Some years afterwards I was staying with some friends in Paris. I had
got up before breakfast and gone out to buy a newspaper. I had noticed
the servant, a girl who had come from the country some years before,
laying the table for breakfast. As I had passed her I had been telling
myself one of those long foolish tales which one tells only to oneself.
If something had happened that had not happened, I would have hurt my
arm, I thought. I saw myself with my arm in a sling in the middle of
some childish adventures. I returned with the newspaper and met my host
and hostess in the door. The moment they saw me they cried out, ‘Why,
the _bonne_ has just told us you had your arm in a sling. We thought
something must have happened to you last night, that you had been run
over maybe’—or some such words. I had been dining out at the other end
of Paris, and had come in after everybody had gone to bed. I had cast
my imagination so strongly upon the servant that she had seen it, and
with what had appeared to be more than the mind’s eye.
One afternoon, about the same time, I was thinking very intently of
a certain fellow-student for whom I had a message, which I hesitated
about writing. In a couple of days I got a letter from a place some
hundreds of miles away where that student was. On the afternoon when
I had been thinking so intently I had suddenly appeared there amid a
crowd of people in a hotel and as seeming solid as if in the flesh. My
fellow-student had seen me, but no one else, and had asked me to come
again when the people had gone. I had vanished, but had come again
in the middle of the night and given the message. I myself had no
knowledge of casting an imagination upon one so far away.
I could tell of stranger images, of stranger enchantments, of
stranger imaginations, cast consciously or unconsciously over as
great distances by friends or by myself, were it not that the greater
energies of the mind seldom break forth but when the deeps are
loosened. They break forth amid events too private or too sacred for
public speech, or seem themselves, I know not why, to belong to hidden
things. I have written of these breakings forth, these loosenings of
the deep, with some care and some detail, but I shall keep my record
shut. After all, one can but bear witness less to convince him who
won’t believe than to protect him who does, as Blake puts it, enduring
unbelief and misbelief and ridicule as best one may. I shall be content
to show that past times have believed as I do, by quoting Joseph
Glanvil’s description of the Scholar Gipsy. Joseph Glanvil is dead, and
will not mind unbelief and misbelief and ridicule.
The Scholar Gipsy, too, is dead, unless indeed perfectly wise magicians
can live till it please them to die, and he is wandering somewhere,
even if one cannot see him, as Arnold imagined, ‘at some lone ale-house
in the Berkshire moors, on the warm ingle-bench,’ or ‘crossing the
stripling Thames at Bablock Hithe,’ ‘trailing his fingers in the cool
stream,’ or ‘giving store of flowers—the frail-leaf’d white anemone,
dark bluebells drenched with dews of summer eves,’ to the girls ‘who
from the distant hamlets come to dance around the Fyfield elm in May,’
or ‘sitting upon the river bank o’ergrown,’ living on through time
‘with a free onward impulse.’ This is Joseph Glanvil’s story—
There was very lately a lad in the University of
Oxford, who being of very pregnant and ready parts and
yet wanting the encouragement of preferment, was by
his poverty forced to leave his studies there, and to
cast himself upon the wide world for a livelihood. Now
his necessities growing daily on him, and wanting the
help of friends to relieve him, he was at last forced
to join himself to a company of vagabond gipsies,
whom occasionally he met with, and to follow their
trade for a maintenance.... After he had been a pretty
while well exercised in the trade, there chanced to
ride by a couple of scholars, who had formerly been
of his acquaintance. The scholar had quickly spied
out these old friends among the gipsies, and their
amazement to see him among such society had well-nigh
discovered him; but by a sign he prevented them owning
him before that crew, and taking one of them aside
privately desired him with his friend to go to an inn,
not far distant, promising there to come to them. They
accordingly went thither and he follows: after their
first salutation his friends inquire how he came to
lead so odd a life as that was, and so joined himself
into such a beggarly company. The scholar gipsy having
given them an account of the necessity which drove
him to that kind of life, told them that the people
he went with were not such impostors as they were
taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of
learning among them and could do wonders by the power
of imagination, and that himself had learned much of
their art and improved it further than themselves
could. And to evince the truth of what he told them,
he said he’d remove into another room, leaving them to
discourse together; and upon his return tell them the
sense of what they had talked of; which accordingly
he performed, giving them a full account of what had
passed between them in his absence. The scholars
being amazed at so unexpected a discovery, earnestly
desired him to unriddle the mystery. In which he gave
them satisfaction by telling them that what he did
was by the power of imagination, his phantasy leading
theirs; and that himself had dictated to them the
discourse they had held together while he was from
them; that there were warrantable ways of heightening
the imagination to that pitch as to bend another’s, and
that when he had compassed the whole secret, some parts
of which he was yet ignorant of, he intended to leave
their company and give the world an account of what he
had learned.
If all who have described events like this have not dreamed, we should
rewrite our histories, for all men, certainly all imaginative men,
must be for ever casting forth enchantments, glamours, illusions; and
all men, especially tranquil men who have no powerful egotistic life,
must be continually passing under their power. Our most elaborate
thoughts, elaborate purposes, precise emotions, are often, as I think,
not really ours, but have on a sudden come up, as it were, out of
hell or down out of heaven. The historian should remember, should he
not? angels and devils not less than kings and soldiers, and plotters
and thinkers. What matter if the angel or devil, as indeed certain
old writers believed, first wrapped itself with an organized shape in
some man’s imagination? what matter ‘if God himself only acts or is in
existing beings or men,’ as Blake believed? we must none the less admit
that invisible beings, far wandering influences, shapes that may have
floated from a hermit of the wilderness, brood over council-chambers
and studies and battle-fields. We should never be certain that it was
not some woman treading in the wine-press who began that subtle change
in men’s minds, that powerful movement of thought and imagination about
which so many Germans have written; or that the passion, because of
which so many countries were given to the sword, did not begin in the
mind of some shepherd boy, lighting up his eyes for a moment before it
ran upon its way.
V
We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more
visibly and obviously, and in all likelihood more easily and fully
than we do, for our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive
meditative life, and our education that enlarges the separated,
self-moving mind, have made our souls less sensitive. Our souls that
were once naked to the winds of heaven are now thickly clad, and have
learned to build a house and light a fire upon its hearth, and shut
to the doors and windows. The winds can, indeed, make us draw near
to the fire, or can even lift the carpet and whistle under the door,
but they could do worse out on the plains long ago. A certain learned
man, quoted by Mr. Lang in his _Making of Religion_, contends that the
memories of primitive man and his thoughts of distant places must have
had the intensity of hallucination, because there was nothing in his
mind to draw his attention away from them—an explanation that does not
seem to me complete—and Mr. Lang goes on to quote certain travellers to
prove that savages live always on the edges of vision. One Laplander
who wished to become a Christian, and thought visions but heathenish,
confessed to a traveller, to whom he had given a minute account of many
distant events, read doubtless in that traveller’s mind, ‘that he knew
not how to make use of his eyes, since things altogether distant were
present to them.’ I myself could find in one district in Galway but one
man who had not seen what I can but call spirits, and he was in his
dotage. ‘There is no man mowing a meadow but sees them at one time or
another,’ said a man in a different district.
If I can unintentionally cast a glamour, an enchantment, over persons
of our own time who have lived for years in great cities, there is
no reason to doubt that men could cast intentionally a far stronger
enchantment, a far stronger glamour, over the more sensitive people
of ancient times, or that men can still do so where the old order of
life remains unbroken. Why should not the Scholar Gipsy cast his spell
over his friends? Why should not St. Patrick, or he of whom the story
was first told, pass his enemies, he and all his clerics, as a herd
of deer? Why should not enchanters like him in the _Morte d’Arthur_
make troops of horse seem but grey stones? Why should not the Roman
soldiers, though they came of a civilization which was ceasing to be
sensitive to these things, have trembled for a moment before the
enchantments of the Druids of Mona? Why should not the Jesuit father,
or the Count Saint Germain, or whoever the tale was first told of, have
really seemed to leave the city in a coach and four by all the Twelve
Gates at once? Why should not Moses and the enchanters of Pharaoh have
made their staffs as the medicine men of many primitive peoples make
their pieces of old rope seem like devouring serpents? Why should not
that mediæval enchanter have made summer and all its blossoms seem to
break forth in middle winter?
May we not learn some day to rewrite our histories, when they touch
upon these things too?
Men who are imaginative writers to-day may well have preferred to
influence the imagination of others more directly in past times.
Instead of learning their craft with paper and a pen they may have
sat for hours imagining themselves to be stocks and stones and beasts
of the wood, till the images were so vivid that the passers-by became
but a part of the imagination of the dreamer, and wept or laughed or
ran away as he would have them. Have not poetry and music arisen,
as it seems, out of the sounds the enchanters made to help their
imagination to enchant, to charm, to bind with a spell themselves and
the passers-by? These very words, a chief part of all praises of music
or poetry, still cry to us their origin. And just as the musician or
the poet enchants and charms and binds with a spell his own mind when
he would enchant the minds of others, so did the enchanter create or
reveal for himself as well as for others the supernatural artist or
genius, the seeming transitory mind made out of many minds, whose work
I saw, or thought I saw, in that suburban house. He kept the doors too,
as it seems, of those less transitory minds, the genius of the family,
the genius of the tribe, or it may be, when he was mighty-souled
enough, the genius of the world. Our history speaks of opinions and
discoveries, but in ancient times when, as I think, men had their eyes
ever upon those doors, history spoke of commandments and revelations.
They looked as carefully and as patiently towards Sinai and its
thunders as we look towards parliaments and laboratories. We are always
praising men in whom the individual life has come to perfection,
but they were always praising the one mind, their foundation of all
perfection.