And so you cannot coax yourself off to sleep? Why? Were you beguiled by
their exquisite flavour into rashly smoking three or four of those
potent Regalias, with which your friend, the rich stock-broker,
professes to aid the digestion of his guests, after a lengthened sitting
at his luxurious table? Or did the rounded arm and taper fingers of his
fair wife, presiding over the mysteries of the silver urn, tempt you to
indulgence in too frequent cups of Souchong? Perhaps you are
endeavouring, in spite of yourself, to solve some knotty problem in
politics, or love, or chess, or mathematics. Perhaps you have a
considerable bill to take up to-morrow, with a very slim balance at your
banker's. Perhaps you have a heart-ache; perhaps a head-ache. At any
rate, your nerves and senses are painfully strained; and you feel as
though you would give the world and all, for a lullaby that would serve
its purpose. My good Sir, compose your mind. If you can't sleep and
dream, as you desire--dream and sleep. Reverse, I say, the common order.
And do not sneer at the suggestion, unless you prefer tossing about all
night in vain. The process is not only not impossible; it is not half
so difficult as you might suppose, presuming--as I have a right to
presume, in regard to my reader--that your imagination is not hopelessly
inert.
Some persons recommend to the restless and wide-awake the repetition of
scraps from books, in prose or verse, just as though every one had a
plenteous store of "elegant extracts" garnered up in his memory, and as
though authors specially aimed at being somniferous. There are indeed
not a few among them, who unavoidably achieve this distinction; and the
advice might not really be bad, if you could con over--once would be
sufficient--Mr. A.'s last pamphlet on political economy, or the Rev. Mr.
B.'s last sermon. On the whole however, inasmuch as your favourite
passages--should you know any of them by heart--may be the very opposite
of soothing in their tendencies, this mode of wooing slumber can
scarcely be pronounced successful.
You must commence, I say, by dreaming, if you would compel yourself
gently to sleep; but before I proceed to introduce to you my list of
available prescriptions in this line, I note one with which my readers
may possibly be familiar, having learned it in their school-boy days.
You will not now be told for the first time, that a drowsy sensation may
be induced by musing upon--or dreaming of, which is the same thing--a
field of tall and ripe barley, swept by fresh autumnal gales. The rise
and fall of each bowed head, with its feathery and graceful spikes,
combines well with the undulating motion of the whole and the varied
play of light and shade. The idea is otherwise expressed by the British
Laureate in "The Poet's Song," one of his minor pieces; "and waves of
shadow," says he, "went over the wheat." Nevertheless it is clear that
he missed the proper application of the thought, for, in place of
lulling the beholder to forgetful repose, the sight seems to have made
him break out into a song so loud that wild swans paused to listen in
their flight, larks fluttered down to earth, swallows gave up hunting
bees, snakes slipped under sprays, wild hawks stared over sparrows
stricken under their claws, and the very nightingales were set
a-thinking. Truly a sad perversion this of a golden opportunity! But
your rhymsters were ever a crazy race. When they deal with their fellows
generally, we all know how they botch poor human nature. What, then, can
be expected, when poets undertake to figure out one of themselves?
Still, let us improve the occasion. Barley-fields or wheat-fields are
well enough in their way; only, if you conjure up this image, I would
advise you to season it with an abundance of red poppies intermingled
with the legitimate crop, and a very careful attempt on your part to
number these interlopers one by one, preparatory, if so it please you,
to flipping off their heads. With due allowance, therefore, for its lack
of novelty, this dream may be admitted into our collection.
And it may be proper to remark at the outset that, though the dreams
whereof I propose to treat are sufficiently distinct in their kind, it
is desirable, in the practical use of them, to run them one into
another--to fuse them unconsciously as it were, without being over-nice
as to the point at which one ends and another begins. It is not
requisite, however, for this reason, that they should all be packed into
one paragraph, like a daily paper's report of one of Mr. Morrill's
speeches on the Tariff, or a Secretary of the Treasury's Report. You
shall have each dainty conceit served up in its own dish, so that,
furthermore by the way, you can take them in such order as suits your
own good pleasure. This view of the matter relieves me also from the
necessity of formal arrangement. It is altogether unimportant which
fancy comes uppermost. The main thing is to shut off all thought
concerning the actualities of life, eschewing reference to your loves,
your hates, your wrestlings with circumstance, your mental cares, your
bodily ailments. I repeat it: you must dream, if you would sleep.
Counting the breezy barley-field above mentioned as one, I believe I can
supply you with a dozen subjects.
Your physical eye is closed, of course--your mind's eye being, on that
account, all the more keenly alive to impression, and the better able to
compass an unembarrassed range. Set it, then, upon a spiral stairway
endless so far as I can imagine it, though you may perchance by looking
earnestly upward discover whereto it leads, or by peering intently
downward find out its base. But did I say a stairway? That was not what
I meant; and dreamers, of all men, are at liberty to change or modify
their views. I should have said an inclined plane. Let it be steep,
smooth, slippery, broad enough to admit the passage of several figures
simultaneously, and guarded by bannisters on either side. When, fatigued
with the vain attempt to satisfy your doubts as to the safety of this
strange structure, your curiosity craves enlightenment as to its uses, I
pray you to observe how I would have it peopled. Sliding tumultuously
adown the balustrades, lo and behold an innumerable throng of Cherubs in
unbroken succession, coming whence and going whither you know not, but
each the counterpart of his predecessors, and each flapping his little
wings to maintain his balance, rendered precarious as it is by his
inability to sit a-straddle. As for the inclined plane itself thus
fantastically flanked, you soon perceive that it is the _via sacra_ of
many an Ethardo, whom you have known in the flesh or in the
spirit--Ethardo, the marvellous gymnast, who mounted and descended steep
slopes at the Sydenham Crystal Palace, by trundling inflated balls
beneath his feet. Up and down, down and up, some painfully and some
skilfully pediculating, your Ethardi pass and repass each other,
disorderly yet in order. Name them and salute them as they go by. You
have probably more acquaintances among them than I; but I recognise
Robinson Crusoe and Count Bismarck, Tarquinius Priscus and Horace
Greeley, John Ruskin and Lucrezia Borgia, Mrs. Fry and Edgar Poe, Mr.
Gladstone and Dion Boucicault, John Bright and Mrs. Grundy, Ben. Wade
and Victor Hugo, Pio Nono and the Great Mogul. Note, too, the various
material moulded into circular form, and blown up by way of ambulant
footstool; now it is a crown, now a crozier, now a bag of gold, now a
wind-bag, now a woman's heart, now a man's fame done up in a newspaper
and properly puffed. Ring the changes upon these Ethardi and the motive
power that each applies, O my wakeful friend; and at least you may lose
sight of your own individuality. Or, take a slide down the banisters
with the young Cherubs, and perchance you may touch bottom--in Lethe.
Not so? Let us proceed. There's a man at our Club, whose reputation is
so solidly built up, though on an ethereal basis, that I never knew any
one presume to question it. He is an absolute master of one
accomplishment; unrivalled, and--to the best of my belief, though I
can't vouch for the fact--unenvied. Admiring spectators gather round him
and applaud; but, if he have ambitious imitators, they rehearse in
secret. So far, he does well--ay, with consummate tact and unfailing
certainty--what few men can do at all, unless once in a while at dreary
intervals, and then by accident. Not to keep you in suspense, which is
antagonistic to repose and slumber, this young paragon contrives to
throw off his cigar-smoke from his lips, at will, in an unerring series
of the most lovely rings or wreaths, which, as they float and rise in
tremulous succession, strangely fascinate the looker-on. It may be that
this feat is not much of an achievement, morally or physically or
intellectually considered. It may be also that the Club does not do
itself much honour, in setting so high a value on this performance. But
what will you? In the palmy days of Greece, a man acquired a certain
celebrity by his precision and address in throwing peas through a
needle's eye--the peas being, I presume, much smaller or the needles
much larger, than any with which we sow or make soup in these degenerate
days. Still, so highly do I appreciate perseverance in the acquirement
of any difficult art, that I purpose doing much more for my proficient
in smoke, than was done for his man of peas by Philip of Macedon. That
bushel of ammunition was a scurvy reward. I confer immortality, by thus
registering a fact and hinting a name. And I do this from a sense of
gratitude, wherein I trust that you will participate, so soon as you
perceive the connection that may surely be traced, between the smoke
thus artistically and gracefully jetted into air, and the drowsiness by
which you would fain be possessed. Do but imagine a score of your
acquaintances round a table, each an adept in this way, and each filling
the atmosphere with coronet after coronet of vapour thrown up from
meerschaum or cheroot. Whose are the most frequent, whose the most
perfect, whose retain their form the longest? Watch the little circlets
as they wave and tremble; and award the palm of merit fairly. Nay, even
if you tell me that you are innocent of the weed and nauseated by its
odour, none the less shall this fantasy be available. I saw once a
ship-of-war firing a salute; and lo, from one of the guns went up to the
pure sky, in magnified proportions, just such a wreath as those I have
described, as delicate yet as clearly defined, and touched withal with a
suspicion of prismatic colours as it caught the rays of the sun. An
enthusiastic painter might have deemed it an invisible Fairy's aureole;
a sentimental milliner would have set it down as the flounce of her
unseen robe. Whether the gunner of this occasion had taken a lesson from
my friend at the Club, I cannot pretend to decide; I only assure you
that I witnessed the phenomenon. You have, therefore, but to multiply as
well as magnify. Think of a squadron, a fleet, all the navies of the
world, sailing slowly and majestically in unending circuit, as the
custom is when they bombard some hapless fort. The saluting is
continuous; the movement never ceases; but the big cannon are noiseless
now and harmless. Space is joyous with the innumerable wreaths of bluish
vapour; but the red slaughter and the accursed tumult of the sea-fight
are not heard or seen. Ponder long and lazily, I counsel you, over the
evolutions of the ships and the convolutions of the smoke. Those may
lure you, possibly, into the Waters of Oblivion; these may spirit you
away to the land of the Lotos-Eaters.
Another dream invites you; but it must be sketched with more reticence,
and this for two reasons. In the first place, the subject has become
identified with that portion of theatrical entertainments usually found
to be the least soporific. In the second place, if your imagination were
encouraged to free range hereupon, you might be foolish enough to
connect its poetic motion and its charm with certain souvenirs of a
certain fair friend of yours, whom it were wiser to forget if you desire
to profit by this Mandragorean system. Briefly, then, I commend a
Ballet, as not altogether unworthy of trial--but not, be it observed,
that thing of gas lamps, and pink tights, and leers, and _poses
plastiques_, over which young America goes into raptures. By no means.
Picture to yourself a smooth sward beneath clustered pines, a tender
moonlight, and Nymphs--not semi-nude as is the fashion of our day,
neither affecting the contortions of the gymnast as in our modern
caricature of dancing--but robed in swansdown, with nodding plumes and
tasseled fuschias pendent, tripping it, if you will, on "light fantastic
toe," yet through stately and solemn measures. You remember Giulio
Romano's dance of Apollo and the Muses in the Pitti at Florence? Take
that for your model; then place the figures to your liking. Nor forget
to add an orchestra of Aeolian harps. Let them hang among the
pine-branches, and sigh forth Weber's Last Waltz, just to set the groups
in motion. Then fail not in your breathings, O soft night-wind; foot it
daintily, ye wildwood Nymphs--so may sleep steal gently upon the
restless one, while yet his ear and eye are unsated!
Another dream: blue water again, though, this time, with a golden beach.
It is calm; but the surf rolls in languidly, with low murmurous sound,
as it will roll, be the sea's surface never so smooth, beyond the
involuntary breakers. What graceful bends and curves are marked, for an
instant, with frothy pencil, upon the shining sands! How they sparkle
with evanescent light! How soon the tiny bubbles disappear! But you have
watched all this, many and many a time; and stale indeed hereon were
description and moralizing! Why, then, this present allusion? What is
there in it, tending to lull the acuter sensibilities? What offers it of
gently-soothing exercise to the overwrought and throbbing brain? This is
the reply. Popular belief gives to every ninth or tenth wave, tumbling
in upon the shore, supremacy over its fellows. It swells up into fuller
volume. It sweeps landward with a more majestic force. This is the
story; but I would have you test its correctness. Is it the ninth, or
the tenth? So, lie down yonder upon the mass of dry sea-weed piled
against the rocks, and count patiently a dozen, a score, a hundred, a
thousand waves as they come in. You shall tell me, to-morrow morning,
whether the ninth have it, or the tenth--whether there be any regularity
at all.
Again: if we do not, like the Roman Augurs, watch and interpret the
flight of birds as of good or evil omen, some of them--I mean some of
the birds, not of the Augurs--may help us to become, for a while,
independent of fate and fortune. Did you ever, for instance, sit at a
window on a summer's evening, and take note how a flight of swallows
skims the air? They are not very numerous, perhaps; but as they dart to
and fro, and cross and recross before you, their number appears
indefinite, and the zigzag peculiarity of their movements can only be
verified by the closest possible scrutiny. I have satisfied myself that
the motion is regular, and that it describes an elongated figure of 8,
traced as I am sure you have often traced it upon ice with the outer
edge of your skates. Now, though I tell you this on the faith of my own
personal observation, you are not bound to accept my word for it. Dream
therefore that, while you are blending two ovals into one figure upon
the frozen pond, swallows overhead are keeping time to your gyrations.
The winter sport and the summer bird may be made to harmonize, as it is
only in a dream; and close watching will enable you hereafter to support
or disavow my theory.
Again: return, if you please, from air to water, for you have by no
means exhausted the resources of this latter element, in the way of
material for dreams. Are you an angler? Did you never drowse and doze
over your rod, when "sitting in a pleasant shade," on a sultry
afternoon, not a nibble disturbed the equanimity of your float? The mere
thought were suggestive of a nap--suggestive, that is, to the indolently
disposed, with whom however you may not be classed, seeing that your
mind is in a state of unwholesome excitement, the which it is my
business to allay. And so, I pray you, look deeper into this matter; pry
down into the blue transparent depths, and mark the fish that swarm
about your hook. Is it paste thereon, or a wriggling worm? Never mind;
the bait is singularly attractive. To say nothing of the float gently
bobbing ever and anon, and of the tell-tale ripples rising to the
surface, you can see with your own eyes how victims dally with
temptation; how they course to and fro, and round and round; how one
eyes the bait, and another smells it, and another mumbles it; how one
swims away, and presently returns, and with him his mate in size and
colour. Are they over-fed or over-cautious, that they thus play round,
but will not gorge? Does one egg on his brother to try the suspicious
morsel, hoping himself to profit by his brother's experience? Is there
so much resemblance to human foibles discernible down there, among these
poor little inhabitants of the waters under the Earth? The question is
worth studying out--especially by a sleepless man, who, while
contemplating the forms, the motions, the manners, and the minds of
fish, may unconsciously swallow the bait that is thus dropped before
him.
It was my intention to devote a long and distinct paragraph to each of
four other subjects, that appear to me no less adapted for the
consideration of waking dreamers. These are, respectively, Ghosts,
Labyrinths, Regattas, and the Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne. But it
is well to leave something to the reader's perspicacity and inventive
powers. Indeed, why should he not fancy--dream is the more appropriate
term--that he himself has undertaken to complete these special
paragraphs? Let his imaginary pen glide, swift and effortless, over his
imaginary foolscap. Ten to one, he will fill in and elaborate my
outlines, far better than I could work them out myself. For instance, I
do but mention Ghosts; he might summon to his presence, and bid troop
before him, hosts upon hosts of his friends or relatives, or of his
chosen heroes and heroines in romance and history. He might clothe them
in white or in grey; he might attire them in their ordinary habiliments;
in short, he might parade them according to his own taste, without
reference to mine, which whould be a clear point in his favour.
Accidentally, I might call up some spirit that had vexed and thwarted
him through life, for no man whose experience is worth remembering hath
not had his enemies, hidden or revealed, and very few are the men, fewer
the women, who have never disposed of a rival. My reader of the moment,
invested with my functions, will of course evoke none but his familiars,
the well-bred and well-behaved. Let me be grateful accordingly that, by
transferring the responsibility to him, I escape the chance of bringing
forward, innocently and inopportunely, some social Banquo. And so I pass
on, with one single word of caution to my substitute in completing this
paragraph: let him not convert his pen into a Pre-Raphaelitish
paint-brush. Airy beings must be rather hinted than described. The
realism of anatomical plates, applied to them, would spoil the reader's
dream _in toto_, and wake him up perhaps more hopelessly than ever.--As
to Labyrinths, the course is obvious. Take a dozen of these quaint
contrivances, and place them side by side, as Paulsen or Paul Morphy may
place the sundry chess-boards whereat he is to play, simultaneously and
blindfolded, an equivalent number of games. Pop, over the hedges and
into the very core of each one, any personage against whom you have a
grudge, or any one of the Ghosts just convened that may have been
troublesome; and then challenge the incarcerated individuals to find
their way out of limbo, by the gravelled pathways. Should one of the
whole number emerge, through extraordinary good luck, quietly tip him
back again over the hedge, or defy him to retrace his steps and regain
the centre. You may enlarge this suggestion, I think, into a paragraph
reasonably long.--The same with Regattas. I am almost sorry that I gave
up to you so felicitous a topic; for all ages and all waters may be laid
under contribution. From Noah's Ark shall float the commodore's broad
pendant. The ocean shall be covered, so far as eye can range, with
countless craft of every build and rig. And all shall glide about in
quiet, inasmuch as oars shall be muffled, and steamers, having learned
to consume their own smoke, shall be taught equally to swallow their
hideous noises. The marshalling of the competitors and the order of the
racing are left to your discretion; but there need be no lack of
interest. Caiques from Stamboul and gondolas from Venice shall be
frequent; and pirogues from the Malayan peninsula shall over-haul the
three trim yacht-schooners that raced across the Atlantic from New-York.
Here Cleopatra's barge shall be matched against an Esquimaux kayak;
there a catamaran from Coringa shall bump the Yale College eight. If
you cannot make something out of all this picturesque confusion, and if
you cannot contrive to lose therein both yourself and the reader of your
paragraph, the fault will be yours, not mine.--There remain the Eleven
Thousand Virgins of Cologne. What are you to do with them? Simply this.
Endow each one of them with personal attributes; let each have form and
features, distinct from the others of her sisterhood. Is the task
difficult? So much the better. After a cool thousand or so of these
individual portraitures, you may begin to fumble in vain for separate
identities. In fact, who knows whether you may not be compelled to take
refuge hopelessly in sleep, the very mark at which both of us are
aiming?
And now, the foregoing long and subdivided paragraph being brought at
last to an end, it were disingenuous to shirk an admission, that the
"who's who" is not so plainly discernible therein as it might be. You
and I, and the reader and the writer, and the giver and recipient of
advice, will be accused by the critic of being somewhat queerly mixed
up. What, then? Are not vagueness and uncertainty of style specially
appropriate to the circumstances? Who would thank us for precision? No,
no; carry clearness, if you like, into your mathematical definitions;
but leave us our mistiness when we treat of the mysterious. Nor, on the
whole, am I otherwise than content with my suggested assumption of
temporary and imaginary authorship, as one of the methods for quieting
a fevered brain. How pleasant to dream that rival Publishers are
contending for your manuscript poems; that rival Managers are waylaying
you for a sight of your unwritten comedy! Besides, by adding authorship
to the list that closed with the damsels of Cologne, the number is
brought up to eleven, so that, when I wind up with my trump card, the
promised dozen of dreams will be complete, and I shall be enabled to
dispense with the "waves of shadow" on the wheat-field, which I
acknowledged were not my original conception.
But am I too late in bringing forward my last and happiest idea?--though
for that matter, when the tale of Mazeppa was concluded, "the King had
been an hour asleep," and yet Mazeppa's story was told out ne'ertheless.
For your immediate purpose therefore, or for use on your next sleepless
night, I entrust you with the crowning opiate. Recollect that you are
dreaming; and dream that all your intimates and relatives, all of whom
you have ever heard or read with interest, men and women and children,
people of every age and clime--imagine them, I say, all seated before
you at a round table. How any table is to accommodate so vast a
multitude, is their affair, and yours; the dreamer is never baulked by
technical impediments. Have your eye upon them all at once--another
little difficulty, to be overcome only by mortals in the incipient stage
of somnolency. Or, if your mind's eye obstinately refuses to enlarge its
orbit in this direction, so as to embrace such a vast and heterogeneous
assemblage, gather, I beseech you, into one focus any such crowd as you
habitually see. The Sunday audience of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher
will answer the purpose; or you may fancy yourself at one of the old
Tammany Hall Meetings; or at the Opera, on a fashionable night; or in
the Senate at Washington during the impeachment of Mr. Johnson. It
matters not when and where; but the proceedings strike you as
insufferably dull, and you give vent to your feelings in a yawn that may
neither be suppressed nor concealed. Suddenly, moved by the same impulse
and unable also to control or hide its effect, the jaw of every soul
present is dropped to the lowermost, and all mouths are open in a
universal yawn. It is not catching; it is caught. Beecher gapes, and the
elect are gaping round him. Isaiah Rynders the same, and the same with
his "unterrified" hearers. Parepa-Rosa stands open-mouthed in dumb show
of singing, while humming-birds perched on chignons vibrate, as they
vainly try to resist the irresistible. Gape the Republicans, and gape
the Democrats, in response to the gaping Butler on his legs. There is,
in Shakespeare's words--though his ignorant editors have transformed it
into a "gap"--there is, I say, "a gape in Nature." Will you alone hold
out: I can't believe it. You have yawned in concert, I am morally
certain. Indeed, if, as these long-drawn prescriptions come to an end,
you be not far on the road to forgetfulness, I can give you but one
parting counsel. Nothing else can serve and save you--you must
incontinently take morphine.