the Pretender ; liberty and property for ever . ' As soon as we get beyond the time—and we are getting beyond it—when the rich man gives enormous sums for a work of art , simply because thereby it becomes his property ; and the poor
man takes up a paving-stone to have a shy at it , because it is not his property ; we shall have advanced a step towards a capacity for national sociality . We have not forgotten the ' picture-fuddles * of the mechanics . Moreover , they have no bad notions of processions . They have the taste , which also thrives in America , for this species of exhibition . It is true that ,, in the best we have
witnessed , indeed the only good ones , there was a deeper and ulterior purpose . They were meant to produce the perception , not of poetry , but of power . And that made the poetry . Who that witnessed will ever forget the procession of the trades' unions to petition for the remission of the sentence on the Dorchester
convicts ? There was the true feeling in that procession . There were no mere ornaments ; no flaring and flaunting banners ; the simplest insignia just served to mark and marshal the divisions . There were no petty arrangements io enhance the show and the effect . As H . M . Williams said of the Champ de Mars , ' The people , sure , the people were the sight / Their banner was the
huge roll of their petition . Their only music was the ceaseless tramp , tramp , with which their close ranks came on , * regular as rolling water / one line of living wave after another , like the billows when a strong steady breeze is blowing shoreward ; and in every face that one fixed purpose which showed that the stem pleasure of duty was the animating spirit of this multitudinous , but undivided uody . The loungers of the club-houses , who turned out to laugh , looked on with a sobered demeanour , which showed
there was a power in the passing scene to reach even the atom of soul which they possessed . The portion of the people that could so marshal themselves for petitioning , when community of interest and feeling shall have identified them with the rest of the nation , will be well prepared to aid in real national celebrations . < Now universal England getteth drunk will not be the record of those festivals . The second desideratum to which we referred ia that of thd
Untitled Article
752 National Anniversaries .
-
-
Citation
-
Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1834, page 752, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2639/page/4/
-