Chapter 8

I think that where one so often makes a mistake in life is in thinking of the beautiful past as over and done with. One ought to think of it rather as existing. It can no more be lost than any other beautiful thing or fine feeling can be lost. The flower may fade, the tree may shed its leaf, the work of art may perish, the great poem may be forgotten; the lovely ancient building, with all the grace of tradition and memory, all the sweet mellowing of outline and detail, may be dismantled or restored; yet the beauty is not in the passing form, but in the spirit that expresses itself in the form on the one hand--the great, subtle, tender, powerful spirit that is for ever working and creating and producing--and, on the other hand, it lies no less in the desire and worship that thrills and beats, deep in the spirit, leaning out like one who gazes upon the sunset from the window of a tower, listening to the appeal of beauty, looking out for it, welcoming it, thirsting for it. Both these powers are there, the spirit that calls and the spirit that answers the call. The mistake we make is to anchor ourselves timidly and persistently to one set of beautiful forms, and if they are destroyed, to feel that the world is made desolate for us. We are apt to think that there is a sort of loyalty about this, and that an ineffectual repining for the beautiful thing that has passed proves the intensity of our regard and love. It is not so; we might as well repine if we have loved a child, to find it growing up to strength and manhood. Because we have loved the rosebud, we need not despise the rose, and when the child loses its tender charm, when the rose drops her loosened petals on the grass, our love is a mere sentiment, an aesthetic appreciation, if we can only regret what is past. It is the fragrant charm, the echoing harmony of the spirit that matters; and if the charm passes out of our ken, if the song dies upon the air, if the sunset hue fades, it is all there none the less, both the beauty and the love we bore it. I do not mean that the conquest is an easy one, because our perceptions are so narrow and so finite that when the sweet sound or the delicate light passes out of our horizon, it is hard to feel that it is not dead. But we ought, I am sure, to remind ourselves more constantly that both the quality of beauty itself and the desirous love that it evokes are the unchangeable things; and that though they shift and fuse, ebb and flow, they are assuredly there. "When they persecute you in one city, flee into another," said the Saviour of men in a dim allegory. It is true of all things; and the secret is to realise that we have no continuing city. Of course there sometimes fall shattering blows upon us, when someone who was half the world to us, on whom we have leant and depended, whose mind and heart have cast a glow of hope and comfort upon every detail of life, steps past the veil into the unseen. Then comes the darkest hour of struggling bewilderment; but even then we make a miserable mistake, if we withdraw into the silence of our own hearts and refuse to be comforted, priding ourselves, it may be, upon the abiding faithfulness of our love. But to yield to that is treachery; and then, most of all, we ought to stretch out our hands to all about us and welcome every gift of love. It is impossible not to suffer, yet we are perhaps but tenderly punished for having loved the image better than the thing it signified. We are punished because our idolising love has rested content with the form that it has borne, and has not gone further and deeper into the love which it typified.

What we have to beware of is a timid and cautious loitering in the little experience we have ourselves selected, in the little garden we have fenced off from the plain and the wood. And thus the old house that I loved in my pleasant youth, the good days that I spent there year by year, are an earnest of the tender care that surrounds me. I will not regard them as past and gone; I will rather regard them as the slow sweet prelude of the great symphony; if I am now tossed upon the melancholy and broken waves of some vehement scherzo of life, the subject is but working itself out, and I will strive to apprehend it even here. There are other movements that await me, as wonderful, as sweet.

"And now that it is all over," said an old, wearied, and dying statesman, after a day of sad farewells, "it is not so bad after all." The terror, the disquietude, is not in the thing suffered, but in our own faithless hearts. But if we look back at the past and see how portion after portion has become dear and beautiful, can we not look forward with a more steadfast tranquillity and believe that the love and beauty are all there waiting for us, though the old light seems to have been withdrawn?

XVII

What a strange, illusory power memory has in dealing with the past, of creating a scene and an emotion that not only never existed, but that could not possibly ever have existed. When I look back to my own commonplace, ordinary, straightforward boyhood, wrapped up in tiny ambitions, vexed with trivial cares, full of trifling events, with a constant sense of small dissatisfaction, I am amazed at the colours with which memory tints the scene. She selects a few golden hours, scenes of peculiar and instantaneous radiance, when the old towers and trees were touched with a fine sunshine, when the sky was unclouded, the heart light, and when one lived for a moment in a sense of some romance of ambition or friendship; and she bids one believe that all one's boyhood was thus bright and goodly, although one knows in one's heart that the texture of it was often mean, pitiful, and selfish; though reason at the same time overwhelms one with reproach and shame for not having made a brighter and braver thing of it, when all the conditions were so favourable.

It is so too with pathos--that pathos which centres so firmly upon the smallest details, and neglects the larger sadnesses. I had so curious an instance of this the other day that I cannot refrain from telling it, because I suppose it can hardly ever have happened to anyone before.

I have an old friend who lives by himself in London, where I sometimes visit him. He is a studious, unmethodical, untidy man. His rooms are dusty and neglected, and he is quite unaware of his surroundings. By his favourite arm-chair stands a table covered with papers, books, cigar-boxes, paper-knives, pencils, in horrible confusion; a condition of things which causes him great discomfort and frequent loss of time. I have often exhorted him to sort the mess; he has always smilingly undertaken to do so, but has never succeeded.

A few weeks ago I called to see him; the servant who let me in, whose face was new to me, looked very grave; and when I asked if my friend was in, turned pale and said: "I suppose you do not know what has happened, sir--Mr. A---- died yesterday at Brighton. I think that Mr. B----" (naming the owner of the house, who lets lodgings) "can tell you all about it--will you go upstairs? I will tell him you are here."

I went up: the sun was streaming into the room, with its well-known furniture and pictures, shabby and yet somehow home-like. There was the familiar table, with all its litter. I was stunned with the news, unable to realise it; and the sight of the table, with all the customary details in the old disorder, fairly unmanned me; so it was all over and done with, and my friend was gone without a word or sign.

I heard rapid steps along the passage; Mr. B----, the owner of the house, entered with an apologetic smile. "I am afraid that there has been a mistake, sir," he said. "Mr. A---- is not dead, as the servant informed you; it is the gentleman who lives on the floor above, who has been an invalid for some time, who is dead; the servant is new to the place, and has made a confusion; we only had a wire a few minutes ago. Mr. A---- is perfectly well, and will be in in a few minutes if you will wait"

I waited, in a strange revulsion of spirit; but the most singular thing is that the crowded table, which had been a few minutes before the most pathetic thing in the world, had become by the time that A---- entered smiling, as irritating and annoying as ever; changed from the poor table where his earthly litter had accumulated, which he could touch no more for ever, into the table which he ought to have put straight long ago and should be ashamed of leaving in so vile a condition.

XVIII

I have had a night of strange and terror-haunted dreams. Yesterday I was forced to work at full speed, feverishly and furiously for a great many hours, at a piece of work that admitted of no delay. By the evening I was considerably exhausted, yet the work was not done. I slept for an hour, and then settled down again and worked very late in the night, until it was finished. Such a strain cannot be borne with impunity, and I never do such a thing except under pressure of absolute necessity. I suppose that I contrived to inflame some delicate tissue of the brain, as the result was a series of intensely vivid dreams, with a strange quality of horror about them. It was not so much that the incidents themselves were of a dreadful type, but I was overshadowed by a deep boding, a dull ache of the mind, which charged everything that I saw with a sense of fortuitous dismay. I woke in that painful mood in which the mind is filled with a formless dread; and the sensation has hung about me, more or less, all day.

What a strange phenomenon it is that the sick mind should be able thus to paint its diseased fancies in the dark, and then to be dismayed at its own creations. In one of my dreams, for instance, I seemed to wander in the bare and silent corridors of a great house. I passed a small and sinister door, and was impelled to open it. I found myself in a large oak-panelled room, with small barred windows admitting a sickly light. The floor was paved with stone; and in the centre, built into the pavement, stood a large block of basalt, black and smooth, which was roughly carved into the semblance of a gigantic human head. I stared at this for a long time, and then swiftly withdrew, overcome with horror which I could not translate into words. All that I seemed to know was that some kind of shocking rites were here celebrated: I did not know what they were, and there were no signs of anything; no instruments of death, no trace of slaughter; yet for all that I knew that the place stood for some evil mystery, and the very walls and floor seemed soaked with fear and pain.

That is the inexplicable part of dreams, that one should invent incidents and scenes of every kind, with no sense of invention or creation, with no feeling that one is able to control what one appears to hear or see; and then that in some other part of one's mind, one should be moved and stirred by the appropriate emotions awakened by word or sight. In waking hours one can be stirred, amused, grieved by the exercise of one's imagination, but one is aware that it is imagination, and one does not lose the sense of responsibility, the consciousness of creation.

It is this sensation, that dreams arise from some power or influence exterior to oneself, which them the significance which they used to possess, and indeed still possess, for the unreasoning mind. They seem communications from some other sphere of life, experiences external to oneself, messages from some hidden agency. When they correspond, as by coincidence they are almost bound on occasions to do, with some unforeseen and unexpected event that follows them, it is very difficult for unphilosophical minds not to believe that they are visions sent from some power that can foresee the future. It would be strange if dreams, trafficking as they do with such wide and various experiences, did not occasionally seem to be related to events of the following day, however little anticipated those events may be; but no theory of dreams would be satisfactory or scientific which did not take account of the vast number of occasions on which they do not in the least correspond with what followed in the day. The natural temper of man is so pre-eminently unscientific that a single occasion on which a dream does seem to correspond in a curious manner with subsequent events outweighs a thousand occasions on which no such correspondence is traceable. Yet nothing but a long series of premonitory dreams could suffice for the basis of a scientific theory.

The main interest of dreams to myself is that they serve to show the essential texture of the mind. In waking hours I am conscious of many natural phenomena which make a strong impression on my mind; but my dreaming mind makes, it seems, a whimsical selection among these incidents, and discards some, while it makes a liberal use of others. For instance, in real life, the sight of a beautiful sunset is a common experience, and stirs in me the most profound emotion; yet I have never seen a sunset in dreams. All my dreams are enacted in a pale and clear light of which the source is never visible. I have never seen sun, moon, or star in a dream. Again, to step into a farther region, I am a good deal occupied in real life by ethical considerations; but in dreams I have absolutely no sense of morality. I am afraid, in my dreams, of the consequences of my acts; but I commit a murder or a theft in a dream without the least scruple of conscience.

Whether this proves that my morality, my conscience, in real life, is a purely conventional thing, acquired by habit, I do not know; it would appear to be so. Again, some of my most habitual actions in real life are never repeated in dreams; I have for many years devoted much time and energy to literary work in real life, but in dreams I have never written anything; though I have heard poems repeated or read from books which are purely imaginary, and I have even read my own compositions aloud from what appeared in dreams to be a previously written manuscript; but I am never conscious, in dreams, of ever having put pen to paper for any purpose whatever, even to write a letter. Yet, again, it is not as though all the materials were drawn from a time before I had begun to write; because sometimes dreams will repeat, or interweave into their texture, quite recent experiences.

It appears to me as though the only part of the brain that is active in dreams is the spectatorial and dramatic part; and even so it is quite beyond me to solve the problem of how it comes about that my visualising faculty in dreams can bring upon the stage, as it often does, some personage who is perfectly well known to me in real life, and cause him to behave in so unaccountable and grotesque a fashion that I appear to be entirely bewildered and even shocked by the occurrence. For instance, I dreamt the other night that I went to see a high ecclesiastical dignitary, whom I have known for many years, whom I knew in my dream to have been undergoing a rest-cure, though the person in question has never to my knowledge undergone any such experience. I was greatly surprised and even distressed when he entered the room arrayed in a short jacket, with an Eton collar, carrying some childish toys, and saying, "I am completely rejuvenated." I was not in the least amused by this at the time, but only lost in wonder as to how I could communicate to him that it would be a great misfortune if he went back to his dignified post in such a guise and with such avocations as his toys implied.

The whole thing is an insoluble mystery. I often wish that some scientific person would investigate the matter in a strictly rational spirit; though it is certainly difficult to see in what directions such investigations could be fruitful. Still it seems to me strange and unsatisfactory that so little should be known about the origin and nature of so universal a phenomenon.

I have had sometimes dreams of a solemnity and beauty that appear to transcend my powers of imagination. I have seen landscapes in dreams of a kind that I have never seen in real life; I have held long, intimate, and tender conversations with persons long since dead, which I might, if I were inclined, consider to be real contact with disembodied spirits, did I not also sometimes hold trivial, absurd, and even painful intercourse, of an entirely uncharacteristic kind, with the same people, intercourse which all sense of affection and reverence would lead me unhesitatingly to regard as purely imaginary. The strangest thing in such dreams is that the memory is wholly at fault, because, though one is not conscious that the people have died long ago, the mind is apt to wrestle with the wonder as to why one has seen so little of them of recent years. The memory seems to be perfectly aware that one has not seen much of them of late, but the effort to recall the fact that they are dead, even when their deaths have been some of the most vivid and grievous experiences of one's life, seems to be quite beyond its power.

One of the most curious facts of all is this. I sometimes have had extremely affectionate and confidential interviews with people in dreams whom I have not known well--so vivid, indeed, that the dream interview has proved a real step in a friendship, because when, as has more than once occurred, I have met the same people in real life while the dream is still fresh in my mind, I have met them with a sense of confidential relations that has made it easier for me to advance in intimacy and to take a certain sympathy for granted. I have one particular friend in mind whose friendship I can honestly say I gained in a dream.

On the other hand, I have occasionally had in a dream so painful and unsatisfactory an interview with a friend, rousing in my mind such anger and resentment, that it has proved a cloud over my acquaintance. It is not that on awaking I believe in the reality of the experience; but it seems to have given a real shock to a delicate sympathy, so that there has been an actual difficulty on meeting the friend upon the same terms as formerly, even though one may relate the dream incident and laugh over it with him.

These are indubitably very mysterious experiences; and I cannot say that I think that they are explicable upon any ordinary hypothesis; that one should thus create a sense of sympathy or misunderstanding by the exercise of involuntary imagination which should have a real power to affect one's relations with a person--here I feel myself on the threshold of a very deep mystery indeed.

XIX

It is generally taken for granted nowadays by fervent educationalists that the important thing to encourage in boys is keenness in every department of school life. As a matter of fact, the keenness which is as a rule most developed in the public school product is keenness about athletic exercises. In the intellectual region, a boy is encouraged to do his duty, but there is no question that a boy who manifested an intense enthusiasm for his school work, who talked, thought, dreamed of nothing but success in examinations, would be considered rather abnormal and eccentric both by his instructors and his schoolfellows, though he would not be thought singular by any one if he did the same about his athletic prospects. What one cannot help wondering is whether this kind of enthusiasm is valuable to the character under its influence, whatever the subject of that enthusiasm may be. The normal boy, who is enthusiastic about athletics, tends to be cynical about intellectual success; and indeed even eminent men are not ashamed to encourage this by uttering, as a Lord Chancellor lately did, good-humoured gibes about the futility of dons and schoolmasters, and the uselessness of lectures. The other day a young friend of mine indulged in a glowing description, in my presence, of the methods and form of a certain short-distance runner. It was a generous panegyric, full of ingenuous admiration. He spoke of the runner's devices--I fear I cannot reproduce the technical terms--with the same thrilled and awestruck emotion which Shelley might have used, as an undergraduate, in speaking of Homer or Shakespeare. I suppose it is a desirable thing, on the whole, to be able to run faster than other people, though the practical utility of being able to do a hundred yards in a fraction of a second less than other runners is not easily demonstrable. But for all that I cannot help wondering whether such enthusiasm is not thrown away or misapplied. Perhaps the same indictment might be made against all warmly expressed admiration for human performances. The greatest philosopher or poet in the world is, after all, a very limited being. The knowledge possessed by the wisest man of science is a very minute affair when compared with what there remains in the universe to know; the finest picture ever painted compares very unfavourably with the beauty that surrounds us every minute of every day. The question, to my mind, is whether we do not do ourselves harm in the long-run by losing ourselves in frantic admiration for any human performance. The Psalmist expressed this feeling very cogently and humorously when he said that the Creator did not delight in any man's legs. The question is not whether it is not a natural temptation to limit our dreams of ultimate possibilities by the standard of human effort, but whether we ought to try and resist that temptation. When I was at a private school, I heard a boy express the most fervent and unfeigned admiration for our head-master, because he caned culprits so hard, and I suppose that one of the germs of religious feeling is the admiration of the Creator because the forces of nature make such havoc of human precautions. Perhaps it is a necessary stage through which we all must pass, the stage of admiring something that is just a little stronger and more effective than ourselves. Our admiration is based upon the fact that such strength and effectiveness is not wholly outside our own powers of attainment, but that we can hope that under favourable circumstances we may acquire equal or similar energies. But even if it is a necessary stage of progress, I am quite sure that it ought not to be an ultimate stage, and that a man ought not to spend the whole of his life admiring limited human performances, however august they may be. That is the great and essential force of religion in human lives, that it tends to set a higher standard, and to concentrate admiration upon Divine rather than upon human forces. Even when we are dealing with emotions, the same holds good. The writer of romances who lavishes the whole force of his enthusiasm upon the possibilities of human love, its depth, its loyalty, its faithfulness, is apt to lose the sense of proportion. One ought to employ one's sense of admiration for the august achievements of humanity as a species of symbolism. Our admiration for athletic prowess, for art, for literature, ought not to limit itself to these, but ought to regard them as symbols of vaster, larger, more beautiful truths.