Some years afterwards I was staying with some friends in Paris. I had got
up before breakfast and gone out to buy a newspaper. I had noticed the
servant, a girl who had come from the country some years before, laying
the table for breakfast. As I had passed her I had been telling myself one
of those long foolish tales which one tells only to oneself. If something
had happened that had not happened, I would have hurt my arm, I thought. I
saw myself with my arm in a sling in the middle of some childish
adventures. I returned with the newspaper and met my host and hostess in
the door. The moment they saw me they cried out, 'Why, the _bonne_ has
just told us you had your arm in a sling. We thought something must have
happened to you last night, that you had been run over maybe'--or some
such words. I had been dining out at the other end of Paris, and had come
in after everybody had gone to bed. I had cast my imagination so strongly
upon the servant that she had seen it, and with what had appeared to be
more than the mind's eye.
One afternoon, about the same time, I was thinking very intently of a
certain fellow-student for whom I had a message, which I hesitated about
writing. In a couple of days I got a letter from a place some hundreds of
miles away where that student was. On the afternoon when I had been
thinking so intently I had suddenly appeared there amid a crowd of people
in a hotel and as seeming solid as if in the flesh. My fellow-student had
seen me, but no one else, and had asked me to come again when the people
had gone. I had vanished, but had come again in the middle of the night
and given the message. I myself had no knowledge of casting an
imagination upon one so far away.
I could tell of stranger images, of stranger enchantments, of stranger
imaginations, cast consciously or unconsciously over as great distances by
friends or by myself, were it not that the greater energies of the mind
seldom break forth but when the deeps are loosened. They break forth amid
events too private or too sacred for public speech, or seem themselves, I
know not why, to belong to hidden things. I have written of these
breakings forth, these loosenings of the deep, with some care and some
detail, but I shall keep my record shut. After all, one can but bear
witness less to convince him who won't believe than to protect him who
does, as Blake puts it, enduring unbelief and misbelief and ridicule as
best one may. I shall be content to show that past times have believed as
I do, by quoting Joseph Glanvil's description of the Scholar Gipsy. Joseph
Glanvil is dead, and will not mind unbelief and misbelief and ridicule.
The Scholar Gipsy, too, is dead, unless indeed perfectly wise magicians
can live till it please them to die, and he is wandering somewhere, even
if one cannot see him, as Arnold imagined, 'at some lone ale-house in the
Berkshire moors, on the warm ingle-bench,' or 'crossing the stripling
Thames at Bablock Hithe,' 'trailing his fingers in the cool stream,' or
'giving store of flowers--the frail-leaf'd white anemone, dark hare-bells
drenched with dew of summer eves,' to the girls 'who from the distant
hamlets come to dance around the Fyfield elm in May,' or 'sitting upon the
river bank o'ergrown,' living on through time 'with a free onward
impulse.' This is Joseph Glanvil's story--
There was very lately a lad in the University of Oxford who, being of
very pregnant and ready parts and yet wanting the encouragement of
preferment, was by his poverty forced to leave his studies there, and
to cast himself upon the wide world for a livelihood. Now his
necessities growing daily on him, and wanting the help of friends to
relieve him, he was at last forced to join himself to a company of
vagabond gipsies, whom occasionally he met with, and to follow their
trade for a maintenance.... After he had been a pretty while well
exercised in the trade, there chanced to ride by a couple of
scholars, who had formerly been of his acquaintance. The scholar had
quickly spied out these old friends among the gipsies, and their
amazement to see him among such society had well-nigh discovered him;
but by a sign he prevented them owning him before that crew, and
taking one of them aside privately, desired him with his friend to go
to an inn, not far distant, promising there to come to them. They
accordingly went thither and he follows: after their first salutation
his friends inquire how he came to lead so odd a life as that was,
and so joined himself into such a beggarly company. The scholar gipsy
having given them an account of the necessity which drove him to that
kind of life, told them that the people he went with were not such
impostors as they were taken for, but that they had a traditional
kind of learning among them and could do wonders by the power of
imagination, and that himself had learned much of their art and
improved it further than themselves could. And to evince the truth of
what he told them, he said he'd remove into another room, leaving
them to discourse together; and upon his return tell them the sense
of what they had talked of; which accordingly he performed, giving
them a full account of what had passed between them in his absence.
The scholars being amazed at so unexpected a discovery, earnestly
desired him to unriddle the mystery. In which he gave them
satisfaction, by telling them that what he did was by the power of
imagination, his phantasy leading theirs; and that himself had
dictated to them the discourse they had held together while he was
from them; that there were warrantable ways of heightening the
imagination to that pitch as to bend another's, and that when he had
compassed the whole secret, some parts of which he was yet ignorant
of, he intended to leave their company and give the world an account
of what he had learned.
If all who have described events like this have not dreamed, we should
rewrite our histories, for all men, certainly all imaginative men, must be
for ever casting forth enchantments, glamours, illusions; and all men,
especially tranquil men who have no powerful egotistic life, must be
continually passing under their power. Our most elaborate thoughts,
elaborate purposes, precise emotions, are often, as I think, not really
ours, but have on a sudden come up, as it were, out of hell or down out of
heaven. The historian should remember, should he not? angels and devils
not less than kings and soldiers, and plotters and thinkers. What matter
if the angel or devil, as indeed certain old writers believed, first
wrapped itself with an organized shape in some man's imagination? what
matter 'if God himself only acts or is in existing beings or men,' as
Blake believed? we must none the less admit that invisible beings, far
wandering influences, shapes that may have floated from a hermit of the
wilderness, brood over council-chambers and studies and battle-fields. We
should never be certain that it was not some woman treading in the
wine-press who began that subtle change in men's minds, that powerful
movement of thought and imagination about which so many Germans have
written; or that the passion, because of which so many countries were
given to the sword, did not begin in the mind of some shepherd boy,
lighting up his eyes for a moment before it ran upon its way.
V
We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more visibly
and obviously, and in all likelihood more easily and fully than we do, for
our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive meditative life,
and our education that enlarges the separated, self-moving mind, have made
our souls less sensitive. Our souls that were once naked to the winds of
heaven are now thickly clad, and have learned to build a house and light a
fire upon its hearth, and shut to the doors and windows. The winds can,
indeed, make us draw near to the fire, or can even lift the carpet and
whistle under the door, but they could do worse out on the plains long
ago. A certain learned man, quoted by Mr. Lang in his _Making of
Religion_, contends that the memories of primitive man and his thoughts of
distant places must have had the intensity of hallucination, because there
was nothing in his mind to draw his attention away from them--an
explanation that does not seem to me complete--and Mr. Lang goes on to
quote certain travellers to prove that savages live always on the edges of
vision. One Laplander who wished to become a Christian, and thought
visions but heathenish, confessed to a traveller, to whom he had given a
minute account of many distant events, read doubtless in that traveller's
mind, 'that he knew not how to make use of his eyes, since things
altogether distant were present to them.' I myself could find in one
district in Galway but one man who had not seen what I can but call
spirits, and he was in his dotage. 'There is no man mowing a meadow but
sees them at one time or another,' said a man in a different district.
If I can unintentionally cast a glamour, an enchantment, over persons of
our own time who have lived for years in great cities, there is no reason
to doubt that men could cast intentionally a far stronger enchantment, a
far stronger glamour, over the more sensitive people of ancient times, or
that men can still do so where the old order of life remains unbroken. Why
should not the Scholar Gipsy cast his spell over his friends? Why should
not St. Patrick, or he of whom the story was first told, pass his enemies,
he and all his clerics, as a herd of deer? Why should not enchanters like
him in the _Morte d'Arthur_ make troops of horse seem but grey stones? Why
should not the Roman soldiers, though they came of a civilization which
was ceasing to be sensitive to these things, have trembled for a moment
before the enchantments of the Druids of Mona? Why should not the Jesuit
father, or the Count Saint Germain, or whoever the tale was first told of,
have really seemed to leave the city in a coach and four by all the Twelve
Gates at once? Why should not Moses and the enchanters of Pharaoh have
made their staffs as the medicine men of many primitive peoples make their
pieces of old rope seem like devouring serpents? Why should not that
mediæval enchanter have made summer and all its blossoms seem to break
forth in middle winter?
May we not learn some day to rewrite our histories, when they touch upon
these things too?
Men who are imaginative writers to-day may well have preferred to
influence the imagination of others more directly in past times. Instead
of learning their craft with paper and a pen they may have sat for hours
imagining themselves to be stocks and stones and beasts of the wood, till
the images were so vivid that the passers-by became but a part of the
imagination of the dreamer, and wept or laughed or ran away as he would
have them. Have not poetry and music arisen, as it seems, out of the
sounds the enchanters made to help their imagination to enchant, to charm,
to bind with a spell themselves and the passers-by? These very words, a
chief part of all praises of music or poetry, still cry to us their
origin. And just as the musician or the poet enchants and charms and binds
with a spell his own mind when he would enchant the mind of others, so did
the enchanter create or reveal for himself as well as for others the
supernatural artist or genius, the seeming transitory mind made out of
many minds, whose work I saw, or thought I saw, in that suburban house. He
kept the doors too, as it seems, of those less transitory minds, the
genius of the family, the genius of the tribe, or it may be, when he was
mighty-souled enough, the genius of the world. Our history speaks of
opinions and discoveries, but in ancient times when, as I think, men had
their eyes ever upon those doors, history spoke of commandments and
revelations. They looked as carefully and as patiently towards Sinai and
its thunders as we look towards parliaments and laboratories. We are
always praising men in whom the individual life has come to perfection,
but they were always praising the one mind, their foundation of all
perfection.