I could almost persuade myself, that others will like this little
fable as much as I do: so curiously simple, and yet so strangely
profound is its delicate epitome of the old old story, the course of
true love, which never did run smooth.
And since so many people have asked me questions as to the origin of
these stories, I will say a word on the point here. Where do they come
from? I do not know. I discovered only the other day that some believe
them to have been written by a woman. That appears to me to be
improbable. But who writes them? I cannot tell. They come to me, one
by one, suddenly, like a flash of lightning, all together: I see them
in the air before me, like a little Bayeux tapestry, complete, from
end to end, and write them down, hardly lifting the pen from the
paper, straight off "from the MS." I never know, the day before, when
one is coming: it arrives, as if shot out of a pistol. Who can tell?
They may be all but so many reminiscences of a former birth.
The _Substance of a Dream_ is half a love-story, and half a fairy
tale: as indeed every love-story is a fairy tale. Because, although
that unaccountable mystery, the mutual attraction of the sexes, is the
very essence of life, and everything else merely accidental or
accessory, yet only too often in the jostle of the world, in the
trough and tossing of the waves of time, the accidental smothers the
essential, and life turns into a commonplace instead of a romance. And
so, like every other story, this little story will perhaps be very
differently judged, according to the reader's sex. The bearded critic
will see it with eyes very different from those with which it may be
viewed by the fair voter with no beard upon her chin; for women, as
the great god says at the end, have scant mercy on their own sex, and
the heroine of the story is a strange heroine, an enigmatical Mona
Lisa, so to say, who will not appeal to everybody so strongly as she
does to the Moony-crested Deity, when he sums her up at the close. I
venture, with humility, to concur in the opinion of the Deity, for she
holds me under the same spell as her innumerable other lovers. The
reader, a more formidable authority even than the god, must decide:
only I must warn him that to understand, he must go to the very end.
He will not think his time wasted, if he take half the delight in
reading, as I did, in transcribing, the evidence in the case. Only,
moreover, when he closes the book will he appreciate the mingled
exactitude and beauty of its name: for no story ever had a name which
fitted it with such curious precision as this one. For the essence of
a dream is always that along with its weird beauty, it counters
expectation, often in such queer, ludicrous, kaleidoscopic ways. So it
is, here.
* * * * *
Many bitter things, since the beginning, have men said of women,
though neither so many nor so bitter, as the witty Frenchman cynically
remarks, as the things women have said of one another. Poor Eve has
paid very dear for that apple: the only wonder is, that she was not
made responsible also for the Flood: but we have not got the whole of
that story: Noah's wife may have dropped some incriminating documents
into the water, for the Higher Criticism to unearth by and by: the
Eternal Feminine may have had a hand in it after all, as she is
generally to be found somewhere behind the scenes, wherever mischief
brews for mortal man. She comes down the ages, loaded with
accusations; and yet, somehow or other, they do not seem to have done
her much harm. And the reason is, that she possesses, in supreme
perfection, the art of disarming her antagonist, having been very
cunningly constructed by the Creator for that very purpose: she is
like a cork; she will not drown, under any flood of charges: she
floats, _quand même_: (two words that she might very well take, like
the inimitable Sarah, for her motto:) so that, be as angry as you
please with her, you generally find yourself not only unable to
condemn her, but even ready to beg her pardon, and rather glad, on the
whole, to get it. It is a hopeless case. And all the more, because no
woman ever lived, bad or good, who could be got to understand what is
meant by "playing cricket": you cannot make her keep the rules in any
game: she plays to win, like a German, and invariably cheats, if she
can: international law counts, only as long as it is for and not
against her: if you find her out, and scold her, she pouts, and will
not play. And then, if, as is commonly the situation, you want her to
play, very badly, what are you to do? Yes, it is a hopeless case.
* * * * *
And yet, if we look into the matter with that stern impartiality which
its public importance demands, we may perceive, that though there is,
it must be candidly owned, an element of truth in the charges brought
against her, they are founded, for all that, largely on
misunderstanding. It is man himself, her accuser, who is very nearly
always to blame. His intelligence as compared with her own, is clumsy:
(it is the difference between the dog and the cat:) he does not
realise the unfathomable gulf that divides her nature from his own,
and for lack of imaginative tact, judging her by himself, he
enormously overestimates the part played by reason in her behaviour.
Hence when, as she is always doing, she lets him down, he breaks out,
(obtusely) into denunciation and reproach, taking it for granted, that
what she did, she did, deliberately. But that is his mistake. Women
never act by deliberation, least of all in their relations with men.
Reason has hardly anything to do with it. A woman is a weapon,
designed by the Creator, who generally knows what he is doing, to
fascinate the other sex: that is her essence and her _raison d'être_:
the woman who does not do it is a failure, and she is Nature's triumph
and entelechy, who does it best. And this every woman knows, by
instinct, and feels, long before she knows it, almost as soon as she
can stand upon her feet: consequently, no artificially elaborated
compliment, no calculated flattery, ever touches her so near, as it
does, when she perceives that her personality _tells_, acts like a
charm, on any given man: a point about which no woman ever blunders,
as a man often so ridiculously does about himself: she invariably
detects, by unerring instinct, when her arrow hits its mark. And this
involuntary homage she finds so irresistibly delectable, going as it
does down to the very depths of her being, and endorsing it, that she
literally _cannot_ deny herself the pleasure of basking in it, making
hay, so to say, while her sun shines, revelling in the consciousness
of her power all the more delicious because she knows only too well
that she must lose it later on, as youth flies: old age, _i.e._ the
loss of her charm, being every woman's ogre, the skeleton in her
cupboard, which she dreads far more than death, just as the only
disease which she shudders to face is the smallpox, for a similar
reason. And so, when she finds her spell working, she lets herself go:
never dreaming what interpretation her victim puts on her behaviour:
and then, all at once, she awakes to discover with what fire she was
ignorantly playing. And then it is, that she recoils, on the verge:
and then it is, that thwarted in the very moment that he deemed
triumph secured, the baffled lover falls into fury and abuse, because
he imagines her to have been all along clearly aware of what she was
about, which is exactly what hardly one woman in a million does. Not
being a man, she does not understand: her end is only his beginning:
his object is possession, still to come: hers is already gained in the
form of the tribute to her charm: she was only playing (every woman is
a child), he was in deadly earnest, and took her purely instinctive
self-congratulation for a promise deliberately made. Suddenly
illuminated, she lets him down abruptly with a bump, all the harder
that she never meant to do it (the _coquette_ does: but she is a
horrible professional, methodising feminine instinct, for prey: a
psychological ghoul, feeding on souls instead of bodies, and deserving
extermination without benefit of clergy). The real crime of woman is
not so much a crime as a defect: she is weak, as all the sages know,
and all languages prove, though "democracy" ignores it; it is her
strength, and half her charm, that she cannot stand alone, like a
creeper. But that is why you cannot depend on her, good or bad.
Irresolution is her essence: she will "determine" one way, and act in
another, according to the pressure. Instinct, inclination or aversion,
vanity, emotion, pity or fear, or even mere chance: these are her
motives, the forces that move her: reason counts with her for
absolutely nothing, a thing like arithmetic, useful, even
indispensable, but only for adding up a grocer's bill, or catching a
train. It has literally nothing to do with her heart. There is no
folly like the folly of supposing that it has: yet on this folly rest
most of the accusations against her. Reduce her to a rational being,
and you degrade her to the level of an inferior man. But she is not
his inferior: she is his dream, his magnet, his force, his
inspiration, and his fate. Take her away, and you annihilate him:
Othello's occupation's gone. Nine-tenths of the great things done in
the world have been done for a woman. Why? Exactly because she would
burn down a street to boil her baby's milk. No rational being would do
that: but we all owe our lives to it.
And hence, misogyny is only a pique. To fall foul of the sea, like
Xerxes, when it wrecks your ambitions, is to behave as he did, like a
spoiled child, without the child's excuse. "If you burn your fingers,
is the flame to blame?" You should have known better. When Aristotle
was reproved, by some early political economist, for giving alms to a
beggar, he replied: I gave not to the man, but humanity. Admirable
retort! which is exactly in point here. When she requited your homage
with such encouraging smiles, it was not _you_ but the man in you,
that appealed to her. And because you are _a_ man, are you necessarily
_the_ man? Not at all. And argument is mere waste of time: reason is
not the court of appeal. _If of herself she will not love, nothing
can make her._ Yet why draw the poet's ungallant conclusion? Why
should _the devil take her_? Because she was weak (were _you_ not
weak?) is she therefore to be damned beyond redemption? Because
flattery was sweet, must she give herself away to every male animal
that confesses the spell? Surely that is not only harsh, but
preposterous, even outrageous. Are you sure that your merit is worthy
of such generosity?
And yet, here is the human catastrophe. Why did the Creator scatter
his sexual attraction so anomalously that it is so rarely
reciprocated, each lover pursuing so often another who flies him for a
third, as in _Midsummer Night's Dream_, an imbroglio oddly enough
found in a little poem identical in the Greek Moschus and the Hindoo
Bhartrihari? Was it blunder or design? Why could he not have made
action and reaction equal and opposite, as they are in mechanics? For
if affection could not operate at all, unless it was mutual, there
would be no unhappy, because ill-assorted, marriages. What a
difference it would have made! Had mutual gravitation been the law of
the sexes, as it is of the spheres, this Earth would never have stood
in need of a Heaven, since it would have existed already: for the only
earthly heaven is a happy marriage. As it is, even when it is not a
Hell, a marriage is only too often but an everlasting sigh.
* * * * *
And not marriage only, but life. For here lies the solution of a
mystery that has baffled the sages, who have failed to discover it
chiefly because they have blinded themselves by their own theological
and philosophical delusions, idealism and monotheism. Why is it, that
gazing at Nature's inexhaustible beauty, thrown at us with such lavish
profusion in her dawns and her sunsets, her shadows and her moods, in
the roar of her breakers and the silence of her snows, the gloom of
her thunder and the spirit of her hills, the blue of her distance and
the tints of her autumns, the glory of her blossom and the dignity of
her decay, her heights and her abysses, her fury and her peace--why is
it, that as we gaze insatiably at these never ending miracles, we are
haunted by so unaccountable a sadness, which is not in the things
themselves, for Nature never mourns, but in some element that we
ourselves import? For if the Soul be only Nature's mirror, her
looking-glass, whence the melancholy? It is because beneath our
surface consciousness, far away down below, in the dark organic depths
that underlie it, we feel without clearly understanding that, as the
Hindoos put it, we have missed the fruit of our existence, owing to
our never having found our other half. For every one of us, so far
from being a self-sufficient whole, an independent unity, is
incomplete, requiring for its metaphysical satisfaction, its
complement, apart from which it never can attain that peace which
passeth all understanding, for which it longs obscurely, and must ever
be uneasy, till it finds it. For just as no misfortunes whatever can
avail to mar the bliss of the man who has beside him the absolute
sympathy of his feminine ideal, so on the other hand no worldly
success of any kind can compensate for its absence. All particular
causes of happiness or misery are swallowed up and sink into
insignificance and nullity compared with this: this present, they
disappear: this absent, each alone is sufficient to wreck the soul,
fluttering about without rudder or ballast on the waves of the world.
Duality is the root, out of which alone, for mortals, happiness can
spring. And the old Hindoo mythology, which is far deeper in its
simplicity than the later idealistic pessimism, expresses this
beautifully by giving to every god his other half; the supreme
instance of which dualism is the divine Pair, the Moony-crested god
and his inseparable other half, the Daughter of the Snow: so
organically symbolised that they coalesce indistinguishably into one:
the _Arddanárí_, the Being half Male half Female, He whose left half
is his wife. That is the true ideal: cut in two, and destroyed, by the
dismal inhuman monotheism of later sophistical speculation.
* * * * *
It was long before I understood this: the solution came to me
suddenly, of its own accord, as all profound solutions always come,
apparently by accident: like a "fluke" in a game of skill, where often
unskilfulness unintentionally does something that could not be
achieved by any degree of skill whatever, short of the divine.[1] And
the two things that combined to produce my spark of illumination were,
as it so fell out, the two things that mean most to me, a sunset and a
child. The child was looking at the sunset, and I was looking at the
child. Some readers of these stories have been introduced to her
before, and will be obliged to me for renewing the acquaintance, as
they would be to the postman who brought them news of an old friend.
The sunset was like every other sunset, the garment of a dying deity,
and a gift of god: but it had a special peculiarity of its own, and it
was this strange peculiarity that arrested the attention of the child.
For children are little animals, _terram spectantia_, taking sunsets
and other commonplaces such as mother, father, home, furniture and
carpets, generally for granted, being as a rule absorbed in the great
things of life, that is, play. This child was very diligently blowing
bubbles, occasionally turning aside up a by-path to make a
bubble-pudding in the soap-dish: the ruckling noise of this operation
possessing some magical fascination for all childhood. And in the
meanwhile, yellow dusk was gradually deepening in the quiet air.
Presently the tired sun sank like a weight, red-hot, burning his way
down through filmy layers of Indian ink. The day had been rainy, but
the clouds had all dissolved imperceptibly away into a broken chain of
veils of mist, which looked with the sun behind them like dropping
showers of liquid gold, or copper-coloured waterfalls: while
underneath or through them the lines of low blue hills showed now half
obscured, now clear and sharp in outline as if cut with scissors out
of paper and stuck upon the amber background of the sky. And then came
the miracle. Right across the horizon, a little higher than the sun, a
long thin bar of cloud suddenly changed colour, becoming rich dark
purple, and all along its jagged upper edge the light shot out in one
continuous sheet of bright glory to the zenith, while below there
poured from the bar a long cascade, a very Niagara of golden mist and
rain, as if the flood-gates of some celestial dam had suddenly given
way, and all the precious stuff were escaping in a cataract through
the rift, in one gigantic plunge, to be lost for ever in some
bottomless abyss.
Suddenly, the dead silence struck me: my ear missed the "ruckle," and
the occasional exclamations of delight. I turned abruptly, and glanced
at the child. She was standing still as a stone, with one hand just in
front of her holding the forgotten pipe, arrested on the way to her
mouth, as the heavenly vision struck her: rapt, lost in her eyes,
which were filled with wonder to the brim, open-mouthed, entranced,
with a smile on her lips of which she was totally unconscious, faint,
involuntary, seraphic, indescribable. The ecstasy of union had
swallowed her: she was gone. I called her by her name: she never
heard: her soul was away at the golden gates.
And I said to myself, as I gazed at her with intense curiosity, mixed
with regret that I was not Raffael, so marvellous was the picture:
This, this is the wisdom of the sages, the secret of Plotinus and the
Buddhists: this is Nirwána, Moksha, Yoga, the unattainable ecstasy of
bliss, the absolute fruition, which men call by many names: the end
towards which the adult strives, in vain, to recover what he lost by
ceasing to be a child: a child, which is sexless, knowing as yet
nothing of the esoteric dissatisfaction of the soul that wants and
has not found. Aye! to reach the mystic union, the absolute extinction
of the Knower in the All; to lose one's Self in Infinity, without a
remnant of regret; to attain to the unattainable, the point of
self-annihilation where all distinction between subject and object,
something and nothing, disappears, it is necessary to be a child: to
be born again. _Rebirth_! the key to the enigma of unhappiness lies
there!
* * * * *
And after a while, as I watched her, she came back to herself. Our
eyes met: and she looked at me long, with a far-off expression that I
could not define. And at last, she gave a little sigh. Daddy, she
said, why does the golden rain never fall here? Our rain is always
only common rain.
And I said solemnly: Little girls are the reason why. But she didn't
understand. She looked at me reproachfully with puzzled eyes--such
great, grey, beautiful, sea-green eyes!--and then drew a long breath.
And she went back to her bubbles, and together we watched them go as
they floated away into the valley, wild with excitement as to whether
my bubble or her bubble would go farthest before it burst--till the
Rhadamanthine summons came, and the Bubble-Blower went to bed.
_Poona_, 1919.