She is easy, good-natured, and compliant about everything but her
sleep. On that point she can bear no interference and no stoppages.
Unless she had it fully out every day, neither would life be worth
having for herself, nor would she allow the life of any other people
to be endurable. Sleep is her great gift; her body has been
wonderfully constituted to take a great deal of ease. Deprive her of
that, and you starve her as effectually as you famish a human being by
abstraction of food. Her personal appearance confirms her philosophy;
for you can detect not one particle of restlessness about her. All is
soft, rounded, and woolly, as if she carried an atmosphere of
deafening about with her.
It has been her habit ever since her earliest years. One of the
principal anecdotes of her girlish days now remembered in her family
is, that her mamma having sent on some exigency to rouse her, she
faintly murmured forth, 'Not for kingdoms!' then turned on the other
side, and doggedly went to sleep again. There is another story of her
having had to rise one morning at half-past seven, in order to attend
a friend as bridemaid, when, coming down stairs, and seeing it to be a
raw drizzly day, she pronounced her situation to be 'the ne plus ultra
of human misery!' She told the young bride (by way of a compliment)
that she would not have got up in _the middle of the night_ to be
present at the marriage of any other friend on earth. This phrase
might seem to most people only a pleasant hyperbole; but I am not
quite sure that it was so intended. The fact is, she has seen so
little of the world at any other hours than between noon and midnight,
that she has a very obscure sense of other periods of daily time. She
scarcely knows what morning is. Sunrise is to her as much of a
phenomenon as a total eclipse of the sun to any other person. She
cannot tell what mankind in general mean by breakfast-time, for she
has scarcely ever seen the world so early. And really half-past seven
was not very far from the middle of _her_ night.
Her husband, who is a little of a wag, compares her waking-life to the
appearance which the sun makes above the horizon on a winter day:
only, her morning is about his noon. He says, however, there appears
to be no necessary end to her sleep. It is like Decandolle's idea as
to the life of a tree: keep up the required conditions, as sap, &c.,
and the tree will never decay. So, keep up the necessary conditions
for her repose, and she continues to sleep. It is always some external
accident of a disturbing nature which gets her up. He has sometimes
proposed making an attempt so to arrange matters as to test how long
she _would_ sleep. But, unfortunately, he cannot provide against the
disturbing effect of hunger, so he fears she might not sleep above two
nights and a day at the most--a result that would not be worth the
trouble of the experiment. She takes all his jokes in good-humour, as
indeed she takes everything which does not positively interfere with
her favourite indulgence. '"Ah, little she'll reck if ye let her sleep
on," ought,' says he, 'to be her motto, being applicable to her in the
most trying crises of life, even that of the house burning about her
ears.'
He contrasts his life, which is a moderately active one, with hers. 'I
went up to my dressing-room, about nine o'clock one evening, to
prepare to go to a party, when the sound of heavy breathing from the
neighbouring apartment informed me that she had reached the land of
forgetfulness. I went out, spent a couple of hours in conversation,
had supper, set several new conundrums agoing in life, and made one or
two new friends. Then I came home, had my usual rest, rose, and set to
work in my business-room, where I drew up an important paper. Still no
appearance of the lady. I had breakfast, read the newspaper, and
played with the children. One of my new friends called, and made an
appointment. Still no appearance of my wife down stairs. At length,
about the middle of the day, when I was deep in a new piece of
business, she peeped in, with a cold nose and fresh ringlets, to ask a
cheque for her house-money--having got down stairs rather more
promptly than usual that morning, in order to go out and settle her
weekly bills. Thus I had a series of waking transactions last night,
another this morning--in fact, _a history_--while she had been lost in
the regions of oblivion. My sleep is rounded by hers, like a small
circle within a large one.'
Sometimes he speculates on the ultimate reckoning of their respective
lives. 'Mine,' says he, 'will have been so thickened up with doings of
all kinds, that it will appear long. I shall seem to have lived all my
days. I fear it must be different with yours. So much of it having
been passed in entire unconsciousness, you will look back from seventy
as most people do from five-and-thirty; and when Death presents his
dart, you will feel like one that has been defrauded of a most
precious privilege. You will go off in a state of impious discontent,
as if you had been shockingly ill-used.' Such is one of his sly plans
for rousing her to a sense of the impropriety of her ways; but all
such quips and cranks are in vain. Only don't absolutely shake her in
her bed before her thirteenth hour of rest, and you may _say_ what you
please. It cannot be implied that she is hardened, for no such quality
is compatible with her character. But she smiles every joke and every
advice aside with such an air of impassible benignity, that you see it
is of no use to think of reforming her in this grand particular.
One day not long since it rather seemed as if she was going to turn
the tables on her worthy spouse. She had a remarkable dream, in which
she thought she heard a lady sing a new song. When she awoke, she
remembered the two verses she thought she had heard, and they turned
out to be perfectly good sense and good metre, and not intolerable as
poetry. Now this was what Coleridge calls a psychological curiosity,
for the verses had of course been composed by her in her sleep. There
was more in the matter still. In her waking-life, she has a remarkably
treacherous memory for poetry, being seldom able to repeat a single
verse even of Isaac Watts without a mistake. Here, however, she had
carried two entire verses safe and sound out of her sleep into her
waking existence. It was therefore a double wonder. She has
accordingly got up a theory, that her mind is at its best in her
sleep, and is judged of at a disadvantage in its daylight moments. In
sleep lies her principal life. Waking is an inferior exceptive kind of
existence, into which she is dragged by the base exigencies of the
world. She ought to be judged of as she is in her dreams. No saying
what she goes through then. Perhaps she is the most active woman in
the world in that state. Possibly she says and does the most brilliant
things, such as nobody else could say or do in any condition. 'You say
you cannot test it, for you cannot follow me into my dream-world.
Well, but it may be as I say; and till you can prove the reverse, I
hold that I am entitled to the presumption which my dream-song
establishes in my favour.' It must be admitted there is some force in
this reasoning. All that her husband can in the meantime say on the
other side, is just this: 'Granted the activity and the brilliancy of
your sleep-life, it does wonderfully little for me or our household
concerns. Only give us an hour more of your sweet company in the
forenoon, and we shall admit you to be in your sleep as stirring and
as clever as you choose to call yourself.' This of course he says very
safely, for he well knows that no earthly consideration would induce
her to abridge her sleep even by that one hour.
At a visit I lately paid to this good couple, I found them debating
these points, the gentleman still refusing to give implicit credence
to the theory which the lady had started in her own favour. The
controversy was conducted with a great deal of good-humour, and I
could not refrain from entering into the discussion. I started,
however, a new theory, which I thought might please both parties, and
in this object I am happy to say I was successful. 'Here,' said I, 'is
a wife remarkable for putting as much good-nature into her six or
eight hours of day-life as most women put into twice the time. No one
can tell what she is in her sleep: perhaps the veriest termagant on
earth. Suppose her sleep could be abridged, might not some of this
termagantism overflow into and be diffused over her waking existence?
I can well imagine this, and you, my friend, reduced to such straits
by it that you might wish she would never waken more. Be content,
then, and rather put up with the little ills you have than fly to
others that you know not of.'