That standest where no wild vines dare to creep,
Men call thee old, and say that thou hast stood
A century upon my rugged steep;
Yet unto me thy life is but a day,
When I recall the things that I have seen,--
The forest monarchs that have passed away
Upon the spot where first I saw thy green;
For I am older than the age of man,
Or all the living things that crawl or creep,
Or birds of air, or creatures of the deep;
I was the first dim outline of God's plan:
Only the waters of the restless sea
And the infinite stars in heaven are old to me.
I am glad my friend Mr. Stedman knew that poem while he was making his
Anthology, for knowing it, so fine a poet and critic could not fail to
give it a place in his treasure-house of American poetry. The poet, Mr.
Clarence Hawkes, has been blind since childhood; yet he finds in nature
hints of combinations for his mental pictures. Out of the knowledge and
impressions that come to him he constructs a masterpiece which hangs
upon the walls of his thought. And into the poet's house come all the
true spirits of the world.
It was a rare poet who thought of the mountain as "the first dim outline
of God's plan." That is the real wonder of the poem, and not that a
blind man should speak so confidently of sky and sea. Our ideas of the
sky are an accumulation of touch-glimpses, literary allusions, and the
observations of others, with an emotional blending of all. My face feels
only a tiny portion of the atmosphere; but I go through continuous space
and feel the air at every point, every instant. I have been told about
the distances from our earth to the sun, to the other planets, and to
the fixed stars. I multiply a thousand times the utmost height and width
that my touch compasses, and thus I gain a deep sense of the sky's
immensity.
Move me along constantly over water, water, nothing but water, and you
give me the solitude, the vastness of ocean which fills the eye. I have
been in a little sail-boat on the sea, when the rising tide swept it
toward the shore. May I not understand the poet's figure: "The green of
spring overflows the earth like a tide"? I have felt the flame of a
candle blow and flutter in the breeze. May I not, then, say: "Myriads of
fireflies flit hither and thither in the dew-wet grass like little
fluttering tapers"?
Combine the endless space of air, the sun's warmth, the clouds that are
described to my understanding spirit, the frequent breaking through the
soil of a brook or the expanse of the wind-ruffled lake, the tactual
undulation of the hills, which I recall when I am far away from them,
the towering trees upon trees as I walk by them, the bearings that I try
to keep while others tell me the directions of the various points of the
scenery, and you will begin to feel surer of my mental landscape. The
utmost bound to which my thought will go with clearness is the horizon
of my mind. From this horizon I imagine the one which the eye marks.
Touch cannot bridge distance,--it is fit only for the contact of
surfaces,--but thought leaps the chasm. For this reason I am able to use
words descriptive of objects distant from my senses. I have felt the
rondure of the infant's tender form. I can apply this perception to the
landscape and to the far-off hills.
ANALOGIES IN SENSE PERCEPTION
X
ANALOGIES IN SENSE PERCEPTION
I HAVE not touched the outline of a star nor the glory of the moon, but
I believe that God has set two lights in mind, the greater to rule by
day and the lesser by night, and by them I know that I am able to
navigate my life-bark, as certain of reaching the haven as he who steers
by the North Star. Perhaps my sun shines not as yours. The colours that
glorify my world, the blue of the sky, the green of the fields, may not
correspond exactly with those you delight in; but they are none the less
colour to me. The sun does not shine for my physical eyes, nor does the
lightning flash, nor do the trees turn green in the spring; but they
have not therefore ceased to exist, any more than the landscape is
annihilated when you turn your back on it.
I understand how scarlet can differ from crimson because I know that the
smell of an orange is not the smell of a grape-fruit. I can also
conceive that colours have shades, and guess what shades are. In smell
and taste there are varieties not broad enough to be fundamental; so I
call them shades. There are half a dozen roses near me. They all have
the unmistakable rose scent; yet my nose tells me that they are not the
same. The American Beauty is distinct from the Jacqueminot and La
France. Odours in certain grasses fade as really to my sense as certain
colours do to yours in the sun. The freshness of a flower in my hand is
analogous to the freshness I taste in an apple newly picked. I make use
of analogies like these to enlarge my conceptions of colours. Some
analogies which I draw between qualities in surface and vibration, taste
and smell, are drawn by others between sight, hearing, and touch. This
fact encourages me to persevere, to try and bridge the gap between the
eye and the hand.
Certainly I get far enough to sympathize with the delight that my kind
feel in beauty they see and harmony they hear. This bond between
humanity and me is worth keeping, even if the idea on which I base it
prove erroneous.
Sweet, beautiful vibrations exist for my touch, even though they travel
through other substances than air to reach me. So I imagine sweet,
delightful sounds, and the artistic arrangement of them which is called
music, and I remember that they travel through the air to the ear,
conveying impressions somewhat like mine. I also know what tones are,
since they are perceptible tactually in a voice. Now, heat varies
greatly in the sun, in the fire, in hands, and in the fur of animals;
indeed, there is such a thing for me as a cold sun. So I think of the
varieties of light that touch the eye, cold and warm, vivid and dim,
soft and glaring, but always light, and I imagine their passage through
the air to an extensive sense, instead of to a narrow one like touch.
From the experience I have had with voices I guess how the eye
distinguishes shades in the midst of light. While I read the lips of a
woman whose voice is soprano, I note a low tone or a glad tone in the
midst of a high, flowing voice. When I feel my cheeks hot, I know that I
am red. I have talked so much and read so much about colours that
through no will of my own I attach meanings to them, just as all people
attach certain meanings to abstract terms like hope, idealism,
monotheism, intellect, which cannot be represented truly by visible
objects, but which are understood from analogies between immaterial
concepts and the ideas they awaken of external things. The force of
association drives me to say that white is exalted and pure, green is
exuberant, red suggests love or shame or strength. Without the colour or
its equivalent, life to me would be dark, barren, a vast blackness.
Thus through an inner law of completeness my thoughts are not permitted
to remain colourless. It strains my mind to separate colour and sound
from objects. Since my education began I have always had things
described to me with their colours and sounds by one with keen senses
and a fine feeling for the significant. Therefore I habitually think of
things as coloured and resonant. Habit accounts for part. The soul sense
accounts for another part. The brain with its five-sensed construction
asserts its right and accounts for the rest. Inclusive of all, the unity
of the world demands that colour be kept in it, whether I have
cognizance of it or not. Rather than be shut out, I take part in it by
discussing it, imagining it, happy in the happiness of those near me
who gaze at the lovely hues of the sunset or the rainbow.
My hand has its share in this multiple knowledge, but it must never be
forgotten that with the fingers I see only a very small portion of a
surface, and that I must pass my hand continually over it before my
touch grasps the whole. It is still more important, however, to remember
that my imagination is not tethered to certain points, locations, and
distances. It puts all the parts together simultaneously as if it saw or
knew instead of feeling them. Though I feel only a small part of my
horse at a time,--my horse is nervous and does not submit to manual
explorations,--yet, because I have many times felt hock, nose, hoof and
mane, I can see the steeds of Phoebus Apollo coursing the heavens.
With such a power active it is impossible that my thought should be
vague, indistinct. It must needs be potent, definite. This is really a
corollary of the philosophical truth that the real world exists only for
the mind. That is to say, I can never touch the world in its entirety;
indeed, I touch less of it than the portion that others see or hear. But
all creatures, all objects, pass into my brain entire, and occupy the
same extent there that they do in material space. I declare that for me
branched thoughts, instead of pines, wave, sway, rustle, make musical
the ridges of mountains rising summit upon summit. Mention a rose too
far away for me to smell it. Straightway a scent steals into my
nostril, a form presses against my palm in all its dilating softness,
with rounded petals, slightly curled edges, curving stem, leaves
drooping. When I would fain view the world as a whole, it rushes into
vision--man, beast, bird, reptile, fly, sky, ocean, mountains, plain,
rock, pebble. The warmth of life, the reality of creation is over
all--the throb of human hands, glossiness of fur, lithe windings of long
bodies, poignant buzzing of insects, the ruggedness of the steeps as I
climb them, the liquid mobility and boom of waves upon the rocks.
Strange to say, try as I may, I cannot force my touch to pervade this
universe in all directions. The moment I try, the whole vanishes; only
small objects or narrow portions of a surface, mere touch-signs, a chaos
of things scattered at random, remain. No thrill, no delight is excited
thereby. Restore to the artistic, comprehensive internal sense its
rightful domain, and you give me joy which best proves the reality.
BEFORE THE SOUL DAWN
XI
BEFORE THE SOUL DAWN
BEFORE my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a
world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that
unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I
knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor
intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind
natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger,
satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose
that I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew
that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to
remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I
never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually
the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel
that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank
without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without
wonder or joy or faith.
It was not night--it was not day.
. . . . .
But vacancy absorbing space,
And fixedness, without a place;
There were no stars--no earth--no time--
No check--no change--no good--no crime.
My dormant being had no idea of God or immortality, no fear of death.
I remember, also through touch, that I had a power of association. I
felt tactual jars like the stamp of a foot, the opening of a window or
its closing, the slam of a door. After repeatedly smelling rain and
feeling the discomfort of wetness, I acted like those about me: I ran to
shut the window. But that was not thought in any sense. It was the same
kind of association that makes animals take shelter from the rain. From
the same instinct of aping others, I folded the clothes that came from
the laundry, and put mine away, fed the turkeys, sewed bead-eyes on my
doll's face, and did many other things of which I have the tactual
remembrance. When I wanted anything I liked,--ice-cream, for instance,
of which I was very fond,--I had a delicious taste on my tongue (which,
by the way, I never have now), and in my hand I felt the turning of the
freezer. I made the sign, and my mother knew I wanted ice-cream. I
"thought" and desired in my fingers. If I had made a man, I should
certainly have put the brain and soul in his finger-tips. From
reminiscences like these I conclude that it is the opening of the two
faculties, freedom of will, or choice, and rationality, or the power of
thinking from one thing to another, which makes it possible to come into
being first as a child, afterwards as a man.
Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with
another. So I was not conscious of any change or process going on in my
brain when my teacher began to instruct me. I merely felt keen delight
in obtaining more easily what I wanted by means of the finger motions
she taught me. I thought only of objects, and only objects I wanted. It
was the turning of the freezer on a larger scale. When I learned the
meaning of "I" and "me" and found that I was something, I began to
think. Then consciousness first existed for me. Thus it was not the
sense of touch that brought me knowledge. It was the awakening of my
soul that first rendered my senses their value, their cognizance of
objects, names, qualities, and properties. Thought made me conscious of
love, joy, and all the emotions. I was eager to know, then to
understand, afterward to reflect on what I knew and understood, and the
blind impetus, which had before driven me hither and thither at the
dictates of my sensations, vanished forever.
I cannot represent more clearly than any one else the gradual and subtle
changes from first impressions to abstract ideas. But I know that my
physical ideas, that is, ideas derived from material objects, appear to
me first an idea similar to those of touch. Instantly they pass into
intellectual meanings. Afterward the meaning finds expression in what is
called "inner speech." When I was a child, my inner speech was inner
spelling. Although I am even now frequently caught spelling to myself on
my fingers, yet I talk to myself, too, with my lips, and it is true that
when I first learned to speak, my mind discarded the finger-symbols and
began to articulate. However, when I try to recall what some one has
said to me, I am conscious of a hand spelling into mine.
It has often been asked what were my earliest impressions of the world
in which I found myself. But one who thinks at all of his first
impressions knows what a riddle this is. Our impressions grow and change
unnoticed, so that what we suppose we thought as children may be quite
different from what we actually experienced in our childhood. I only
know that after my education began the world which came within my reach
was all alive. I spelled to my blocks and my dogs. I sympathized with
plants when the flowers were picked, because I thought it hurt them,
and that they grieved for their lost blossoms. It was two years before I
could be made to believe that my dogs did not understand what I said,
and I always apologized to them when I ran into or stepped on them.
As my experiences broadened and deepened, the indeterminate, poetic
feelings of childhood began to fix themselves in definite thoughts.
Nature--the world I could touch--was folded and filled with myself. I am
inclined to believe those philosophers who declare that we know nothing
but our own feelings and ideas. With a little ingenious reasoning one
may see in the material world simply a mirror, an image of permanent
mental sensations. In either sphere self-knowledge is the condition and
the limit of our consciousness. That is why, perhaps, many people know
so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They
look within themselves--and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that
there is nothing outside themselves, either.
However that may be, I came later to look for an image of my emotions
and sensations in others. I had to learn the outward signs of inward
feelings. The start of fear, the suppressed, controlled tensity of pain,
the beat of happy muscles in others, had to be perceived and compared
with my own experiences before I could trace them back to the intangible
soul of another. Groping, uncertain, I at last found my identity, and
after seeing my thoughts and feelings repeated in others, I gradually
constructed my world of men and of God. As I read and study, I find
that this is what the rest of the race has done. Man looks within
himself and in time finds the measure and the meaning of the universe.
THE LARGER SANCTIONS
XII
THE LARGER SANCTIONS
SO, in the midst of life, eager, imperious life, the deaf-blind child,
fettered to the bare rock of circumstance, spider-like, sends out
gossamer threads of thought into the measureless void that surrounds
him. Patiently he explores the dark, until he builds up a knowledge of
the world he lives in, and his soul meets the beauty of the world, where
the sun shines always, and the birds sing. To the blind child the dark
is kindly. In it he finds nothing extraordinary or terrible. It is his
familiar world; even the groping from place to place, the halting
steps, the dependence upon others, do not seem strange to him. He does
not know how many countless pleasures the dark shuts out from him. Not
until he weighs his life in the scale of others' experience does he
realize what it is to live forever in the dark. But the knowledge that
teaches him this bitterness also brings its consolation--spiritual
light, the promise of the day that shall be.
The blind child--the deaf-blind child--has inherited the mind of seeing
and hearing ancestors--a mind measured to five senses. Therefore he must
be influenced, even if it be unknown to himself, by the light, colour,
song which have been transmitted through the language he is taught, for
the chambers of the mind are ready to receive that language. The brain
of the race is so permeated with colour that it dyes even the speech of
the blind. Every object I think of is stained with the hue that belongs
to it by association and memory. The experience of the deaf-blind
person, in a world of seeing, hearing people, is like that of a sailor
on an island where the inhabitants speak a language unknown to him,
whose life is unlike that he has lived. He is one, they are many; there
is no chance of compromise. He must learn to see with their eyes, to
hear with their ears, to think their thoughts, to follow their ideals.
If the dark, silent world which surrounds him were essentially different
from the sunlit, resonant world, it would be incomprehensible to his
kind, and could never be discussed. If his feelings and sensations were
fundamentally different from those of others, they would be
inconceivable except to those who had similar sensations and feelings.
If the mental consciousness of the deaf-blind person were absolutely
dissimilar to that of his fellows, he would have no means of imagining
what they think. Since the mind of the sightless is essentially the same
as that of the seeing in that it admits of no lack, it must supply some
sort of equivalent for missing physical sensations. It must perceive a
likeness between things outward and things inward, a correspondence
between the seen and the unseen. I make use of such a correspondence in
many relations, and no matter how far I pursue it to things I cannot
see, it does not break under the test.
As a working hypothesis, correspondence is adequate to all life, through
the whole range of phenomena. The flash of thought and its swiftness
explain the lightning flash and the sweep of a comet through the
heavens. My mental sky opens to me the vast celestial spaces, and I
proceed to fill them with the images of my spiritual stars. I recognize
truth by the clearness and guidance that it gives my thought, and,
knowing what that clearness is, I can imagine what light is to the eye.
It is not a convention of language, but a forcible feeling of the
reality, that at times makes me start when I say, "Oh, I see my
mistake!" or "How dark, cheerless is his life!" I know these are
metaphors. Still, I must prove with them, since there is nothing in our
language to replace them. Deaf-blind metaphors to correspond do not
exist and are not necessary. Because I can understand the word "reflect"
figuratively, a mirror has never perplexed me. The manner in which my
imagination perceives absent things enables me to see how glasses can
magnify things, bring them nearer, or remove them farther.
Deny me this correspondence, this internal sense, confine me to the
fragmentary, incoherent touch-world, and lo, I become as a bat which
wanders about on the wing. Suppose I omitted all words of seeing,
hearing, colour, light, landscape, the thousand phenomena, instruments
and beauties connected with them. I should suffer a great diminution of
the wonder and delight in attaining knowledge; also--more dreadful
loss--my emotions would be blunted, so that I could not be touched by
things unseen.
Has anything arisen to disprove the adequacy of correspondence? Has any
chamber of the blind man's brain been opened and found empty? Has any
psychologist explored the mind of the sightless and been able to say,
"There is no sensation here"?
I tread the solid earth; I breathe the scented air. Out of these two
experiences I form numberless associations and correspondences. I
observe, I feel, I think, I imagine. I associate the countless varied
impressions, experiences, concepts. Out of these materials Fancy, the
cunning artisan of the brain, welds an image which the sceptic would
deny me, because I cannot see with my physical eyes the changeful,
lovely face of my thought-child. He would break the mind's mirror. This
spirit-vandal would humble my soul and force me to bite the dust of
material things. While I champ the bit of circumstance, he scourges and
goads me with the spur of fact. If I heeded him, the sweet-visaged earth
would vanish into nothing, and I should hold in my hand nought but an
aimless, soulless lump of dead matter. But although the body physical is
rooted alive to the Promethean rock, the spirit-proud huntress of the
air will still pursue the shining, open highways of the universe.
Blindness has no limiting effect upon mental vision. My intellectual
horizon is infinitely wide. The universe it encircles is immeasurable.
Would they who bid me keep within the narrow bound of my meagre senses
demand of Herschel that he roof his stellar universe and give us back
Plato's solid firmament of glassy spheres? Would they command Darwin
from the grave and bid him blot out his geological time, give us back a
paltry few thousand years? Oh, the supercilious doubters! They ever
strive to clip the upward daring wings of the spirit.
A person deprived of one or more senses is not, as many seem to think,
turned out into a trackless wilderness without landmark or guide. The
blind man carries with him into his dark environment all the faculties
essential to the apprehension of the visible world whose door is closed
behind him. He finds his surroundings everywhere homogeneous with those
of the sunlit world; for there is an inexhaustible ocean of likenesses
between the world within, and the world without, and these likenesses,
these correspondences, he finds equal to every exigency his life offers.
The necessity of some such thing as correspondence or symbolism appears
more and more urgent as we consider the duties that religion and
philosophy enjoin upon us.
The blind are expected to read the Bible as a means of attaining
spiritual happiness. Now, the Bible is filled throughout with references
to clouds, stars, colours, and beauty, and often the mention of these is
essential to the meaning of the parable or the message in which they
occur. Here one must needs see the inconsistency of people who believe
in the Bible, and yet deny us a right to talk about what we do not see,
and for that matter what _they_ do not see, either. Who shall forbid my
heart to sing: "Yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind. He made
darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters
and thick clouds of the skies"?
Philosophy constantly points out the untrustworthiness of the five
senses and the important work of reason which corrects the errors of
sight and reveals its illusions. If we cannot depend on five senses, how
much less may we rely on three! What ground have we for discarding
light, sound, and colour as an integral part of our world? How are we to
know that they have ceased to exist for us? We must take their reality
for granted, even as the philosopher assumes the reality of the world
without being able to see it physically as a whole.
Ancient philosophy offers an argument which seems still valid. There is
in the blind as in the seeing an Absolute which gives truth to what we
know to be true, order to what is orderly, beauty to the beautiful,
touchableness to what is tangible. If this is granted, it follows that
this Absolute is not imperfect, incomplete, partial. It must needs go
beyond the limited evidence of our sensations, and also give light to
what is invisible, music to the musical that silence dulls. Thus mind
itself compels us to acknowledge that we are in a world of intellectual
order, beauty, and harmony. The essences, or absolutes of these ideas,
necessarily dispel their opposites which belong with evil, disorder and
discord. Thus deafness and blindness do not exist in the immaterial
mind, which is philosophically the real world, but are banished with the
perishable material senses. Reality, of which visible things are the
symbol, shines before my mind. While I walk about my chamber with
unsteady steps, my spirit sweeps skyward on eagle wings and looks out
with unquenchable vision upon the world of eternal beauty.
THE DREAM WORLD
XIII
THE DREAM WORLD
EVERYBODY takes his own dreams seriously, but yawns at the
breakfast-table when somebody else begins to tell the adventures of the
night before. I hesitate, therefore, to enter upon an account of my
dreams; for it is a literary sin to bore the reader, and a scientific
sin to report the facts of a far country with more regard to point and
brevity than to complete and literal truth. The psychologists have
trained a pack of theories and facts which they keep in leash, like so
many bulldogs, and which they let loose upon us whenever we depart from
the straight and narrow path of dream probability. One may not even tell
an entertaining dream without being suspected of having liberally edited
it,--as if editing were one of the seven deadly sins, instead of a
useful and honourable occupation! Be it understood, then, that I am
discoursing at my own breakfast-table, and that no scientific man is
present to trip the autocrat.
I used to wonder why scientific men and others were always asking me
about my dreams. But I am not surprised now, since I have discovered
what some of them believe to be the ordinary waking experience of one
who is both deaf and blind. They think that I can know very little about
objects even a few feet beyond the reach of my arms. Everything outside
of myself, according to them, is a hazy blur. Trees, mountains, cities,
the ocean, even the house I live in are but fairy fabrications, misty
unrealities. Therefore it is assumed that my dreams should have peculiar
interest for the man of science. In some undefined way it is expected
that they should reveal the world I dwell in to be flat, formless,
colourless, without perspective, with little thickness and less
solidity--a vast solitude of soundless space. But who shall put into
words limitless, visionless, silent void? One should be a disembodied
spirit indeed to make anything out of such insubstantial experiences. A
world, or a dream for that matter, to be comprehensible to us, must, I
should think, have a warp of substance woven into the woof of fantasy.
We cannot imagine even in dreams an object which has no counterpart in
reality. Ghosts always resemble somebody, and if they do not appear
themselves, their presence is indicated by circumstances with which we
are perfectly familiar.
During sleep we enter a strange, mysterious realm which science has thus
far not explored. Beyond the border-line of slumber the investigator may
not pass with his common-sense rule and test. Sleep with softest touch
locks all the gates of our physical senses and lulls to rest the
conscious will--the disciplinarian of our waking thoughts. Then the
spirit wrenches itself free from the sinewy arms of reason and like a
winged courser spurns the firm green earth and speeds away upon wind
and cloud, leaving neither trace nor footprint by which science may
track its flight and bring us knowledge of the distant, shadowy country
that we nightly visit. When we come back from the dream-realm, we can
give no reasonable report of what we met there. But once across the
border, we feel at home as if we had always lived there and had never
made any excursions into this rational daylight world.
My dreams do not seem to differ very much from the dreams of other
people. Some of them are coherent and safely hitched to an event or a
conclusion. Others are inconsequent and fantastic. All attest that in
Dreamland there is no such thing as repose. We are always up and doing
with a mind for any adventure. We act, strive, think, suffer and are
glad to no purpose. We leave outside the portals of Sleep all
troublesome incredulities and vexatious speculations as to probability.
I float wraith-like upon clouds in and out among the winds, without the
faintest notion that I am doing anything unusual. In Dreamland I find
little that is altogether strange or wholly new to my experience. No
matter what happens, I am not astonished, however extraordinary the
circumstances may be. I visit a foreign land where I have not been in
reality, and I converse with peoples whose language I have never heard.
Yet we manage to understand each other perfectly. Into whatsoever
situation or society my wanderings bring me, there is the same
homogeneity. If I happen into Vagabondia, I make merry with the jolly
folk of the road or the tavern.
I do not remember ever to have met persons with whom I could not at once
communicate, or to have been shocked or surprised at the doings of my
dream-companions. In its strange wanderings in those dusky groves of
Slumberland my soul takes everything for granted and adapts itself to
the wildest phantoms. I am seldom confused. Everything is as clear as
day. I know events the instant they take place, and wherever I turn my
steps, Mind is my faithful guide and interpreter.
I suppose every one has had in a dream the exasperating, profitless
experience of seeking something urgently desired at the moment, and the
aching, weary sensation that follows each failure to track the thing to
its hiding-place. Sometimes with a singing dizziness in my head I climb
and climb, I know not where or why. Yet I cannot quit the torturing,
passionate endeavour, though again and again I reach out blindly for an
object to hold to. Of course according to the perversity of dreams there
is no object near. I clutch empty air, and then I fall downward, and
still downward, and in the midst of the fall I dissolve into the
atmosphere upon which I have been floating so precariously.
Some of my dreams seem to be traced one within another like a series of
concentric circles. In sleep I think I cannot sleep. I toss about in the
toils of tasks unfinished. I decide to get up and read for a while. I
know the shelf in my library where I keep the book I want. The book has
no name, but I find it without difficulty. I settle myself comfortably
in the morris-chair, the great book open on my knee. Not a word can I
make out, the pages are utterly blank. I am not surprised, but keenly
disappointed. I finger the pages, I bend over them lovingly, the tears
fall on my hands. I shut the book quickly as the thought passes through
my mind, "The print will be all rubbed out if I get it wet." Yet there
is no print tangible on the page!
This morning I thought that I awoke. I was certain that I had overslept.
I seized my watch, and sure enough, it pointed to an hour after my
rising time. I sprang up in the greatest hurry, knowing that breakfast
was ready. I called my mother, who declared that my watch must be
wrong. She was positive it could not be so late. I looked at my watch
again, and lo! the hands wiggled, whirled, buzzed and disappeared. I
awoke more fully as my dismay grew, until I was at the antipodes of
sleep. Finally my eyes opened actually, and I knew that I had been
dreaming. I had only waked into sleep. What is still more bewildering,
there is no difference between the consciousness of the sham waking and
that of the real one.
It is fearful to think that all that we have ever seen, felt, read, and
done may suddenly rise to our dream-vision, as the sea casts up objects
it has swallowed. I have held a little child in my arms in the midst of
a riot and spoken vehemently, imploring the Russian soldiers not to
massacre the Jews. I have re-lived the agonizing scenes of the Sepoy
Rebellion and the French Revolution. Cities have burned before my eyes,
and I have fought the flames until I fell exhausted. Holocausts overtake
the world, and I struggle in vain to save my friends.
Once in a dream a message came speeding over land and sea that winter
was descending upon the world from the North Pole, that the Arctic zone
was shifting to our mild climate. Far and wide the message flew. The
ocean was congealed in midsummer. Ships were held fast in the ice by
thousands, the ships with large, white sails were held fast. Riches of
the Orient and the plenteous harvests of the Golden West might no more
pass between nation and nation. For some time the trees and flowers
grew on, despite the intense cold. Birds flew into the houses for
safety, and those which winter had overtaken lay on the snow with wings
spread in vain flight. At last the foliage and blossoms fell at the feet
of Winter. The petals of the flowers were turned to rubies and
sapphires. The leaves froze into emeralds. The trees moaned and tossed
their branches as the frost pierced them through bark and sap, pierced
into their very roots. I shivered myself awake, and with a tumult of joy
I breathed the many sweet morning odours wakened by the summer sun.
One need not visit an African jungle or an Indian forest to hunt the
tiger. One can lie in bed amid downy pillows and dream tigers as
terrible as any in the pathless wild. I was a little girl when one night
I tried to cross the garden in front of my aunt's house in Alabama. I
was in pursuit of a large cat with a great bushy tail. A few hours
before he had clawed my little canary out of its cage and crunched it
between his cruel teeth. I could not see the cat. But the thought in my
mind was distinct: "He is making for the high grass at the end of the
garden. I'll get there first!" I put my hand on the box border and ran
swiftly along the path. When I reached the high grass, there was the cat
gliding into the wavy tangle. I rushed forward and tried to seize him
and take the bird from between his teeth. To my horror a huge beast, not
the cat at all, sprang out from the grass, and his sinewy shoulder
rubbed against me with palpitating strength! His ears stood up and
quivered with anger. His eyes were hot. His nostrils were large and wet.
His lips moved horribly. I knew it was a tiger, a real live tiger, and
that I should be devoured--my little bird and I. I do not know what
happened after that. The next important thing seldom happens in dreams.
Some time earlier I had a dream which made a vivid impression upon me.
My aunt was weeping because she could not find me. But I took an impish
pleasure in the thought that she and others were searching for me, and
making great noise which I felt through my feet. Suddenly the spirit of
mischief gave way to uncertainty and fear. I felt cold. The air smelt
like ice and salt. I tried to run; but the long grass tripped me, and I
fell forward on my face. I lay very still, feeling with all my body.
After a while my sensations seemed to be concentrated in my fingers, and
I perceived that the grass blades were sharp as knives, and hurt my
hands cruelly. I tried to get up cautiously, so as not to cut myself on
the sharp grass. I put down a tentative foot, much as my kitten treads
for the first time the primeval forest in the backyard. All at once I
felt the stealthy patter of something creeping, creeping, creeping
purposefully toward me. I do not know how at that time the idea was in
my mind; I had no words for intention or purpose. Yet it was precisely
the evil intent, and not the creeping animal that terrified me. I had
no fear of living creatures. I loved my father's dogs, the frisky little
calf, the gentle cows, the horses and mules that ate apples from my
hand, and none of them had ever harmed me. I lay low, waiting in
breathless terror for the creature to spring and bury its long claws in
my flesh. I thought, "They will feel like turkey-claws." Something warm
and wet touched my face. I shrieked, struck out frantically, and awoke.
Something was still struggling in my arms. I held on with might and main
until I was exhausted, then I loosed my hold. I found dear old Belle,
the setter, shaking herself and looking at me reproachfully. She and I
had gone to sleep together on the rug, and had naturally wandered to the
dream-forest where dogs and little girls hunt wild game and have
strange adventures. We encountered hosts of elfin foes, and it required
all the dog tactics at Belle's command to acquit herself like the lady
and huntress that she was. Belle had her dreams too. We used to lie
under the trees and flowers in the old garden, and I used to laugh with
delight when the magnolia leaves fell with little thuds, and Belle
jumped up, thinking she had heard a partridge. She would pursue the
leaf, point it, bring it back to me and lay it at my feet with a
humorous wag of her tail as much as to say, "This is the kind of bird
that waked me." I made a chain for her neck out of the lovely blue
Paulownia flowers and covered her with great heart-shaped leaves.
Dear old Belle, she has long been dreaming among the lotus-flowers and
poppies of the dogs' paradise.
Certain dreams have haunted me since my childhood. One which recurs
often proceeds after this wise: A spirit seems to pass before my face. I
feel an extreme heat like the blast from an engine. It is the embodiment
of evil. I must have had it first after the day that I nearly got burnt.
Another spirit which visits me often brings a sensation of cool
dampness, such as one feels on a chill November night when the window is
open. The spirit stops just beyond my reach, sways back and forth like a
creature in grief. My blood is chilled, and seems to freeze in my veins.
I try to move, but my body is still, and I cannot even cry out. After a
while the spirit passes on, and I say to myself shudderingly, "That was
Death. I wonder if he has taken her." The pronoun stands for my Teacher.
In my dreams I have sensations, odours, tastes and ideas which I do not
remember to have had in reality. Perhaps they are the glimpses which my
mind catches through the veil of sleep of my earliest babyhood. I have
heard "the trampling of many waters." Sometimes a wonderful light visits
me in sleep. Such a flash and glory as it is! I gaze and gaze until it
vanishes. I smell and taste much as in my waking hours; but the sense of
touch plays a less important part. In sleep I almost never grope. No one
guides me. Even in a crowded street I am self-sufficient, and I enjoy
an independence quite foreign to my physical life. Now I seldom spell on
my fingers, and it is still rarer for others to spell into my hand. My
mind acts independent of my physical organs. I am delighted to be thus
endowed, if only in sleep; for then my soul dons its winged sandals and
joyfully joins the throng of happy beings who dwell beyond the reaches
of bodily sense.
The moral inconsistency of dreams is glaring. Mine grow less and less
accordant with my proper principles. I am nightly hurled into an
unethical medley of extremes. I must either defend another to the last
drop of my blood or condemn him past all repenting. I commit murder,
sleeping, to save the lives of others. I ascribe to those I love best
acts and words which it mortifies me to remember, and I cast reproach
after reproach upon them. It is fortunate for our peace of mind that
most wicked dreams are soon forgotten. Death, sudden and awful, strange
loves and hates remorselessly pursued, cunningly plotted revenge, are
seldom more than dim haunting recollections in the morning, and during
the day they are erased by the normal activities of the mind. Sometimes
immediately on waking, I am so vexed at the memory of a dream-fracas, I
wish I may dream no more. With this wish distinctly before me I drop off
again into a new turmoil of dreams.
Oh, dreams, what opprobrium I heap upon you--you, the most pointless
things imaginable, saucy apes, brewers of odious contrasts, haunting
birds of ill omen, mocking echoes, unseasonable reminders,
oft-returning vexations, skeletons in my morris-chair, jesters in the
tomb, death's-heads at the wedding feast, outlaws of the brain that
every night defy the mind's police service, thieves of my Hesperidean
apples, breakers of my domestic peace, murderers of sleep. "Oh, dreadful
dreams that do fright my spirit from her propriety!" No wonder that
Hamlet preferred the ills he knew rather than run the risk of one
dream-vision.
Yet remove the dream-world, and the loss is inconceivable. The magic
spell which binds poetry together is broken. The splendour of art and
the soaring might of imagination are lessened because no phantom of
fadeless sunsets and flowers urges onward to a goal. Gone is the mute
permission or connivance which emboldens the soul to mock the limits of
time and space, forecast and gather in harvests of achievement for ages
yet unborn. Blot out dreams, and the blind lose one of their chief
comforts; for in the visions of sleep they behold their belief in the
seeing mind and their expectation of light beyond the blank, narrow
night justified. Nay, our conception of immortality is shaken. Faith,
the motive-power of human life, flickers out. Before such vacancy and
bareness the shocks of wrecked worlds were indeed welcome. In truth,
dreams bring us the thought independently of us and in spite of us that
the soul
"may right
Her nature, shoot large sail on lengthening cord,
And rush exultant on the Infinite."
DREAMS AND REALITY
XIV
DREAMS AND REALITY
IT is astonishing to think how our real wide-awake world revolves around
the shadowy unrealities of Dreamland. Despite all that we say about the
inconsequence of dreams, we often reason by them. We stake our greatest
hopes upon them. Nay, we build upon them the fabric of an ideal world. I
can recall few fine, thoughtful poems, few noble works of art or any
system of philosophy in which there is not evidence that dream-fantasies
symbolize truths concealed by phenomena.
The fact that in dreams confusion reigns, and illogical connections
occur gives plausibility to the theory which Sir Arthur Mitchell and
other scientific men hold, that our dream-thinking is uncontrolled and
undirected by the will. The will--the inhibiting and guiding
power--finds rest and refreshment in sleep, while the mind, like a
barque without rudder or compass, drifts aimlessly upon an uncharted
sea. But curiously enough, these fantasies and inter-twistings of
thought are to be found in great imaginative poems like Spenser's "Færie
Queene." Lamb was impressed by the analogy between our dream-thinking
and the work of the imagination. Speaking of the episode in the cave of
Mammon, Lamb wrote:
"It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of the mind's
conceptions in sleep; it is--in some sort, but what a copy! Let the most
romantic of us that has been entertained all night with the spectacle of
some wild and magnificent vision, re-combine it in the morning and try
it by his waking judgment. That which appeared so shifting and yet so
coherent, when it came under cool examination, shall appear so
reasonless and so unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded,
and to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. The
transitions in this episode are every whit as violent as in the most
extravagant dream, and yet the waking judgment ratifies them."
Perhaps I feel more than others the analogy between the world of our
waking life and the world of dreams because before I was taught, I lived
in a sort of perpetual dream. The testimony of parents and friends who
watched me day after day is the only means that I have of knowing the
actuality of those early, obscure years of my childhood. The physical
acts of going to bed and waking in the morning alone mark the transition
from reality to Dreamland. As near as I can tell, asleep or awake I only
felt with my body. I can recollect no process which I should now dignify
with the term of thought. It is true that my bodily sensations were
extremely acute; but beyond a crude connection with physical wants they
are not associated or directed. They had little relation to each other,
to me or the experience of others. Idea--that which gives identity and
continuity to experience--came into my sleeping and waking existence at
the same moment with the awakening of self-consciousness. Before that
moment my mind was in a state of anarchy in which meaningless sensations
rioted, and if thought existed, it was so vague and inconsequent, it
cannot be made a part of discourse. Yet before my education began, I
dreamed. I know that I must have dreamed because I recall no break in my
tactual experiences. Things fell suddenly, heavily. I felt my clothing
afire, or I fell into a tub of cold water. Once I smelt bananas, and the
odour in my nostrils was so vivid that in the morning, before I was
dressed, I went to the sideboard to look for the bananas. There were no
bananas, and no odour of bananas anywhere! My life was in fact a dream
throughout.
The likeness between my waking state and the sleeping one is still
marked. In both states I see, but not with my eyes. I hear, but not with
my ears. I speak, and am spoken to, without the sound of a voice. I am
moved to pleasure by visions of ineffable beauty which I have never
beheld in the physical world. Once in a dream I held in my hand a pearl.
The one I saw in my dreams must, therefore, have been a creation of my
imagination. It was a smooth, exquisitely moulded crystal. As I gazed
into its shimmering deeps, my soul was flooded with an ecstasy of
tenderness, and I was filled with wonder as one who should for the
first time look into the cool, sweet heart of a rose. My pearl was dew
and fire, the velvety green of moss, the soft whiteness of lilies, and
the distilled hues and sweetness of a thousand roses. It seemed to me,
the soul of beauty was dissolved in its crystal bosom. This beauteous
vision strengthens my conviction that the world which the mind builds up
out of countless subtle experiences and suggestions is fairer than the
world of the senses. The splendour of the sunset my friends gaze at
across the purpling hills is wonderful. But the sunset of the inner
vision brings purer delight because it is the worshipful blending of all
the beauty that we have known and desired.
I believe that I am more fortunate in my dreams than most people; for
as I think back over my dreams, the pleasant ones seem to predominate,
although we naturally recall most vividly and tell most eagerly the
grotesque and fantastic adventures in Slumberland. I have friends,
however, whose dreams are always troubled and disturbed. They wake
fatigued and bruised, and they tell me that they would give a kingdom
for one dreamless night. There is one friend who declares that she has
never had a felicitous dream in her life. The grind and worry of the day
invade the sweet domain of sleep and weary her with incessant,
profitless effort. I feel very sorry for this friend, and perhaps it is
hardly fair to insist upon the pleasure of dreaming in the presence of
one whose dream-experience is so unhappy. Still, it is true that my
dreams have uses as many and sweet as those of adversity. All my
yearning for the strange, the weird, the ghostlike is gratified in
dreams. They carry me out of the accustomed and commonplace. In a flash,
in the winking of an eye they snatch the burden from my shoulder, the
trivial task from my hand and the pain and disappointment from my heart,
and I behold the lovely face of my dream. It dances round me with merry
measure and darts hither and thither in happy abandon. Sudden, sweet
fancies spring forth from every nook and corner, and delightful
surprises meet me at every turn. A happy dream is more precious than
gold and rubies.
I like to think that in dreams we catch glimpses of a life larger than
our own. We see it as a little child, or as a savage who visits a
civilized nation. Thoughts are imparted to us far above our ordinary
thinking. Feelings nobler and wiser than any we have known thrill us
between heart-beats. For one fleeting night a princelier nature captures
us, and we become as great as our aspirations. I daresay we return to
the little world of our daily activities with as distorted a half-memory
of what we have seen as that of the African who visited England, and
afterwards said he had been in a huge hill which carried him over great
waters. The comprehensiveness of our thought, whether we are asleep or
awake, no doubt depends largely upon our idiosyncrasies, constitution,
habits, and mental capacity. But whatever may be the nature of our
dreams, the mental processes that characterize them are analogous to
those which go on when the mind is not held to attention by the will.
A WAKING DREAM
XV
A WAKING DREAM
I HAVE sat for hours in a sort of reverie, letting my mind have its way
without inhibition and direction, and idly noted down the incessant beat
of thought upon thought, image upon image. I have observed that my
thoughts make all kinds of connections, wind in and out, trace
concentric circles, and break up in eddies of fantasy, just as in
dreams. One day I had a literary frolic with a certain set of thoughts
which dropped in for an afternoon call. I wrote for three or four hours
as they arrived, and the resulting record is much like a dream. I found
that the most disconnected, dissimilar thoughts came in arm-in-arm--I
dreamed a wide-awake dream. The difference is that in waking dreams I
can look back upon the endless succession of thoughts, while in the
dreams of sleep I can recall but few ideas and images. I catch broken
threads from the warp and woof of a pattern I cannot see, or glowing
leaves which have floated on a slumber-wind from a tree that I cannot
identify. In this reverie I held the key to the company of ideas. I give
my record of them to show what analogies exist between thoughts when
they are not directed and the behaviour of real dream-thinking.
I had an essay to write. I wanted my mind fresh and obedient, and all
its handmaidens ready to hold up my hands in the task. I intended to
discourse learnedly upon my educational experiences, and I was unusually
anxious to do my best. I had a working plan in my head for the essay,
which was to be grave, wise, and abounding in ideas. Moreover, it was to
have an academic flavour suggestive of sheepskin, and the reader was to
be duly impressed with the austere dignity of cap and gown. I shut
myself up in the study, resolved to beat out on the keys of my
typewriter this immortal chapter of my life-history. Alexander was no
more confident of conquering Asia with the splendid army which his
father Philip had disciplined than I was of finding my mental house in
order and my thoughts obedient. My mind had had a long vacation, and I
was now coming back to it in an hour that it looked not for me. My
situation was similar to that of the master who went into a far country
and expected on his home coming to find everything as he left it. But
returning he found his servants giving a party. Confusion was rampant.
There was fiddling and dancing and the babble of many tongues, so that
the voice of the master could not be heard. Though he shouted and beat
upon the gate, it remained closed.
So it was with me. I sounded the trumpet loud and long; but the vassals
of thought would not rally to my standard. Each had his arm round the
waist of a fair partner, and I know not what wild tunes "put life and
mettle into their heels." There was nothing to do. I looked about
helplessly upon my great retinue, and realized that it is not the
possession of a thing but the ability to use it which is of value. I
settled back in my chair to watch the pageant. It was rather pleasant
sitting there, "idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean," watching
my own thoughts at play. It was like thinking fine things to say without
taking the trouble to write them. I felt like Alice in Wonderland when
she ran at full speed with the red queen and never passed anything or
got anywhere.
The merry frolic went on madly. The dancers were all manner of thoughts.
There were sad thoughts and happy thoughts, thoughts suited to every
clime and weather, thoughts bearing the mark of every age and nation,
silly thoughts and wise thoughts, thoughts of people, of things, and of
nothing, good thoughts, impish thoughts, and large, gracious thoughts.
There they went swinging hand-in-hand in corkscrew fashion. An antic
jester in green and gold led the dance. The guests followed no order or
precedent. No two thoughts were related to each other even by the
fortieth cousinship. There was not so much as an international alliance
between them. Each thought behaved like a newly created poet.
"His mouth he could not ope,
But there flew out a trope."
Magical lyrics--oh, if I only had written them down! Pell-mell they came
down the sequestered avenues of my mind, this merry throng. With
bacchanal song and shout they came, and eye hath not since beheld
confusion worse confounded.
Shut your eyes, and see them come--the knights and ladies of my revel.
Plumed and turbaned they come, clad in mail and silken broideries,
gentle maids in Quaker gray, gay princes in scarlet cloaks, coquettes
with roses in their hair, monks in cowls that might have covered the
tall Minster Tower, demure little girls hugging paper dolls, and
rollicking school-boys with ruddy morning faces, an absent-minded
professor carrying his shoes under his arms and looking wise, followed
by cronies, fairies, goblins, and all the troops just loosed from Noah's
storm-tossed ark. They walked, they strutted, they soared, they swam,
and some came in through fire. One sprite climbed up to the moon on a
ladder made of leaves and frozen dew-drops. A peacock with a great
hooked bill flew in and out among the branches of a pomegranate-tree
pecking the rosy fruit. He screamed so loud that Apollo turned in his
chariot of flame and from his burnished bow shot golden arrows at him.
This did not disturb the peacock in the least; for he spread his
gem-like wings and flourished his wonderful, fire-tipped tail in the
very face of the sun-god! Then came Venus--an exact copy of my own
plaster cast--serene, calm-eyed, dancing "high and disposedly" like
Queen Elizabeth, surrounded by a troop of lovely Cupids mounted on
rose-tinted clouds, blown hither and thither by sweet winds, while all
around danced flowers and streams and queer little Japanese cherry-trees
in pots! They were followed by jovial Pan with green hair and jewelled
sandals, and by his side--I could scarcely believe my eyes!--walked a
modest nun counting her beads. At a little distance were seen three
dancers arm-in-arm, a lean, starved platitude, a rosy, dimpled joke, and
a steel-ribbed sermon on predestination. Close upon them came a whole
string of Nights with wind-blown hair and Days with faggots on their
backs. All at once I saw the ample figure of Life rise above the
whirling mass holding a naked child in one hand and in the other a
gleaming sword. A bear crouched at her feet, and all about her swirled
and glowed a multitudinous host of tiny atoms which sang all together,
"We are the will of God." Atom wedded atom, and chemical married
chemical, and the cosmic dance went on in changing, changeless measure,
until my head sang like a buzz-saw.
Just as I was thinking I would leave this scene of phantoms and take a
stroll in the quiet groves of Slumber I noticed a commotion near one of
the entrances to my enchanted palace. It was evident from the whispering
and buzzing that went round that more celebrities had arrived. The first
personage I saw was Homer, blind no more, leading by a golden chain the
white-beaked ships of the Achaians bobbing their heads and squawking
like so many white swans. Plato and Mother Goose with the numerous
children of the shoe came next. Simple Simon, Jill, and Jack who had had
his head mended, and the cat that fell into the cream--all these danced
in a giddy reel, while Plato solemnly discoursed on the laws of
Topsyturvy Land. Then followed grim-visaged Calvin and "violet-crowned,
sweet-smiling Sappho" who danced a Schottische. Aristophanes and Molière
joined for a measure, both talking at once, Molière in Greek and
Aristophanes in German. I thought this odd, because it occurred to me
that German was a dead language before Aristophanes was born.
Bright-eyed Shelley brought in a fluttering lark which burst into the
song of Chaucer's chanticleer. Henry Esmond gave his hand in a stately
minuet to Diana of the Crossways. He evidently did not understand her
nineteenth century wit; for he did not laugh. Perhaps he had lost his
taste for clever women. Anon Dante and Swedenborg came together
conversing earnestly about things remote and mystical. Swedenborg said
it was very warm. Dante replied that it might rain in the night.
Suddenly there was a great clamour, and I found that "The Battle of the
Books" had begun raging anew. Two figures entered in lively dispute. One
was dressed in plain homespun and the other wore a scholar's gown over a
suit of motley. I gathered from their conversation that they were Cotton
Mather and William Shakspere. Mather insisted that the witches in
"Macbeth" should be caught and hanged. Shakspere replied that the
witches had already suffered enough at the hands of commentators. They
were pushed aside by the twelve knights of the Round Table, who marched
in bearing on a salver the goose that laid golden eggs. "The Pope's
Mule" and "The Golden Bull" had a combat of history and fiction such as
I had read of in books, but never before witnessed. These little animals
were put to rout by a huge elephant which lumbered in with Rudyard
Kipling riding high on its trunk. The elephant changed suddenly to "a
rakish craft." (I do not know what a rakish craft is; but this was very
rakish and very crafty.) It must have been abandoned long ago by wild
pirates of the southern seas; for clinging to the rigging, and jovially
cheering as the ship went down, I made out a man with blazing eyes, clad
in a velveteen jacket. As the ship disappeared from sight, Falstaff
rushed to the rescue of the lonely navigator--and stole his purse! But
Miranda persuaded him to give it back. Stevenson said, "Who steals my
purse steals trash." Falstaff laughed and called this a good joke, as
good as any he had heard in his day.
This was the signal for a rushing swarm of quotations. They surged to
and fro, an inchoate throng of half finished phrases, mutilated
sentences, parodied sentiments, and brilliant metaphors. I could not
distinguish any phrases or ideas of my own making. I saw a poor, ragged,
shrunken sentence that might have been mine own catch the wings of a
fair idea with the light of genius shining like a halo about its head.
Ever and anon the dancers changed partners without invitation or
permission. Thoughts fell in love at sight, married in a measure, and
joined hands without previous courtship. An incongruity is the wedding
of two thoughts which have had no reasonable courtship, and marriages
without wooing are apt to lead to domestic discord, even to the breaking
up of an ancient, time-honoured family. Among the wedded couples were
certain similes hitherto inviolable in their bachelorhood and
spinsterhood, and held in great respect. Their extraordinary proceedings
nearly broke up the dance. But the fatuity of their union was evident to
them, and they parted. Other similes seemed to have the habit of living
in discord. They had been many times married and divorced. They belonged
to the notorious society of Mixed Metaphors.
A company of phantoms floated in and out wearing tantalizing garments
of oblivion. They seemed about to dance, then vanished. They reappeared
half a dozen times, but never unveiled their faces. The imp Curiosity
pulled Memory by the sleeve and said, "Why do they run away? 'Tis
strange knavery!" Out ran Memory to capture them. After a great deal of
racing and puffing and collision it apprehended some of the fugitives
and brought them in. But when it tore off their masks, lo! some were
disappointingly commonplace, and others were gipsy quotations trying to
conceal the punctuation marks that belonged to them. Memory was much
chagrined to have had such a hard chase only to catch this sorry lot of
graceless rogues.
Into the rabble strode four stately giants who called themselves
History, Philosophy, Law, and Medicine. They seemed too solemn and
imposing to join in a masque. But even as I gazed at these formidable
guests, they all split into fragments which went whirling, dancing in
divisions, subdivisions, re-subdivisions of scientific nonsense! History
split into philology, ethnology, anthropology, and mythology, and these
again split finer than the splitting of hairs. Each speciality hugged
its bit of knowledge and waltzed it round and round. The rest of the
company began to nod, and I felt drowsy myself. To put an end to the
solemn gyrations, a troop of fairies mercifully waved poppies over us
all, the masque faded, my head fell, and I started. Sleep had wakened
me. At my elbow I found my old friend Bottom.
"Bottom," I said, "I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what
dream it was. Methought I was--there is no man can tell what. The eye of
man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, his hand is not able
to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream
was."
A CHANT OF DARKNESS
A CHANT OF DARKNESS
"_My wings are folded o'er mine ears,
My wings are crossèd o'er mine eyes,
Yet through their silver shade appears,
And through their lulling plumes arise,
A Shape, a throng of sounds._"
_Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound."_
I DARE not ask why we are reft of light,
Banished to our solitary isles amid the unmeasured seas,
Or how our sight was nurtured to glorious vision,
To fade and vanish and leave us in the dark alone.
The secret of God is upon our tabernacle;
Into His mystery I dare not pry. Only this I know:
With Him is strength, with Him is wisdom,
And His wisdom hath set darkness in our paths.
_Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came,
And in a little time we shall return again
Into the vast, unanswering dark._
O Dark! thou awful, sweet, and holy Dark!
In thy solemn spaces, beyond the human eye,
God fashioned His universe; laid the foundations of the earth,
Laid the measure thereof, and stretched the line upon it;
Shut up the sea with doors, and made the glory
Of the clouds a covering for it;
Commanded His morning, and, behold! chaos fled
Before the uplifted face of the sun;
Divided a water-course for the overflowing of waters;
Sent rain upon the earth--
Upon the wilderness wherein there was no man,
Upon the desert where grew no tender herb,
And, lo! there was greenness upon the plains,
And the hills were clothed with beauty!
_Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came,
And in a little time we shall return again
Into the vast, unanswering dark._
O Dark! thou secret and inscrutable Dark!
In thy silent depths, the springs whereof man hath not fathomed,
God wrought the soul of man.
O Dark! compassionate, all-knowing Dark!
Tenderly, as shadows to the evening, comes thy message to man.
Softly thou layest thy hand on his tired eyelids,
And his soul, weary and homesick, returns
Unto thy soothing embrace.
_Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came,
And in a little time we shall return again
Into the vast, unanswering dark._
O Dark! wise, vital, thought-quickening Dark!
In thy mystery thou hidest the light
That is the soul's life.
Upon thy solitary shores I walk unafraid;
I dread no evil; though I walk in the valley of the shadow,
I shall not know the ecstasy of fear
When gentle Death leads me through life's open door,
When the bands of night are sundered,
And the day outpours its light.
_Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came,
And in a little time we shall return again
Into the vast, unanswering dark._
The timid soul, fear-driven, shuns the dark;
But upon the cheeks of him who must abide in shadow
Breathes the wind of rushing angel-wings,
And round him falls a light from unseen fires.
Magical beams glow athwart the darkness;
Paths of beauty wind through his black world
To another world of light,
Where no veil of sense shuts him out from Paradise.
_Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came,
And in a little time we shall return again
Into the vast, unanswering dark._
O Dark! thou blessèd, quiet Dark!
To the lone exile who must dwell with thee
Thou art benign and friendly;
From the harsh world thou dost shut him in;
To him thou whisperest the secrets of the wondrous night;
Upon him thou bestowest regions wide and boundless as his spirit;
Thou givest a glory to all humble things;
With thy hovering pinions thou coverest all unlovely objects;
Under thy brooding wings there is peace.
_Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came,
And in a little time we shall return again
Into the vast, unanswering dark._
II
Once in regions void of light I wandered;
In blank darkness I stumbled,
And fear led me by the hand;
My feet pressed earthward,
Afraid of pitfalls.
By many shapeless terrors of the night affrighted,
To the wakeful day
I held out beseeching arms.
Then came Love, bearing in her hand
The torch that is the light unto my feet,
And softly spoke Love: "Hast thou
Entered into the treasures of darkness?
Hast thou entered into the treasures of the night?
Search out thy blindness. It holdeth
Riches past computing."
The words of Love set my spirit aflame.
My eager fingers searched out the mysteries,
The splendours, the inmost sacredness, of things,
And in the vacancies discerned
With spiritual sense the fullness of life;
And the gates of Day stood wide.
I am shaken with gladness;
My limbs tremble with joy;
My heart and the earth
Tremble with happiness;
The ecstasy of life
Is abroad in the world.
Knowledge hath uncurtained heaven;
On the uttermost shores of darkness there is light;
Midnight hath sent forth a beam!
The blind that stumbled in darkness without light
Behold a new day!
In the obscurity gleams the star of Thought;
Imagination hath a luminous eye,
And the mind hath a glorious vision.
III
"The man is blind. What is life to him?
A closed book held up against a sightless face.
Would that he could see
Yon beauteous star, and know
For one transcendent moment
The palpitating joy of sight!"
All sight is of the soul.
Behold it in the upward flight
Of the unfettered spirit! Hast thou seen
Thought bloom in the blind child's face?
Hast thou seen his mind grow,
Like the running dawn, to grasp
The vision of the Master?
It was the miracle of inward sight.
In the realms of wonderment where I dwell
I explore life with my hands;
I recognize, and am happy;
My fingers are ever athirst for the earth,
And drink up its wonders with delight,
Draw out earth's dear delights;
My feet are charged with the murmur,
The throb, of all things that grow.
This is touch, this quivering,
This flame, this ether,
This glad rush of blood,
This daylight in my heart,
This glow of sympathy in my palms!
Thou blind, loving, all-prying touch,
Thou openest the book of life to me.
The noiseless little noises of the earth
Come with softest rustle;
The shy, sweet feet of life;
The silky mutter of moth-wings
Against my restraining palm;
The strident beat of insect-wings,
The silvery trickle of water;
Little breezes busy in the summer grass;
The music of crisp, whisking, scurrying leaves,
The swirling, wind-swept, frost-tinted leaves;
The crystal splash of summer rain,
Saturate with the odours of the sod.
With alert fingers I listen
To the showers of sound
That the wind shakes from the forest.
I bathe in the liquid shade
Under the pines, where the air hangs cool
After the shower is done.
My saucy little friend the squirrel
Flips my shoulder with his tail,
Leaps from leafy billow to leafy billow,
Returns to eat his breakfast from my hand.
Between us there is glad sympathy;
He gambols; my pulses dance;
I am exultingly full of the joy of life!
Have not my fingers split the sand
On the sun-flooded beach?
Hath not my naked body felt the water sing
When the sea hath enveloped it
With rippling music?
Have I not felt
The lilt of waves beneath my boat,
The flap of sail,
The strain of mast,
The wild rush
Of the lightning-charged winds?
Have I not smelt the swift, keen flight
Of winged odours before the tempest?
Here is joy awake, aglow;
Here is the tumult of the heart.
My hands evoke sight and sound out of feeling,
Intershifting the senses endlessly;
Linking motion with sight, odour with sound
They give colour to the honeyed breeze,
The measure and passion of a symphony
To the beat and quiver of unseen wings.
In the secrets of earth and sun and air
My fingers are wise;
They snatch light out of darkness,
They thrill to harmonies breathed in silence.
I walked in the stillness of the night,
And my soul uttered her gladness.
O Night, still, odorous Night, I love thee!
O wide, spacious Night, I love thee!
O steadfast, glorious Night!
I touch thee with my hands;
I lean against thy strength;
I am comforted.
O fathomless, soothing Night!
Thou art a balm to my restless spirit,
I nestle gratefully in thy bosom,
Dark, gracious mother!
Like a dove, I rest in thy bosom.
_Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came,
And in a little time we shall return again
Into the vast, unanswering dark._
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Transcriber's Note:
Page 223, "similies" changed to "similes" (Other similes seemed)