result of any conscious effort of the imagination. They are, as the
title-page indicates, records of dreams occurring at intervals during
the last ten years, and transcribed, pretty nearly in the order of
their occurrence, from my diary. Written down as soon as possible
after awaking from the slumber during which they presented themselves,
these narratives, necessarily unstudied in style, and wanting in
elegance of diction, have at least the merit of fresh and vivid
colour; for they were committed to paper at a moment when the effect
and impress of each successive vision were strong and forceful on the
mind. . . .
The most remarkable features of the experiences I am about to record
are the methodical consecutiveness of their sequences, and the
intelligent purpose disclosed alike in the events witnessed and in the
words heard or read. . . . I know of no parallel to this phenomenon,
unless in the pages of Bulwer Lytton's romance entitled The Pilgrims
of the Rhine, in which is related the story of a German student
endowed with so marvellous a faculty of dreaming, that for him the
normal conditions of sleeping and waking became reversed; his true
life was that which he lived in his slumbers, and his hours of
wakefulness appeared to him as so many uneventful and inactive
intervals of arrest, occurring in an existence of intense and vivid
interest which was wholly passed in the hypnotic state. . . .
During the whole period covered by these dreams I have been busily and
almost continuously engrossed with scientific and literary pursuits,
demanding accurate judgment and complete self-possession and rectitude
of mind. At the time when many of the most vivid and remarkable
visions occurred I was following my course as a student at the Paris
Faculty of Medicine, preparing for examinations, daily visiting
hospital wards as dresser, and attending lectures. Later, when I had
taken my degree, I was engaged in the duties of my profession and in
writing for the Press on scientific subjects. Neither had I ever
taken opium, haschish, or other dream-producing agent. A cup of tea
or coffee represents the extent of my indulgences in this direction. I
mention these details in order to guard against inferences which might
otherwise be drawn as to the genesis of my faculty.
It may, perhaps, be worthy of notice that by far the larger number of
the dreams set down in this volume occurred towards dawn; sometimes
even, after sunrise, during a 'second sleep.' A condition of fasting,
united possibly with some subtle magnetic or other atmospheric state,
seems, therefore, to be that most open to impressions of the kind.
This is the account given by the late Dr. Anna Kingsford of the genesis
of her remarkable volume, Dreams and Dream-Stories; and certainly some of
the stories, especially those entitled Steepside, Beyond the Sunset, and
The Village of Seers, are well worth reading, though not intrinsically
finer, either in motive or idea, than the general run of magazine
stories. No one who had the privilege of knowing Mrs. Kingsford, who was
one of the brilliant women of our day, can doubt for a single moment that
these tales came to her in the way she describes; but to me the result is
just a little disappointing. Perhaps, however, I expect too much. There
is no reason whatsoever why the imagination should be finer in hours of
dreaming than in its hours of waking. Mrs. Kingsford quotes a letter
written by Jamblichus to Agathocles, in which he says: 'The soul has a
twofold life, a lower and a higher. In sleep the soul is liberated from
the constraint of the body, and enters, as an emancipated being, on its
divine life of intelligence. The nobler part of the mind is thus united
by abstraction to higher natures, and becomes a participant in the wisdom
and foreknowledge of the gods. . . . The night-time of the body is the
day-time of the soul.' But the great masterpieces of literature and the
great secrets of wisdom have not been communicated in this way; and even
in Coleridge's case, though Kubla Khan is wonderful, it is not more
wonderful, while it is certainly less complete, than the Ancient Mariner.
As for the dreams themselves, which occupy the first portion of the book,
their value, of course, depends chiefly on the value of the truths or
predictions which they are supposed to impart. I must confess that most
modern mysticism seems to me to be simply a method of imparting useless
knowledge in a form that no one can understand. Allegory, parable, and
vision have their high artistic uses, but their philosophical and
scientific uses are very small. However, here is one of Mrs. Kingsford's
dreams. It has a pleasant quaintness about it:
THE WONDERFUL SPECTACLES
I was walking alone on the sea-shore. The day was singularly clear
and sunny. Inland lay the most beautiful landscape ever seen; and far
off were ranges of tall hills, the highest peaks of which were white
with glittering snows. Along the sands by the sea came towards me a
man accoutred as a postman. He gave me a letter. It was from you. It
ran thus:
'I have got hold of the earliest and most precious book extant. It
was written before the world began. The text is easy enough to read;
but the notes, which are very copious and numerous, are in such minute
and obscure characters that I cannot make them out. I want you to get
for me the spectacles which Swedenborg used to wear; not the smaller
pair--those he gave to Hans Christian Andersen--but the large pair,
and these seem to have got mislaid. I think they are Spinoza's make.
You know, he was an optical-glass maker by profession, and the best we
ever had. See if you can get them for me.'
When I looked up after reading this letter I saw the postman hastening
away across the sands, and I cried out to him, 'Stop! how am I to send
the answer? Will you not wait for it?'
He looked round, stopped, and came back to me.
'I have the answer here,' he said, tapping his letter-bag, 'and I
shall deliver it immediately.'
'How can you have the answer before I have written it?' I asked. 'You
are making a mistake.'
'No,' he said. 'In the city from which I come the replies are all
written at the office, and sent out with the letters themselves. Your
reply is in my bag.'
'Let me see it,' I said. He took another letter from his wallet, and
gave it to me. I opened it, and read, in my own handwriting, this
answer, addressed to you:
'The spectacles you want can be bought in London; but you will not be
able to use them at once, for they have not been worn for many years,
and they sadly want cleaning. This you will not be able to do
yourself in London, because it is too dark there to see well, and
because your fingers are not small enough to clean them properly.
Bring them here to me, and I will do it for you.'
I gave this letter back to the postman. He smiled and nodded at me;
and then I perceived, to my astonishment, that he wore a camel's-hair
tunic round his waist. I had been on the point of addressing him--I
know not why--as Hermes. But I now saw that he must be John the
Baptist; and in my fright at having spoken to so great a Saint I
awoke.
Mr. Maitland, who edits the present volume, and who was joint-author with
Mrs. Kingsford of that curious book The Perfect Way, states in a footnote
that in the present instance the dreamer knew nothing of Spinoza at the
time, and was quite unaware that he was an optician; and the
interpretation of the dream, as given by him, is that the spectacles in
question were intended to represent Mrs. Kingsford's remarkable faculty
of intuitional and interpretative perception. For a spiritual message
fraught with such meaning, the mere form of this dream seems to me
somewhat ignoble, and I cannot say that I like the blending of the
postman with St. John the Baptist. However, from a psychological point
of view, these dreams are interesting, and Mrs. Kingsford's book is
undoubtedly a valuable addition to the literature of the mysticism of the
nineteenth century.
* * * * *
The Romance of a Shop, by Miss Amy Levy, is a more mundane book, and
deals with the adventures of some young ladies who open a photographic
studio in Baker Street to the horror of some of their fashionable
relatives. It is so brightly and pleasantly written that the sudden
introduction of a tragedy into it seems violent and unnecessary. It
lacks the true tragic temper, and without this temper in literature all
misfortunes and miseries seem somewhat mean and ordinary. With this
exception the book is admirably done, and the style is clever and full of
quick observation. Observation is perhaps the most valuable faculty for
a writer of fiction. When novelists reflect and moralise, they are, as a
rule, dull. But to observe life with keen vision and quick intellect, to
catch its many modes of expression, to seize upon the subtlety, or
satire, or dramatic quality of its situations, and to render life for us
with some spirit of distinction and fine selection--this, I fancy, should
be the aim of the modern realistic novelist. It would be, perhaps, too
much to say that Miss Levy has distinction; this is the rarest quality in
modern literature, though not a few of its masters are modern; but she
has many other qualities which are admirable.
* * * * *
Faithful and Unfaithful is a powerful but not very pleasing novel.
However, the object of most modern fiction is not to give pleasure to the
artistic instinct, but rather to portray life vividly for us, to draw
attention to social anomalies, and social forms of injustice. Many of
our novelists are really pamphleteers, reformers masquerading as story-
tellers, earnest sociologists seeking to mend as well as to mirror life.
The heroine, or rather martyr, of Miss Margaret Lee's story is a very
noble and graciously Puritanic American girl, who is married at the age
of eighteen to a man whom she insists on regarding as a hero. Her
husband cannot live in the high rarefied atmosphere of idealism with
which she surrounds him; her firm and fearless faith in him becomes a
factor in his degradation. 'You are too good for me,' he says to her in
a finely conceived scene at the end of the book; 'we have not an idea, an
inclination, or a passion in common. I'm sick and tired of seeming to
live up to a standard that is entirely beyond my reach and my desire. We
make each other miserable! I can't pull you down, and for ten years you
have been exhausting yourself in vain efforts to raise me to your level.
The thing must end!' He asks her to divorce him, but she refuses. He
then abandons her, and availing himself of those curious facilities for
breaking the marriage-tie that prevail in the United States, succeeds in
divorcing her without her consent, and without her knowledge. The book
is certainly characteristic of an age so practical and so literary as
ours, an age in which all social reforms have been preceded and have been
largely influenced by fiction. Faithful and Unfaithful seems to point to
some coming change in the marriage-laws of America.
(1) Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. Edited and Selected by
W. B. Yeats. (Walter Scott.)
(2) Helen Davenant. By Violet Fane. (Chapman and Hall.)
(3) Dreams and Dream-Stories. By Dr. Anna Kingsford. (Redway.)
(4) The Romance of a Shop. By Amy Levy. (Fisher Unwin.)
(5) Faithful and Unfaithful. By Margaret Lee. (Macmillan and Co.)
ONE OF THE BIBLES OF THE WORLD
(Pall Mall Gazette, February 12, 1889.)
The Kalevala is one of those poems that Mr. William Morris once described
as 'The Bibles of the World.' It takes its place as a national epic
beside the Homeric poems, the Niebelunge, the Shahnameth and the
Mahabharata, and the admirable translation just published by Mr. John
Martin Crawford is sure to be welcomed by all scholars and lovers of
primitive poetry. In his very interesting preface Mr. Crawford claims
for the Finns that they began earlier than any other European nation to
collect and preserve their ancient folklore. In the seventeenth century
we meet men of literary tastes like Palmskold who tried to collect and
interpret the various national songs of the fen-dwellers of the North.
But the Kalevala proper was collected by two great Finnish scholars of
our own century, Zacharias Topelius and Elias Lonnrot. Both were
practising physicians, and in this capacity came into frequent contact
with the people of Finland. Topelius, who collected eighty epical
fragments of the Kalevala, spent the last eleven years of his life in
bed, afflicted with a fatal disease. This misfortune, however, did not
damp his enthusiasm. Mr. Crawford tells us that he used to invite the
wandering Finnish merchants to his bedside and induce them to sing their
heroic poems which he copied down as soon as they were uttered, and that
whenever he heard of a renowned Finnish minstrel he did all in his power
to bring the song-man to his house in order that he might gather new
fragments of the national epic. Lonnrot travelled over the whole
country, on horseback, in reindeer sledges and in canoes, collecting the
old poems and songs from the hunters, the fishermen and the shepherds.
The people gave him every assistance, and he had the good fortune to come
across an old peasant, one of the oldest of the runolainen in the Russian
province of Wuokinlem, who was by far the most renowned song-man of the
country, and from him he got many of the most splendid runes of the poem.
And certainly the Kalevala, as it stands, is one of the world's great
poems. It is perhaps hardly accurate to describe it as an epic. It
lacks the central unity of a true epic in our sense of the word. It has
many heroes beside Wainomoinen and is, properly speaking, a collection of
folk-songs and ballads. Of its antiquity there is no doubt. It is
thoroughly pagan from beginning to end, and even the legend of the Virgin
Mariatta to whom the Sun tells where 'her golden babe lies hidden'--
Yonder is thy golden infant,
There thy holy babe lies sleeping
Hidden to his belt in water,
Hidden in the reeds and rushes--
is, according to all scholars, essentially pre-Christian in origin. The
gods are chiefly gods of air and water and forest. The highest is the
sky-god Ukks who is 'The Father of the Breezes,' 'The Shepherd of the
Lamb-Clouds'; the lightning is his sword, the rainbow is his bow; his
skirt sparkles with fire, his stockings are blue and his shoes crimson-
coloured. The daughters of the Sun and Moon sit on the scarlet rims of
the clouds and weave the rays of light into a gleaming web. Untar
presides over fogs and mists, and passes them through a silver sieve
before sending them to the earth. Ahto, the wave-god, lives with 'his
cold and cruel-hearted spouse,' Wellamo, at the bottom of the sea in the
chasm of the Salmon-Rocks, and possesses the priceless treasure of the
Sampo, the talisman of success. When the branches of the primitive oak-
trees shut out the light of the sun from the Northland, Pikku-Mies (the
Pygmy) emerged from the sea in a suit of copper, with a copper hatchet in
his belt, and having grown to a giant's stature felled the huge oak with
the third stroke of his axe. Wirokannas is 'The Green-robed Priest of
the Forest,' and Tapio, who has a coat of tree-moss and a high-crowned
hat of fir-leaves, is 'The Gracious God of the Woodlands.' Otso, the
bear, is the 'Honey-Paw of the Mountains,' the 'Fur-robed Forest Friend.'
In everything, visible and invisible, there is God, a divine presence.
There are three worlds, and they are all peopled with divinities.
As regards the poem itself, it is written in trochaic eight-syllabled
lines with alliteration and the part-line echo, the metre which
Longfellow adopted for Hiawatha. One of its distinguishing
characteristics is its wonderful passion for nature and for the beauty of
natural objects. Lemenkainen says to Tapio:
Sable-bearded God of forests,
In thy hat and coat of ermine,
Robe thy trees in finest fibres,
Deck thy groves in richest fabrics,
Give the fir-trees shining silver,
Deck with gold the slender balsams,
Give the spruces copper-belting,
And the pine-trees silver girdles,
Give the birches golden flowers,
Deck their stems with silver fretwork,
This their garb in former ages
When the days and nights were brighter,
When the fir-trees shone like sunlight,
And the birches like the moonbeams;
Honey breathe throughout the forest,
Settled in the glens and highlands,
Spices in the meadow-borders,
Oil outpouring from the lowlands.
All handicrafts and art-work are, as in Homer, elaborately described:
Then the smiter Ilmarinen
The eternal artist-forgeman,
In the furnace forged an eagle
From the fire of ancient wisdom,
For this giant bird of magic
Forged he talons out of iron,
And his beak of steel and copper;
Seats himself upon the eagle,
On his back between the wing-bones
Thus addresses he his creature,
Gives the bird of fire this order.
Mighty eagle, bird of beauty,
Fly thou whither I direct thee,
To Tuoni's coal-black river,
To the blue-depths of the Death-stream,
Seize the mighty fish of Mana,
Catch for me this water-monster.
And Wainamoinen's boat-building is one of the great incidents of the
poem:
Wainamoinen old and skilful,
The eternal wonder-worker,
Builds his vessel with enchantment,
Builds his boat by art and magic,
From the timber of the oak-tree,
Forms its posts and planks and flooring.
Sings a song and joins the framework;
Sings a second, sets the siding;
Sings a third time, sets the rowlocks;
Fashions oars, and ribs, and rudder,
Joins the sides and ribs together.
. . . . .
Now he decks his magic vessel,
Paints the boat in blue and scarlet,
Trims in gold the ship's forecastle,
Decks the prow in molten silver;
Sings his magic ship down gliding,
On the cylinders of fir-tree;
Now erects the masts of pine-wood,
On each mast the sails of linen,
Sails of blue, and white, and scarlet,
Woven into finest fabric.
All the characteristics of a splendid antique civilisation are mirrored
in this marvellous poem, and Mr. Crawford's admirable translation should
make the wonderful heroes of Suomi song as familiar if not as dear to our
people as the heroes of the great Ionian epic.
The Kalevala, the Epic Poem of Finland. Translated into English by John
Martin Crawford. (G. P. Putnam's Sons.)
POETICAL SOCIALISTS
(Pall Mall Gazette, February 15, 1889.)
Mr. Stopford Brooke said some time ago that Socialism and the socialistic
spirit would give our poets nobler and loftier themes for song, would
widen their sympathies and enlarge the horizon of their vision and would
touch, with the fire and fervour of a new faith, lips that had else been
silent, hearts that but for this fresh gospel had been cold. What Art
gains from contemporary events is always a fascinating problem and a
problem that is not easy to solve. It is, however, certain that
Socialism starts well equipped. She has her poets and her painters, her
art lecturers and her cunning designers, her powerful orators and her
clever writers. If she fails it will not be for lack of expression. If
she succeeds her triumph will not be a triumph of mere brute force. The
first thing that strikes one, as one looks over the list of contributors
to Mr. Edward Carpenter's Chants of Labour, is the curious variety of
their several occupations, the wide differences of social position that
exist between them, and the strange medley of men whom a common passion
has for the moment united. The editor is a 'Science lecturer'; he is
followed by a draper and a porter; then we have two late Eton masters and
then two bootmakers; and these are, in their turn, succeeded by an ex-
Lord Mayor of Dublin, a bookbinder, a photographer, a steel-worker and an
authoress. On one page we have a journalist, a draughtsman and a music-
teacher: and on another a Civil servant, a machine fitter, a medical
student, a cabinet-maker and a minister of the Church of Scotland.
Certainly, it is no ordinary movement that can bind together in close
brotherhood men of such dissimilar pursuits, and when we mention that Mr.
William Morris is one of the singers, and that Mr. Walter Crane has
designed the cover and frontispiece of the book, we cannot but feel that,
as we pointed out before, Socialism starts well equipped.
As for the songs themselves, some of them, to quote from the editor's
preface, are 'purely revolutionary, others are Christian in tone; there
are some that might be called merely material in their tendency, while
many are of a highly ideal and visionary character.' This is, on the
whole, very promising. It shows that Socialism is not going to allow
herself to be trammelled by any hard and fast creed or to be stereotyped
into an iron formula. She welcomes many and multiform natures. She
rejects none and has room for all. She has the attraction of a wonderful
personality and touches the heart of one and the brain of another, and
draws this man by his hatred of injustice, and his neighbour by his faith
in the future, and a third, it may be, by his love of art or by his wild
worship of a lost and buried past. And all of this is well. For, to
make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great
thing.
They are not of any very high literary value, these poems that have been
so dexterously set to music. They are meant to be sung, not to be read.
They are rough, direct and vigorous, and the tunes are stirring and
familiar. Indeed, almost any mob could warble them with ease. The
transpositions that have been made are rather amusing. 'Twas in
Trafalgar Square is set to the tune of 'Twas in Trafalgar's Bay; Up, Ye
People! a very revolutionary song by Mr. John Gregory, boot-maker, with a
refrain of
Up, ye People! or down into your graves!
Cowards ever will be slaves!
is to be sung to the tune of Rule, Britannia! the old melody of The Vicar
of Bray is to accompany the new Ballade of Law and Order--which, however,
is not a ballade at all--and to the air of Here's to the Maiden of
Bashful Fifteen the democracy of the future is to thunder forth one of
Mr. T. D. Sullivan's most powerful and pathetic lyrics. It is clear that
the Socialists intend to carry on the musical education of the people
simultaneously with their education in political science and, here as
elsewhere, they seem to be entirely free from any narrow bias or formal
prejudice. Mendelssohn is followed by Moody and Sankey; the Wacht am
Rhein stands side by side with the Marseillaise; Lillibulero, a chorus
from Norma, John Brown and an air from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony are all
equally delightful to them. They sing the National Anthem in Shelley's
version and chant William Morris's Voice of Toil to the flowing numbers
of Ye Banks and Braes of Bonny Doon. Victor Hugo talks somewhere of the
terrible cry of 'Le Tigre Populaire,' but it is evident from Mr.
Carpenter's book that should the Revolution ever break out in England we
shall have no inarticulate roar but, rather, pleasant glees and graceful
part-songs. The change is certainly for the better. Nero fiddled while
Rome was burning--at least, inaccurate historians say he did; but it is
for the building up of an eternal city that the Socialists of our day are
making music, and they have complete confidence in the art instincts of
the people.
They say that the people are brutal--
That their instincts of beauty are dead--
Were it so, shame on those who condemn them
To the desperate struggle for bread.
But they lie in their throats when they say it,
For the people are tender at heart,
And a wellspring of beauty lies hidden
Beneath their life's fever and smart,
is a stanza from one of the poems in this volume, and the feeling
expressed in these words is paramount everywhere. The Reformation gained
much from the use of popular hymn-tunes, and the Socialists seem
determined to gain by similar means a similar hold upon the people.
However, they must not be too sanguine about the result. The walls of
Thebes rose up to the sound of music, and Thebes was a very dull city
indeed.
Chants of Labour: A Song-Book of the People. With Music. Edited by
Edward Carpenter. With Designs by Walter Crane. (Swan Sonnenschein and
Co.)
MR. BRANDER MATTHEWS' ESSAYS
(Pall Mall Gazette, February 27, 1889.)