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THE SECRET LIFE
Being the Book of a Heretic
"Prove all things: hold fast that which is good."
_St. Paul, 1 Thessalonians v. 21._
"Ici l'on voulut que tout fût simple, tranquille, sans ostentation
d'esprit ni de science, que personne ne se crût engagé à avoir
raison, et que l'on fût toujours en état de céder sans honte,
surtout qu'aucun système ne dominât dans l'Académie à l'exclusion
des autres, et qu'on laissât toujours toutes les portes ouvert à
la vérité." _Fontenelle._
London: John Lane, The Bodley Head
New York: John Lane Company. MDCCCCVII
Copyright, 1906
By John Lane Company
CONTENTS
PAGE
L'Enfant Terrible 1
An Optimistic Cynic 7
A Poet Sheep-rancher 10
An Eaten Cake 13
Concerning Elbows on the Table 16
An Autumn Impulse 17
John-a'-Dreams 19
The Fountain of Salmacis 41
Two Siegfrieds 44
A Door Ajar 47
At Time of Death 49
The Curse of Babel 49
The Fourth Dimension 52
The Ant and the Lark 58
The Döppelganger 63
"A Young Man's Fancy" 73
An Arabian Looking-glass 78
The Cry of the Women 80
The Beauty of Cruelty 95
The Duke of Wellington's Trees 101
The Boy with the Goose 103
A God Indeed 104
A Question of Skulls 110
The Modern Woman and Marriage 112
The Ideal Husband 120
A New Law of Health 126
"Dead, Dead, Dead" 139
Verbal Magic 140
Hamlet 143
Ghosts 149
Amateur Saints 153
The Zeitgeist 159
The Abdication of Man 187
Life 205
Portable Property 206
Are American Parents Selfish? 208
A Question of Heredity 219
The Little Dumb Brother 220
Fever Dreams 248
A Misunderstood Moralist 250
The Pleasures of Pessimism 255
Moral Pauperism 257
On a Certain Lack of Humour in
Frenchmen 258
The Value of a Soul 267
A Grateful Spaniard 271
Bores 271
Emotions and Oxydization 273
Abelard to Heloïse 275
Heloïse to Abelard 277
Yumei Mujitsu 279
The Real Thing 284
"Oh, Eloquent, Just, and Mighty
Death" 286
"Philistia, be Thou Glad of Me" 299
"Oh King, Live Forever!" 305
The Little Room 307
Aftermath 312
June 21.
L'Enfant Terrible.
"The very Devil's in the moon for mischief:
There's not a day, the longest, not the twenty-first of June,
Sees half the mischief in a quiet way
On which three single hours of moonlight smile."
At my age, alas! one no longer gets into mischief, either by moonlight
or at midsummer, and yet to-day all the tricksey spirits of the
invisible world are supposed to be abroad--tangling the horses' manes,
souring the milkmaid's cream, setting lovers by the ears. Some such
frisky Puck stirs even peaceable middle-aged blood at this season to
mild little secret sins, such as beginning a diary in which to set down
one's private naughty views--the heresies one has grown too staid and
cautious to give speech to any longer.
All, I think, have some Secret Garden where they unbind the girdle of
conventions and breathe to a sympathetic listener the opinions they
would repudiate indignantly upon the housetops; but I know of no such
kindred soul--indeed my private views are so heretical that I should
tremble to whisper them even into the dull cold ear of night, lest I
should cause it to turn pink, and thereafter hymns would not purge it.
Hence no resource remains to ease my bosom of its perilous stuff but
the unprotesting innocence of the blank pages of a diary.
There is a story concerning the king of some ungeographical country,
to whom came two adventurers of cynical tendencies, professing to be
able--given a certain allowance of jewels and precious metals--to
weave a garment of exceeding richness and of such subtle texture that
no monarch on earth might hope to match it. Setting up a loom and
providing themselves with ample materials from the Royal treasury,
they went through the motions of stringing a warp and thereupon
industriously threw empty shuttles back and forth.
When the king, accompanied by his court, was summoned to observe the
progress of the famous web, the puzzled ruler could see nothing but
an empty loom, but before the eager explanations of the enthusiastic
weavers, who pointed out here a glowing dye, there a splendid pattern,
and having regard to the non-committal countenances of the courtiers,
the king nodded sagely and waited developments.
"Best of all, Sire," cried the cheerful rogues, "so magical is this
robe we weave, that only those can see it whose tongue has never
uttered a lie, whose hands have never taken a bribe."
Rises thereupon instant chorus of praise of the beautiful fabric from
a unanimous court. Next day a solemn procession through the streets of
the capital to display to the world the magic robe. Amazed multitude
staring at the king in pompous dishabille, but hearing the courtiers'
admiring cries, no man willing to admit his own blindness--when up
speaks Tiresome Child: "Mother, why does the king ride abroad in his
shirt?"
General outburst of mortified veracity, and futile search for the
discreetly vanished adventurers.
So ends the story. But nothing of the sort really took place. Instead,
l'enfant terrible was slapped and put to bed, to meditate upon his
ill-timed outspokenness, and next day, and all the days thereafter,
sees what his companions see. I know, because I myself am that Tiresome
Child, and because my uncomfortable eyes refuse to see the imaginary
robe in which so many kings of this world are dressed I have spent
a large part of my life in disgrace. At last and tearfully I have
learned to hold my tongue, but when the tricksome spirits of Mid-summer
Eve are abroad, I get out pen and paper and, where no pious ear can
be violated, secretly vent my elderly naughtinesses. My respectable
acquaintances will be all the safer in consequence that I have an
inviolable confidant of the real thoughts that lie behind my but
slightly wrinkled brow and unrevealing eyes. Thackeray once said, "If
women's eyes could only be _dragged_, what queer things one might
learn."... Ah, the Secret Life!--who among us can guess at the thoughts
that are concealed behind the clear brows and frank-seeming eyes of
even those nearest us?
We live our lives draped and masked in our own bodies; forcing those
bodies to speak the words, perform the actions expected from them,
while we dwell alone within, thinking and wishing what we never, or
rarely, express. It is this that drives us to diaries--the need to
somewhere, somehow, speak the truth in a world of conformable lies.
It is of no use to slip aside our masks or raise our draperies for an
instant, in the hope that our fellows will recognize a hand or an eye
like their own, and that thereupon even one of our companions will
invite us to come out from under our robe and walk about with him
friendlily, without disguise. Instead our companion makes signs of
distress and resentment through the veil of his concealment, and we
hastily readjust the mask and domino and resist further temptation to
find a heart akin.
"It takes," says Thoreau, "two to tell the truth--one to speak and
another to hear."
Called upon once to help a grief-stricken mother to lay away the
belongings of a boy summoned suddenly out of life, we unearthed
among his abandoned treasures a curious collection of odds and ends
concerning which we could imagine no value that should have moved him
to keep them by him. A shell, a bit of ribbon, a rusty nail; scraps
of paper with a scribbled line or two; cuttings, whose printed words
referred to nothing which seemed to bear in any way upon what we might
guess of as touching his life.
"I thought I knew every fibre of his heart," cried the mother in sudden
tears, "and yet of all these strange things he seems to have treasured
so carefully I cannot divine the meaning of a single one!" A whole
world of ambitions, interests, and sentiments foreign to her he had
carried away into eternal silence.
If I shall have persistence sufficient to continue this Heretic Diary,
I am afraid it will find itself stuffed with an equally absurd number
of my secret loves and hates, of the intolerable opinions for which
I have been slapped and put to bed, of all the sentimental rubbish I
carry about with me in a fardel under my mask and domino--the poor
inconsequential treasures of my secret life.
July 7.
An Optimistic Cynic.
Amiel's Journal:--I have been reading it with the half impatient
interest which such books always arouse--in me at least. It is a
more agreeable book, however, than Marie Bashkirtseff's disingenuous
posings, or Rousseau's vulgar, insulting confidences. One is impatient
with the bore who talks about himself when one is impatient to bore him
about one's own self, and yet, somehow, one is fascinated by the hope
of getting behind the mask of personality.
I learned to read French that I might possess the contents of the
"Confessions." George Eliot called it the most interesting book she
knew, which fired my ambition to read it. With the aid of a dictionary,
the four great volumes were got through somehow, and when the task was
accomplished, though I loathed Rousseau, I had enough French to serve
roughly for both reading and speech.
What ambition and courage one had in those days! I studied French
while I did the churning. Remembering the strength and persistency of
that time I wonder that I have come to middle age and done nothing.
Athletic trainers say that there is in every one only a fixed capacity
for development. One may reach that limit readily, and once reached no
toil or patience will ever carry the power of the muscles beyond it
by the smallest part of a fraction. Mentally, the same probably holds
good. My capacity was, no doubt, always small. So far as it went the
cramping, unpropitious circumstances of youth had no power to chill
it, but prosperity, leisure, opportunity, could not add one jot to its
possibilities....
In all these journals what I find interesting is not so much what the
writer says as what he reveals unintentionally.
The impression Amiel leaves upon the reader is that he was at least a
gentleman--that he had a gentle soul; clean and modest, continent and
grave. His melancholy seems neither so profound nor so touching as Mrs.
Humphrey Ward and his other critics would have one believe. At least it
is neither tragic nor torturing. He gives the impression of saying "I
have no bread--but," he adds cheerfully, after a moment's reflection,
"the Lord will provide."
He is not rebellious. In moments of the most real gravity, when he is
face to face with death, he clings to the egotistic superstition that
perhaps--most probably--there is somewhere some wise kind Power deeply
interested in his doings, his emotions, his future. He is profoundly
convinced that it is important how he feels, how he bears himself. He
has no sense at all of the blind nullity of things. He asserts this
nullity to be unthinkable.
All this is surprising when one remembers the insistence of his
commentators upon the intense modernity of his mind. Is this modern? I
cannot see wherein it differs from the spirit of the past. Such natures
were not uncommon in other centuries--as was the nature of Erasmus for
example....
The man had no passion. He did not marry because, he says, he demanded
perfection; could not find or give it, and therefore resigned himself
cheerfully to celibacy. Passion, of course, would have blinded his
eyes to imperfections; having none, his eyes were always clear.... It
is perhaps in this passionlessness that he is most modern. Most of us
no longer demand perfection. Knowing it to be unattainable, modern
common sense cheerfully agrees to abandon desire for it. This is
visible in our literature, in art, in love. No one reads or buys long
poems any more, therefore the poets never contemplate a new Paradise
Lost. No one paints heroic pictures, for they are not salable. The
grandiose has no market and therefore grows obsolete. The law of supply
and demand rules there as elsewhere. Passion and the perfection it
longs and strives for is démodé.
July 20.
A Poet Sheep-rancher.
F---- is dead, and with the announcement by cable this morning comes
a belated letter from M----, full of hope and encouragement. A sudden
rally had made her believe in a possibility of recovery--no doubt it
was that last flare which comes often just as the oil fails and the
light is about to go out.
My mind has been full of amazement all day. It is so difficult to
realize that a strong, aggressive personality is finally and definitely
extinguished. I have been thinking of their odd, romantic story. He
must have had great seductive power--not easily realizable now--to
have come into her life and have persuaded her to abandon everything
to follow him. I have heard her tell the story often. The tall young
sheep-rancher from New Zealand, with his burning eyes and his pockets
full of sonnets, appearing one morning, and she suddenly abandons her
brilliant position, her jointure, her two orphan boys, and goes away,
despite the furious outcries of her family and friends, with a man
seven years her junior; goes into the wilderness with him, New Zealand
of more than a quarter of a century ago being decidedly wilderness,
yet she calls those the happiest years of her life--spent in a shanty
fifty miles from the nearest neighbour! She likes to recall the wild
scrambles among the mountains; the wrestles to save the sheep from the
spring floods; the vigils; the dances to which they rode on mountain
ponies, sixty or seventy miles; the makeshifts; the caring for flocks
and shepherds in the stress of heat and cold, of sickness and sorrow;
and the snow-bound nights beside the fire, when the sonnets came to
the fore again. After all it was youth, and love, and adventure; why
shouldn't she have been happy? And she was justified in her faith.
When I came to know them the detrimental young sheep-rancher moved in
a world of gilded aides-de-camp, with sentries and mounted escorts
attending his steps, surrounded by tropical pomp and spacious luxury,
and now, alas! he is but one more unit in the yearly tribute of flesh
and blood demanded by England's Equatorial Empire.
A handsome, brilliant, charming creature. The generation is the
poorer for the loss of his graceful, cynical wit. He belonged to the
generation who formed their ideals of manners upon _Pelham_ and _Vivian
Grey_. It was Byronism translated into prose. M---- says he bore his
sufferings--enormous sufferings--with the light and humorous courage
with which it was the ideal of the fine gentleman of his period to
face all unpleasant situations.
September 4.
An Eaten Cake.
The S----s came in last night after dinner. They cling to the old
fashion, common in England before the advent of afternoon tea, of
having the tray brought in about ten o'clock, so I tried it to-night
because of them, and found it not a bad idea.
Simple, agreeable folk they are, of what is called in Scotland the
middle classes. That is to say, they follow some commercial calling: I
am not sure of its exact nature. They are very well educated in just
the way which differentiates the British middle-class education from
the other sort--they speak several modern languages fluently, and know
little of the classics. All their learning is sound, unornamental,
utilitarian. Some reference was made to a kinsman in a foreign
town which I had visited. I could not recall any association with
the name until the elder brother said quite simply and without any
self-consciousness:
"He is Jones of Jones & Co. (a large haberdasher in P----)--you may
have been in his shop."
It was nicely done. I doubt if an American could have achieved it in
quite the same way. If he had made the confidence it would have been
made with bravado, or he would have explained that the shop was an
"emporium."
The girl has such a good restful British calm about her--I felt it
after she was gone. It arises, I think, from lack of any special
interest in the impression she makes upon others. All the rest of
us--we Americans--were desirous of being agreeable, amusing--of making
a good effect. We were consciously sympathetic, consciously vivacious,
consciously civil. She was just herself; we might take or leave her as
she was. It never occurred to her to attempt to be different for our
sakes. The result of it is very reposeful. One is always conscious of a
sense of strain in American society for this reason. It is because of
that desire to impress, to please, that American voices in conversation
grow sharp and hurried, that American faces grow keen and lined. We
have a tradition that English women are dull and bovine, but no doubt
they make the better mothers because of it. They hoard their energies
to give to their sons. They bring their children into the world with
deep reserves of strength. I have often observed the great superiority
of English men over Americans in the capacity for long, sustained,
unflinching labour. I am sure they owe that to the immense fund of
unexhausted power given them by their mothers, who are profound wells
of calm vitality. It is the old story of being unable to eat one's cake
and have it too. American women eat their cake in the form of a higher
exhilaration in existence, but when the drain of creation comes they
have nothing save nervous energy to give. The rest of the cake has
already been devoured. There are no reserves for the child to call upon.
I believe that Englishmen--without reasoning upon the matter--feel
this instinctively. They vastly prefer their own women as mates. I
have rarely known an Englishman to marry an American woman who had not
the extrinsic attraction of wealth. They do not hesitate to marry
penniless countrywomen of their own.
September 12.
Concerning Elbows on the Table.
A---- was here to-day. What a formal little soul it is! She can never
begin where she left off. One has her acquaintance to make all over
again each time she comes.
The depths, the heights of her propriety!... Always that extremely well
behaved look, which never changes. P---- says, "A---- is too modest to
take off and put on expressions in public."
One wonders if there is any privacy so entire that she would consider
dishevelment of behaviour permissible. How exhausting to herself such
flawless respectability must become!
She is the concentrated essence of the bourgeoisie. A savage can be
natural; he knows nothing else, but when his eyes are opened and he
sees himself to be naked the reign of the fig-leaf begins. There is
something pathetic in that long era of profound distrust of his own
nature and impulses. What does he think he would do if he let himself
go?
Perhaps he is, underneath all that propriety, still so close to
savagery that he dare not trust himself to be natural lest he instantly
relapse into barbarism. After many generations of breeding he dare be
savage and free again if he like--he is so sure of himself. As Mrs.
B---- says, he becomes at last "A man who can afford to put his elbows
on the table."
When he reaches such a point I notice he is always impatient of the
constraint of those still bound by the shackles of self-conscious
propriety, forgetting that he owes his own freedom to many generations
that laboured in bonds, struggling to slay or subdue the savage....
October 14.
An Autumn Impulse.
A bird sat on the balcony rail just outside my window to-day gossiping
with an unseen neighbour perched somewhere out of my range of vision.
He was rather a grimy little person, and as the day was cold he made a
perfect puff ball of himself. I listened to them conversing with great
interest, feeling, as I always do when I hear birds talk, that if I
only paid a little closer attention it would be possible to understand
all they say. It is somewhat the same sensation one has in overhearing
a rapid dialogue in French which one is too lazy to try to follow. When
I came through I think I left some of the doors ajar behind me, and
I remember my bird avatar especially clearly. Even yet, when autumn
comes, I am pursued by a fluttering longing to arise and go southward.
I feel that something beautiful--some wide splendid ecstasy is calling
me if I will only go to meet it. I can remember having that sensation
in my earliest childhood. In my dreams I often fly, with beautiful
swoopings and balancings, with sudden confident droppings, through the
elastic air, and sometimes I am in an enclosed place, beating my wings
against the bounds, knowing no other way to get out....
When I look at birds they seem to know me. Not in the way of a mere
creature who puts out crumbs in convenient breakfasting places, or
who brings strawberries to one's cage, but they meet my eye with
that familiarity one sees in the glance of brothers--a look of mutual
understanding. My own sense is of kinship of the closest character. I
understand how they regard things--what they think and feel. I wish I
could so concentrate my attention as to catch what this grimy little
citizen is saying to his fellow on the nearby ledge. If I could, what a
flood of other memories it would restore that are now dim and confused.
November 1.
John-a'-Dreams.
I dreamed last night that I wore upon my breast a great necklace of
flat golden plates cut in the shape of winged things, and these were
linked together with other flat plates of turquoise. My garments were
of white semi-transparent stuff, and my limbs and body showed through
it. Before me stood a building of some sort, creamy yellow in colour
and of a style of architecture with which I am not familiar--though it
seemed familiar enough to me in my dreams. Now I have only a confused
sense of low domes set upon massive cubes. I was waiting for the
sun to rise. The air was warm and dry and that white glamour of the
dawning light lay upon the surrounding country, which seemed flat and
not very verdant. Suddenly the rays of the sun, which rose apparently
immediately behind this dome, spread out about it like an aureole
(Gavin Douglas's "Golden fanys")--and this seemed a signal for me to
lift my arms above my head and recite a sort of litany--and then--it
all passed away....
Most of one's dreams are confused and blurred by a sense of conflicting
personalities. There is generally a sort of impression that while the
incidents are apparently happening to one's self, they are happening
in reality to some other being, not quite one's self; but this one was
very clear, with no arrière pensée. I have worked out a theory which
seems to me to quite solve the mystery of dreams.
Lifelong familiarity with the phenomena of sleep--with the trooping
phantoms that inhabit slumber's dusk realm--has so dulled our wonder
at the mystery of our double existence of the dark that night after
night we open with calm incuriousness the door into that ghostly
underworld, where we hold insane revels with fantastic spectres, babble
with foolish laughter at witless jests, stain our souls with useless
crime, or fly with freezing blood from the grasp of unnamable horrors,
and with the morning we saunter serenely back from these adventures
into the warm precincts of the cheerful day, unmoved, unstartled, and
forgetting.
The hypnotists, because they can make a man feel pain or pleasure
without material cause, are gaped upon with awed surprise by the same
man who once every twenty-four hours of his life, with no more magic
potion than healthy fatigue, with no greater weapon for wonder working
than a pillow, may create for himself phantasmal illusions beside which
all mesmeric suggestions are but the flattest of commonplace.
The naive egotism of superstition saw in the movements of the solar
system only prognostications concerning its own bean crop, and could
discern nothing in the dream-world but the efforts of the supernatural
powers to communicate, in their usual shuffling and incompetent
fashion, with man. The modern revolt from this childishness has swung
the pendulum of interest in dreams so far up the other curve of the arc
that there seems now to be a foolish fear of attaching any importance
whatever to the strange experiences of sleep, and as a result an
unscientific avoidance of the whole subject. The consequence of this
absurd revulsion is that in a period of universal investigation one
of the most curious functions of the brain is left unexamined and
unexplained.
Some dabbling there has been, with results of little more value
than were the contents of the greasy, bethumbed dream-books of the
eighteenth-century milkmaid or apprentice. The labour bestowed upon
the matter has been mainly directed to efforts to prove the extreme
rapidity with which dreams pass through the mind, and that it is some
trivial outward cause at the very instant of awakening--such as a
noise, a light, or a blow--which rouses the brain to this miraculous
celerity of imaginative creation.
The persistent assertion that a dream occurs only at the moment of
awakening shows how little real attention has been given to the
matter, since the most casual observation of "the dog that hunts in
dreams" would have shown that he may be "chasing the wild deer and
following the roe" in the grey Kingdom of Seeming without breaking his
slumbers. He will start and twitch, and give tongue after the phantom
quarry he dreams he is pursuing, and yet continue his sleep without an
interval. But have it whichever way one likes, the heart of the mystery
is not yet discovered. How do they explain why a noise or a gleam
of light--such as the waking senses know familiarly--should at this
magical moment of rousing cause the brain to create with inconceivable
rapidity a crowd of phantasmagoria in order to explain to itself the
familiar phenomena of light and sound?
Dr. Friederich Scholz, in his recent volume upon "Sleep and Dreams,"
gives an example of rapid effort of the mind to explain the sensations
felt by the sleeping body:
"I dreamed of the Reign of Terror, saw scenes of blood and murder,
appealed before the Revolutionary Tribunal, saw Robespierre, Marat,
Fouquier-Tinville, all the personages of that time of horrors, argued
with them, was finally, after a number of occurrences, condemned to
death, was carried to the place of execution on a cart through enormous
masses of people, was bound by the executioner to the board. The knife
fell and I felt my head severed from my body. Thereupon I awoke and
found that a loosened rod of the bed had fallen on my neck like the
knife of the guillotine, and this had happened, my mother assured me,
at the very moment when I awoke."...
That the mind should, merely because of the body's sleep, be able to
_create_ a whole scene of a terrible drama with a rapidity impossible
when all the functions are awake and active is incredible. The only
function of the brain capable of this lightning-like swiftness of
vision is _memory_. To create requires a certain effort, consumes a
certain period of time, but a scene once beheld, an adventure once
experienced and vividly impressed upon the memory, can be recalled in
its minutest details in a period of time too short to be reckonable.
That the sensitive plate of the brain never loses any clear picture
once received, has been demonstrated beyond doubt. The picture,
the sensation, may be overlaid and hidden for a long time beneath
the heaps of useless lumber that the days and years accumulate in
the mind's storehouse, but need or accident, or a similarity of
circumstance, will bring the forgotten belonging to light--sometimes
with startling effect. There is the well-known instance of a girl who,
during an attack of fever delirium, spoke in a language that no one
about her could understand. Investigation proved it to be Welsh--a
language of which, both before and after her illness, she was totally
ignorant. Further investigation showed that being born in Wales she
had understood the tongue as a very little child, but had afterwards
completely forgotten it.
It is commonly known that in the struggle of the body against death by
water, the memory, stirred to furious effort, produces all her stores
at once--probably in the frantic endeavour to find some experience
which may be of use in this crisis.
It is often broadly asserted that the memory retains each and every
experience which life has presented for its contemplation, but this
is hardly true. The memory makes to a certain extent a choice, and
chooses oftentimes with apparent caprice. To demonstrate the truth of
this, let one endeavour to recall the first impression retained by his
childish mind and it usually proves to be something extremely trivial.
My own first clear memory is a sense of the comfort to my tired little
two-year-old body of the clean linen sheets of the bed at the end of
a perilous and adventurous journey, of whose startling incidents my
memory preserved only one. Often this capricious faculty will seize
upon some few high lights in a vivid picture and reject all the
unimportant details. As a rule, however, it is the profound stirring of
the emotions which wakes the memory to activity. A woman never forgets
her first lover. A man to the end of his life can recall his first
triumph, or his most imminent danger, and a trifle will often, after
the lapse of half a century, fill the eye with tears, make the cheek
burn, or the heart beat with the power of the long-passed emotion,
preserved living and fresh by the memory.
That the memory uses in sleep the material it has gathered during the
day, and during the whole life, no dreamer will deny; but here again
it is capricious; some parts of the day's--the life's--experiences
are used, others rejected. Added to these natural and explicable
possessions of the memory are a mass of curious, conflicting, tangled
thoughts, which are foreign to our whole experience of existence, and
which, when confused with our own memories, makes of our nights a wild
jumble of useless and foolish pictures. If it be true that it is by
some outward impression upon the senses that dreams are evoked, that
it is the endeavours of the somnolent mind to explain to itself the
meaning of a noise, a light, a blow, which creates that delusion we
call dreams, then it is not upon the stores of our own memories alone
that the brain draws for material, since the falling rod awoke in the
mind of Dr. Scholz a picture of the French revolution, which he had
never seen, and different in detail and vividness from any picture his
reading had furnished.
Heredity is an overworked jade, too often driven in double harness with
a hobby; but the link between generation and generation is so strong
and so close that none may lightly tell all the strands of which it
is woven, nor from whence were spun the threads that tie us to the
past. It is very certain, despite the theories of Weismann, that the
acquired characteristics of the parent may be transmitted to the child.
The boy whose father walked the quarter-deck is, nine times out of
ten, as certain to head for salt water as a seagull born in a hen's
nest. The victim of ill-fortune and prisoner of despair who breaks
the jail of life to escape fate's malice leaves a dark tendency in
the blood of his offspring, which again and again proves the terrible
power of an inherited weakness. Women who lose their mind or become
clouded in thought at childbirth--though they come of a stock of _mens
sana_--transmit the blight of insanity to their sons and daughters
both; and not only consumptive tendencies and the appetite for drink
are acquired in a lifetime and then handed on for generations, but
preferences, talents, manners, personal likeness--all may be the
wretched burden or happy gift handed down to the son by the father. Who
can say without fear of contradiction that the memories of passions
and emotions that stirred those dead hearts to their centre may not be
a part of our inheritance? The setting, the connection, is gone, but
the memory of the emotion remains. Such and such nerves have quivered
violently for such or such a cause--the memory stores and transmits the
impression, and a similar incident sets them tingling again, though two
generations lie between.
Certainly animals possess very distinctly these inherited memories. A
young horse never before beyond the paddock and stables will fall into
a very passion of fear when a snake crosses his path, or when driven
upon a ferry to cross deep, swift water. He is entirely unfamiliar
with the nature of the danger, but at some period one of his kind has
sweated and throbbed in hideous peril, and the memory remains after the
lapse of a hundred years. He, no more than ourselves, can recall all
the surrounding circumstances of that peril, but the threatening aspect
of a similar danger brings memory forward with a rush to use her stored
warning. When the migrating bird finds its way without difficulty,
untaught and unaccompanied, to the South it has never seen, we call
its guiding principle instinct--but what is the definition of the word
instinct? No man can give it. It but removes the difficulty one step
backward. Call this instinct an inherited memory and the matter becomes
clear. Such memories, it is plain, are more definite with the animals
than with us; but so are many of their faculties, hearing, smell, and
sight.
Everyone has felt many times in his life a sense of familiarity with
incidents that have had no place in his own experience, and has found
it impossible to offer any explanation for the feeling. Coming suddenly
around a turn of a hill upon a fair and unknown landscape, his heart
may bound with a keen sense of recognition of its unfamiliar outlines.
In the midst of a tingling scene of emotion, a sensation of the whole
incident being a mere dull repetition will rob it of its joy or pain.
A sentence begun by a friend is recognized as trite and old before it
is half done, though it refers to matters new to the hearer. A sound,
a perfume, a sensation, will awaken feelings having no connection with
the occasion.
The first day I ever spent in a tropical country I was charmed with
the excessive novelty of everything about me; but suddenly that
evening, being carried home in a chair by the coolie bearers, a flood
of recognition poured over me like the waves of the sea, and for a
few minutes the illusion was so strong as to leave me breathless with
astonishment. I had the sense of having often done this before. The
warm night, the padding of the bare feet in the dust, the hot smell of
leaves, were all an old, trite experience. For days I struggled with
that tormenting sense, with which we are all familiar, of being unable
to recall a something, a name, that is perfectly well known--is "on
the tip of the tongue," as one says--but all in vain; and in time the
recognition grew fainter and more elusive with each effort to grasp it,
until it slipped forever away into darkness. If such experiences as
these are not inherited memories, what are they?
With sleep, the will becomes dormant. Waking, it guards and governs;
chooses what we shall do and be and think; stands sentinel over the
mind and rejects all comers with which it is not familiar. Unless the
thought comes from within the known borders of the body's own life, the
will will have none of it. But overtaken by fatigue and sinking into
slumber with the night, his domain is left fenceless and unpatrolled,
for with the will goes his troop of watchmen, judgment, logic,
deliberation, ethics; and memory, ungoverned and uncontrolled, holds a
feast of misrule. The barrier between past and present melts away; all
his ancestors are merged into the individual; the events of the day are
inextricably tangled with those of two centuries since, and this motley
play of time is called a dream.
A man going back but to his great grandparents has already fourteen
direct progenitors, and is heir of such strange or striking episodes of
their fourteen lives as were sufficiently deeply impressed upon their
memories to be transmittable. This alone is enough, one would think,
to provide all the nights with material for the queer kaleidoscopic
jumbling of leavings, with which the nimble mind diverts itself,
turning over the leaves of its old picture-book alone in the dark while
its sluggish comrade snores; but there is no reason to believe that
there is a limit to these inheritances.
The most vivid sensation my night memory holds is of finding myself
standing alone, high up in a vast arena. It is open to the sky and
the night is falling swiftly and warm. Everyone has gone but myself,
but there is a tremulous sensation in my mind, as of very recent
excitement, noise, and tumult. I am waiting for someone who is coming
through the arched door on the left, and I rise to go. I feel the
rough coolness of the stone beneath my hand as I help myself to rise,
and upon my throat and bosom I have a sensation of the light wool of
my garment. It has the vivid familiarity of a personal and perfectly
natural experience--so strong that, waking, I retain as keen a sense
of it as if it were a happening of yesterday. I remember many more
dreams of this type--momentary flashes of sensation of the trivial
things about me, such as all persons have felt in their waking lives,
only that the things about me in my dreams are totally unfamiliar to
my waking brain. In one of these I am emerging from the back door of a
small white house--intensely white in the glare of a fierce sun. The
house seems square and flat-topped, built of stone and with no windows
visible here in the rear. It opens on a narrow street of similar
residences. A man is with me, dressed in a long black robe and wearing
a curious black head-dress. He is reproaching me and remonstrating
violently concerning my indifference in regard to religious matters. I
look away, annoyed and bored by his vehemence, and the whole picture
vanishes. It was as clear, as natural and familiar, as my own waking
life, while it lasted.... The narrow street of white houses seemed the
only possible form for a street. I had no consciousness of anything
different or more modern. The man's eager, stern face, with the heavy
beard and the high head-dress, looked in no way strange or unfamiliar.
With that double consciousness with which we are all familiar when
awake, I watched the movement of his lips and the wagging of his beard
as he talked, full of a sense of distaste, and thought, while listening
to his flow of clear words, "How tiresome these religious men are!"
Another time I was aware of standing in the dark, sword in hand (I
seemed to be a man and the seeming was not strange to me), listening
with furious pulses to a confusion of clashing blades and stamping
of feet. Under the surface of passionate excitement the deeper
sub-consciousness said: "All is lost! The conspiracy is a failure!"
I was aware of a cool bravado which recognized the uselessness of
attempting escape. The dice had been thrown--they had turned up wrong,
that was all. Yet so vigorous and courageous was the heart of this
man that he was still buoyantly unafraid. There was a rush of bodies
by him; the door swung back against him, crushing him to the wall,
and a few moments later, under guard, he was passing through a long,
low corridor of stone. The torches showed the groined arch above him,
and, a cell being unlocked, for the first time he felt afraid. Inside
was a big bear with a collar about its neck, and two villainous-faced
mountebanks sat surlily upon the floor. The man was very much afraid at
the thought of such companions, for his hands were tied and he had no
sword; yet he reasoned jovially with his guards, not wishing to show
his real terror. After some protests his sword was returned to him and
he stepped inside, again cheerfully confident. The door clanged to
behind him and the dream faded. All the conditions of the dream, the
change of sex, the strange clothes and faces, the arched corridor, the
men with the bear, seemed to my senses perfectly natural. They were
quite commonplace, and of course. For the most part, however, my dreams
are the fantastic hodge-podge common to dreamers, such as might result
from the unsorted, unclassified memories of a thousand persons flung
down in a heap together and grasped without choice. One curious fact
I have noted is that though I am a wide and omnivorous reader, I have
never had a dream or impression in sleep which might not have been part
of the experience of some one of European or American ancestry. I am
an ardent reader of travel and adventure, but never have I imagined
myself in Africa, nor have the landscapes of my dreams been other than
European or American.
Mr. Howells, in "True I Talk of Dreams," added confirmation on this
point by saying that he had never been able to discover a dreamer
who had seen in his dreams a dragon or any such beast of impossible
proportions.
It suggests itself--_en passant_--that dragons and other such "fearful
wild fowl" are not uncommon in the cataclysmic visions of delirium, but
perhaps the potency of fever, of drugs, of alcohol, or of mania, may
open up deeps of memory, of primordial memory, that are closed to the
milder magic of sleep. The subtle poison in the grape may gnaw through
the walls of Time and give the memory sight of those terrible days when
we wallowed--nameless shapes--in the primæval slime. Who knows whether
Alexander the Great, crowning himself with the gold of Bedlam's straws,
may not be only forgetful of the years that gape between him and his
kingly Macedonian ancestor? Even Horatio's philosophy did not plumb all
the mysteries of life and of heredity.
Another interesting fact, in this connection, is that those who come
of a class who have led narrow and uneventful lives for generations
dream but little, and that dully and without much sensation; while the
children of adventurous and travelled ancestors--men and women whose
passions have been profoundly stirred--have their nights filled with
the movement "of old forgotten far-off things and battles long ago."
Again, it is a fact that many persons, while hovering on the borders
of sleep, but still vaguely conscious, are accustomed to see pictures
of all manner of disconnected things--many of them scenes or faces
which have never had part in their waking life--drifting slowly across
the darkness of the closed lid like the pictures of a magic lantern
across a sheet stretched to receive them, and these, by undiscernible
gradations, lead the sleeper away into the land of dreams, the dim
treasure house of memory and the past.
If a dream is a memory, then the stories of their momentary duration
are easily credible. The falling rod upon the sleeper's neck might
recall, as by a lightning flash, some scene in the Red Terror in which
his ancestor participated--an ancestor so nearly allied, perhaps,
to the victim suffering under the knife as to know all the agonies
vicariously, and leave the tragedy bitten into his memory and his blood
forever.
When the words heredity or instinct are contemplated in their broad
sense they mean no more than inherited memory. The experiences of
many generations teach the animal its proper food and methods of
defence. The fittest survive because they have inherited most clearly
the memories of the best means of securing nourishment and escaping
enemies. The marvellous facility gradually acquired by artisans who for
generations practise a similar craft is but the direct transmission of
the brain's treasures.
In sleep the brain is peculiarly active in certain directions, not
being distracted by the multitude of impressions constantly conveyed
to it by the five senses, and experiments with hypnotic sleepers
prove that some of its functions become in sleep abnormally acute and
vigorous. Why not the function of memory? The possessions which during
the waking hours were useless, and therefore rejected by the will,
surge up again, vivid and potent, and troop before the perception
unsummoned, motley and fantastic; serving no purpose more apparent
than do the idle, disconnected recollections of one's waking moments
of dreaminess--and yet it may hap, withal, that the tireless brain,
forever turning over and over its heirlooms in the night, is seeking
here an inspiration, or there a memory, to be used in that fierce and
complex struggle called Life.
November 6.
The Fountain of Salmacis.
G---- was talking yesterday about the "Sonnets from the Portuguese."
Liked them. Thought them the high-water mark of Feminine Poetry....
Alas, then, for that capitalized variety of verse!
To me these sonnets are extremely disagreeable. There is a type of
man whose love is intolerably odious in all its manifestations to a
wholesome woman. She feels that he is too nearly akin to her own sex
for his love to seem a natural, virile thing. Other men never appear to
guess this cause of persistent lack of success with women.
They say: "Jones is a good fellow--modest, clean-minded, gentle,--why
is he so unlucky with women? The truth is, women like brutes."
The underlying femininity of Jones is not repulsive to them. They
probably feel, however, the same repugnance for the tendernesses of
women who are too nearly akin to themselves.
The Greeks seem to have thought about and observed this. From their
keen vision none of the phenomena of life, apparently, was hid, and
they were quite aware of this occasional confusion of the nature and
person of the sex. As usual they typified it and invented legends
about it, though they were not, of course, aware of its cause--the
atavistic tendency to throw back to the primordial condition when both
sexes existed in the same individual; but then they were poets and not
scientists. They got at essential truths by instinct and revealed their
knowledge by beautiful suggestion rather than by exact analysis. The
dry-as-dusts fail even yet to see that their marbles and legends are as
valuable in the study of life as German theses.
"The Sonnets from the Portuguese" give me the unwholesome,
uncomfortable sense that one gets from those unlucky feminine men
and masculine women. They mingle in a disagreeable fashion the pride
and reserve of the woman who receives worship and the abandon and
aggressiveness of the man who sues.
One wonders why women cannot write poetry?--or rather, to speak with
more exactness--are never poets. Once or twice in their lives,
perhaps, they may speak with sacred fire, but they are never, in the
full meaning of the word, poets. They cannot rise out of themselves.
Gosse says of Mrs. Browning: "She was not striving to produce an
effect; she was trying with all the effort of which her spirit was
capable to say exactly what was in her heart."
There is the whole secret of the feminine failure in art. It always
degenerates into an attempt to express, not humanity, but the
individual woman. Woman is inevitably personal. She still sits alone
at the door of her wigwam. Of humanity, she is ignorant, and to it is,
moreover, indifferent.
Mrs. Browning was only once shaken out of herself--when she wrote that
fine plaint "De Profundis"--voicing the griefs of the many in telling
of her own. After all, a portrait of one's self only is not art, or is
art in its most limited form. Aurora Leigh and all the rest are simply
Elizabeth Barrett masking under other names. However much the hand may
resemble Esau's, the voice is always the voice of Jacob.
Byron had these same feminine limitations--"dressing up" (as the
children say) as a Pirate, a Turk, or the like, and reciting a rhymed
Baedeker for the benefit of the untravelled; but whether Pirate or
Giaour, always unmistakably Byron.