LANDSCAPES SEEN IN DREAMS
[Illustration]
The painter of landscapes seen in dreams must be a memory that knows
fantastic woods and faery seas all strange to the waking memory. Or else
the artist is only a weariness with the day just past that gives us in
sleep sight of the country which, so Mr. Maugham and other story-tellers
say, is the real home that men may go their whole lives long without
finding, because we are not always born at home, nor even brought up
there, and we might for years be homesick for a land unseen. Once
beheld, the recognition is instant, and in the foreign place begins a
_vita nuova_--relief and an intensity of living never known before the
new and familiar harbor came down to meet us at the shore. So sometimes
it is in dreams. Recurrent and vivid, a scene of sheerest unreality will
take on an earthly air, or landscapes flamboyantly exotic will hold the
peace denied by every country it has been our daily fortune to know.
Dream landscapes come back again and again, as if they waited there
forever, substantial, and we were the transient comers. Some, in ether
dreams, shrink always from the same green waves, the same black, open
mine, and two have now and then been found who saw on sleep journeys
places that words repictured curiously alike. The fantasies may be
patchwork of poems, plays, and paintings long forgotten, but when they
rise in their compelling fusion they owe no debt to the lumber attic of
the subconscious. The world they fashion is their own, and they do offer
by their ethereal pathway a compensation for the insufficiencies of
life.
There is a long, uncurving sea strand whose gray immensity of sands lies
smooth for miles along the upper beach, but is feathered near the water
by the stroking of little afterwaves, and draped unendingly with umber
bands of kelp. Here as in no place seen the seaweed laces are edged with
colors ground in unlighted depths, as if the tide cast carvings of lapis
lazuli and feldspar up with the argent pebbles, and all the drifting
algæ are incrusted with yellow shells. Shoreward the palms climb up
until they make a green horizon, and their unnatural fronds sink down
again like green chiffon that veils the entrance to the pensive forest.
Vines with scented flowers as intangible as fog creep over root and
trunk, and among them now and then with soundless foot and molten eye a
leopard winds. Perpetual sunset wanes and glows behind the palms. There
is never any wind. The violence of the ocean, the beasts, the tempest,
is held in languorous leash while the treader of the sands goes on with
unfelt steps toward rocks where the waters break importunate and sink
moaning back. They hang black above a cave, and waves come in to prowl
and snakes with scales like gems twine back and forth, glittering in the
half light, with narcotic and effortless motion, until they with the
rocks and all the scene fade.
A tiny stream, a pixy's river, slips from beneath a bowlder in a wood
long known, and leads through thicket, glade, and clearing to a
terrifying land, desolated by ancient fires and strewn with blackened
stones and charred boughs. The place itself is athirst, and the dreamer
kneels to drink. The tiny stream is dark, like a deep water, and bitter
cold as if it flowed through ice. A staff thrust down cannot sound its
depths. A finger's span across and bottomless! Nothing could dam its
flow. Old embers at its borders are suddenly scattered when a gleaming
hand parts the current and waves back toward the way just traced, but
the flame-blasted firs have closed behind into a forbidding wall. Other
pallid fingers rise from the portal of the abyss in warning gesture, but
the narrow gulf opens underfoot.
There is a town where gay people in white dress promenade in a plaza
shaded by orange trees, and they are always humming tunes. Little white
streets lead to shuttered houses. A glory of buginvillæa overflows
trellis and bower in splendid war with the hibiscus hedges and the
dropping yellow fruit. Down the hill and over cobblestones, pursued by
music and laughter, ministered to by odors of the lemon blossom, he whom
sleep leads here may go toward a lake of fluent amethyst. The way is
past the market place where brown women crouch by baskets of brilliant
wares and venders of glistening lizards sit drowsily bent, and then at a
step the forest dense and brooding is above him and its low boughs sweep
the ripple of the lake. Immense leaves hang like curtains, and among
them men with unquiet eyes move and hold monotoned speech while they hew
sparkling rock into monstrous shapes. They are circling round a pit.
They cast in ornaments of opal and dark gold and garlands of venomous
forest growths, gray and blood-red, tied with withered vines. Cries come
from the pit, but the chant never stops.
Marching from a stronghold far up on a mountain of cedars, men in mail
come at dusk with standards flickering crimson, fringed with gold, down
to a valley full of blossomed iris where there is a wide pool with
torches at its rim. Their flare streams out toward the circling cliffs.
Each marcher dips his silken flag into the quiet waters, and lights rise
upon the battlements above as one by one all the black plumes are lost
in the meadow's darkness and the torches burn low and fall into the
pool.
A garden planted only with dark-red nasturtiums that lift for the
dreamer's touch a flower's velvet cheek lies filmed with dew and
fragrant as a noon breath from Ceylon spice groves. The miracle of color
is spread along a hillside up to a high wall of great gray stones, and
inside the gate is a house grown all over with grapevines, some borne
down by blue clusters with shadowy bloom, some by clusters of topaz and
ripe green. There is a pond among the grasses, where broad, wan lilies
float, and purple pansies border all the walks. Very slowly the paneled
door opens and the sun floods the central hall. It is hung with silver
draperies, and an old woman stands there with a candle, mumbling and
peering in a cataract of light.