I had a singular dream last night. I found myself on Robinson
Crusoe's Island and, curiously enough, in Robinson Crusoe's rôle. In
the bright sunshine, by the sea-shore. I was turning over the stores
of eatables, chiefly bags of potatoes, it seemed to me, that were
lying about. There was abundance to go on with and I did not feel at
all disturbed at the prospect of not being called for for many a long
day. I was alone, but without the sense of solitude. Indeed, I was
entirely happy and free from care. I feel, even now that I am awake,
the glow of the warm sunshine and the peace of the sands and the sea.
Most dreams are easily traceable to some waking circumstance, and
this quite enjoyable spiritual experience was, I suppose, due to a
conversation I had had about Honolulu and my regret that I was never
likely to see the islands of the Pacific. The friendly spirit who
has charge of my dreams evidently took the hint and wafted me away to
Juan Fernandez. I am half-disposed, so pleasant is the memory, to
regret that he did not leave me there, wrapped in immortal dreams of
plenty, peace and sunshine.
I shall repeat the experiment of nudging my amiable djinn into
agreeable activity. I have a great many schemes to put before him,
and if my friends discover that I am talking with enthusiasm about
Pizarro they will know that I am putting in a plea with the director
of dreams for a trip to Peru, and that if I am unusually concerned,
even distressed, about the fate of Mummery, or the importance of
conquering Mount Everest, I have in mind the possibility of a
climbing excursion in the Himalayas. It is an excellent way of
filling up the blanks in one's experience.
As we get on in years we become conscious of those blanks. We feel
that we are in danger of missing much of the show we came to see.
While we are young, say, up to fifty, we are not troubled. There
seems plenty of time still to do everything worth doing, and see
everything worth seeing. But after fifty the horizon shrinks most
alarmingly, or perhaps it would be truer to say that it expands most
alarmingly, and we find that, not only is Heaven, as Hood said,
farther off than it seems in childhood, but that the desirable places
of the earth have become more inaccessible. When I was a boy and had
my imagination stirred by tales of the backwoods and Russell's songs
about
The land of the free
Where the mighty Missouri rolls down to the sea,
I had no doubt that I should one day roll down with it, probably in a
canoe, with a friendly Indian. Everything seemed possible then.
Life was so enormously long an affair that the only disturbing
thought was how you would be able to fill it up, and you had no more
idea of missing a trip up the Amazon or seeing the Rockies and
Niagara and the Grand Cañon when you grew up than of not being
privileged to smoke a pipe or to have a latchkey or to go to Lord's
or the Oval and see Grace whenever you felt inclined.
In this comfortable conviction that we shall do everything in good
time we jog along doing nothing in particular, getting more and more
like the donkey we used to see at Carisbrooke Castle years ago,
tramping round and round its tread-mill without ever reaching
anywhere. We are not disquieted. We feel that any day in the
infinite days before us we shall be threading the Thousand Islands or
climbing the Heights of Abraham, or seeing the sunrise in the
Oberland or the sunset in Venice, or the dawn coming up like thunder
on the road to Mandalay, or standing in the Coliseum at Rome or among
the ruins of Carthage or Timgad, or sailing among the isles of Greece
or catching the spicy breezes that, according to the hymn of the good
Bishop Heber, whom we could not suspect of romancing, come from
Ceylon's favoured isle.
And so with other things. One day, assuredly, we shall take to
horse-riding, and canter gaily round Rotten Row, or we shall go
yachting in the Mediterranean or shooting in Scotland. And think of
the books we shall read in the enormous leisure that lies before us.
There is that fellow Karl Marx, for example. He certainly must be
read--some day. It is absurd not to know what he said, when all the
world goes on babbling so learnedly about him. No doubt he is a dull
fellow, but we cannot, of course, leave the world without knowing why
he created such a hubbub. And there are a lot of other high-brows
that we shall become acquainted with in good time. We shall really
study those categorical imperatives of the illustrious Kant, and the
monism of Spinoza, and the _Leviathan_ and the _Novum Organum_, and a
score of other solemn books that ought to be read and must be
read--some day. We are not worried about these things. We have
years and years before us, and shall need some stout fellows like
these to make the time pass by.
That is how we drift until, somewhere in the fifties, we begin to
suspect that we are cutting it rather fine, and that all those riches
of experience that we confidently expected to enjoy and those
intellectual conquests that we intended to make are slipping beyond
our grasp. Karl Marx is still joyfully unthumbed, the _Novum
Organum_ still beckons us unavailingly from the abode where the
eternal are, and we are still hazy about the categorical imperatives
of the illustrious Kant. The call of the mighty Missouri falls faint
on our ears, and Ceylon's spicy breezes we have to take at
second-hand from the saintly Heber. We are chained to the No. 16 bus
to Cricklewood or the tube to Shepherd's Bush, and when we break
loose we find ourselves on the pier at Brighton or heroically scaling
Beachy Head. We pass our dreams of adventure on to hopeful and
undazzled youth, browsing greedily in the breathless pages of
Prescott. We are not even sure that we want to go now, so habituated
have we become to the familiar tread-mill. I daresay the Carisbrooke
donkey would have been broken-hearted at the idea of a trip to Cowes.
We are like Johnson when he was asked if he would not like to see
Giant's Causeway. "Sir, I should like to see it, but I should not
like _to go to see it_."
It would be pleasant if we could educate our dreams to spirit us away
without all the trouble of tickets and luggage and travel to the
sights and experiences we have missed. Do not tell me it would be an
idle illusion. There was no illusion in my island. I can see it in
my mind as clearly as any place I ever visited in the flesh, and if I
had the skill I could draw its hills and paint its tranquil sea and
sunny sands for you. To-night I hope to spend with Mummery in the
Alps.