In nobler books we are moved with something like the emotions of life;
and this emotion is very variously provoked. We are so moved when Levine
labours in the field, when André sinks beyond emotion, when Richard
Feverel and Lucy Desborough meet beside the river, when Antony, “not
cowardly, puts off his helmet,” when Kent has infinite pity on the dying
Lear, when, in Dostoieffky’s _Despised and Rejected_, the uncomplaining
hero drains his cup of suffering and virtue. These are notes that please
the great heart of man. Not only love, and the fields, and the bright
face of danger, but sacrifice and death and unmerited suffering humbly
supported, touch in us the vein of the poetic. We love to think of them,
we long to try them, we are humbly hopeful that we may prove heroes also.
We have heard, perhaps, too much of lesser matters. Here is the door,
here is the open air. _Itur in antiquam silvam_.
VIII
A CHAPTER ON DREAMS
THE past is all of one texture—whether feigned or suffered—whether acted
out in three dimensions, or only witnessed in that small theatre of the
brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long, after the jets are
down, and darkness and sleep reign undisturbed in the remainder of the
body. There is no distinction on the face of our experiences; one is
vivid indeed, and one dull, and one pleasant, and another agonising to
remember; but which of them is what we call true, and which a dream,
there is not one hair to prove. The past stands on a precarious footing;
another straw split in the field of metaphysic, and behold us robbed of
it. There is scarce a family that can count four generations but lays a
claim to some dormant title or some castle and estate: a claim not
prosecutable in any court of law, but flattering to the fancy and a great
alleviation of idle hours. A man’s claim to his own past is yet less
valid. A paper might turn up (in proper story-book fashion) in the
secret drawer of an old ebony secretary, and restore your family to its
ancient honours, and reinstate mine in a certain West Indian islet (not
far from St. Kitt’s, as beloved tradition hummed in my young ears) which
was once ours, and is now unjustly some one else’s, and for that matter
(in the state of the sugar trade) is not worth anything to anybody. I do
not say that these revolutions are likely; only no man can deny that they
are possible; and the past, on the other baud, is, lost for ever: our old
days and deeds, our old selves, too, and the very world in which these
scenes were acted, all brought down to the same faint residuum as a last
night’s dream, to some incontinuous images, and an echo in the chambers
of the brain. Not an hour, not a mood, not a glance of the eye, can we
revoke; it is all gone, past conjuring. And yet conceive us robbed of
it, conceive that little thread of memory that we trail behind us broken
at the pocket’s edge; and in what naked nullity should we be left! for we
only guide ourselves, and only know ourselves, by these air-painted
pictures of the past.
Upon these grounds, there are some among us who claim to have lived
longer and more richly than their neighbours; when they lay asleep they
claim they were still active; and among the treasures of memory that all
men review for their amusement, these count in no second place the
harvests of their dreams. There is one of this kind whom I have in my
eye, and whose case is perhaps unusual enough to be described. He was
from a child an ardent and uncomfortable dreamer. When he had a touch of
fever at night, and the room swelled and shrank, and his clothes, hanging
on a nail, now loomed up instant to the bigness of a church, and now drew
away into a horror of infinite distance and infinite littleness, the poor
soul was very well aware of what must follow, and struggled hard against
the approaches of that slumber which was the beginning of sorrows.
But his struggles were in vain; sooner or later the night-hag would have
him by the throat, and pluck him strangling and screaming, from his
sleep. His dreams were at times commonplace enough, at times very
strange, at times they were almost formless: he would be haunted, for
instance, by nothing more definite than a certain hue of brown, which he
did not mind in the least while he was awake, but feared and loathed
while he was dreaming; at times, again, they took on every detail of
circumstance, as when once he supposed he must swallow the populous
world, and awoke screaming with the horror of the thought. The two chief
troubles of his very narrow existence—the practical and everyday trouble
of school tasks and the ultimate and airy one of hell and judgment—were
often confounded together into one appalling nightmare. He seemed to
himself to stand before the Great White Throne; he was called on, poor
little devil, to recite some form of words, on which his destiny
depended; his tongue stuck, his memory was blank, hell gaped for him; and
he would awake, clinging to the curtain-rod with his knees to his chin.
These were extremely poor experiences, on the whole; and at that time of
life my dreamer would have very willingly parted with his power of
dreams. But presently, in the course of his growth, the cries and
physical contortions passed away, seemingly for ever; his visions were
still for the most part miserable, but they were more constantly
supported; and he would awake with no more extreme symptom than a flying
heart, a freezing scalp, cold sweats, and the speechless midnight fear.
His dreams, too, as befitted a mind better stocked with particulars,
became more circumstantial, and had more the air and continuity of life.
The look of the world beginning to take hold on his attention, scenery
came to play a part in his sleeping as well as in his waking thoughts, so
that he would take long, uneventful journeys and see strange towns and
beautiful places as he lay in bed. And, what is more significant, an odd
taste that he had for the Georgian costume and for stories laid in that
period of English history, began to rule the features of his dreams; so
that he masqueraded there in a three-cornered hat and was much engaged
with Jacobite conspiracy between the hour for bed and that for breakfast.
About the same time, he began to read in his dreams—tales, for the most
part, and for the most part after the manner of G. P. R. James, but so
incredibly more vivid and moving than any printed book, that he has ever
since been malcontent with literature.
And then, while he was yet a student, there came to him a dream-adventure
which he has no anxiety to repeat; he began, that is to say, to dream in
sequence and thus to lead a double life—one of the day, one of the
night—one that he had every reason to believe was the true one, another
that he had no means of proving to be false. I should have said he
studied, or was by way of studying, at Edinburgh College, which (it may
be supposed) was how I came to know him. Well, in his dream-life, he
passed a long day in the surgical theatre, his heart in his mouth, his
teeth on edge, seeing monstrous malformations and the abhorred dexterity
of surgeons. In a heavy, rainy, foggy evening he came forth into the
South Bridge, turned up the High Street, and entered the door of a tall
_land_, at the top of which he supposed himself to lodge. All night
long, in his wet clothes, he climbed the stairs, stair after stair in
endless series, and at every second flight a flaring lamp with a
reflector. All night long, he brushed by single persons passing
downward—beggarly women of the street, great, weary, muddy labourers,
poor scarecrows of men, pale parodies of women—but all drowsy and weary
like himself, and all single, and all brushing against him as they
passed. In the end, out of a northern window, he would see day beginning
to whiten over the Firth, give up the ascent, turn to descend, and in a
breath be back again upon the streets, in his wet clothes, in the wet,
haggard dawn, trudging to another day of monstrosities and operations.
Time went quicker in the life of dreams, some seven hours (as near as he
can guess) to one; and it went, besides, more intensely, so that the
gloom of these fancied experiences clouded the day, and he had not shaken
off their shadow ere it was time to lie down and to renew them. I cannot
tell how long it was that he endured this discipline; but it was long
enough to leave a great black blot upon his memory, long enough to send
him, trembling for his reason, to the doors of a certain doctor;
whereupon with a simple draught he was restored to the common lot of man.
The poor gentleman has since been troubled by nothing of the sort;
indeed, his nights were for some while like other men’s, now blank, now
chequered with dreams, and these sometimes charming, sometimes appalling,
but except for an occasional vividness, of no extraordinary kind. I will
just note one of these occasions, ere I pass on to what makes my dreamer
truly interesting. It seemed to him that he was in the first floor of a
rough hill-farm. The room showed some poor efforts at gentility, a
carpet on the floor, a piano, I think, against the wall; but, for all
these refinements, there was no mistaking he was in a moorland place,
among hillside people, and set in miles of heather. He looked down from
the window upon a bare farmyard, that seemed to have been long disused.
A great, uneasy stillness lay upon the world. There was no sign of the
farm-folk or of any live stock, save for an old, brown, curly dog of the
retriever breed, who sat close in against the wall of the house and
seemed to be dozing. Something about this dog disquieted the dreamer; it
was quite a nameless feeling, for the beast looked right enough—indeed,
he was so old and dull and dusty and broken-down, that he should rather
have awakened pity; and yet the conviction came and grew upon the dreamer
that this was no proper dog at all, but something hellish. A great many
dozing summer flies hummed about the yard; and presently the dog thrust
forth his paw, caught a fly in his open palm, carried it to his mouth
like an ape, and looking suddenly up at the dreamer in the window, winked
to him with one eye. The dream went on, it matters not how it went; it
was a good dream as dreams go; but there was nothing in the sequel worthy
of that devilish brown dog. And the point of interest for me lies partly
in that very fact: that having found so singular an incident, my
imperfect dreamer should prove unable to carry the tale to a fit end and
fall back on indescribable noises and indiscriminate horrors. It would
be different now; he knows his business better!
For, to approach at last the point: This honest fellow had long been in
the custom of setting himself to sleep with tales, and so had his father
before him; but these were irresponsible inventions, told for the
teller’s pleasure, with no eye to the crass public or the thwart
reviewer: tales where a thread might be dropped, or one adventure quitted
for another, on fancy’s least suggestion. So that the little people who
manage man’s internal theatre had not as yet received a very rigorous
training; and played upon their stage like children who should have
slipped into the house and found it empty, rather than like drilled
actors performing a set piece to a huge hall of faces. But presently my
dreamer began to turn his former amusement of story-telling to (what is
called) account; by which I mean that he began to write and sell his
tales. Here was he, and here were the little people who did that part of
his business, in quite new conditions. The stories must now be trimmed
and pared and set upon all fours, they must run from a beginning to an
end and fit (after a manner) with the laws of life; the pleasure, in one
word, had become a business; and that not only for the dreamer, but for
the little people of his theatre. These understood the change as well as
he. When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought
amusement, but printable and profitable tales; and after he had dozed off
in his box-seat, his little people continued their evolutions with the
same mercantile designs. All other forms of dream deserted him but two:
he still occasionally reads the most delightful books, he still visits at
times the most delightful places; and it is perhaps worthy of note that
to these same places, and to one in particular, he returns at intervals
of months and years, finding new field-paths, visiting new neighbours,
beholding that happy valley under new effects of noon and dawn and
sunset. But all the rest of the family of visions is quite lost to him:
the common, mangled version of yesterday’s affairs, the
raw-head-and-bloody-bones nightmare, rumoured to be the child of toasted
cheese—these and their like are gone; and, for the most part, whether
awake or asleep, he is simply occupied—he or his little people—in
consciously making stories for the market. This dreamer (like many other
persons) has encountered some trifling vicissitudes of fortune. When the
bank begins to send letters and the butcher to linger at the back gate,
he sets to belabouring his brains after a story, for that is his readiest
money-winner; and, behold! at once the little people begin to bestir
themselves in the same quest, and labour all night long, and all night
long set before him truncheons of tales upon their lighted theatre. No
fear of his being frightened now; the flying heart and the frozen scalp
are things by-gone; applause, growing applause, growing interest, growing
exultation in his own cleverness (for he takes all the credit), and at
last a jubilant leap to wakefulness, with the cry, “I have it, that’ll
do!” upon his lips: with such and similar emotions he sits at these
nocturnal dramas, with such outbreaks, like Claudius in the play, he
scatters the performance in the midst. Often enough the waking is a
disappointment: he has been too deep asleep, as I explain the thing;
drowsiness has gained his little people, they have gone stumbling and
maundering through their parts; and the play, to the awakened mind, is
seen to be a tissue of absurdities. And yet how often have these
sleepless Brownies done him honest service, and given him, as he sat idly
taking his pleasure in the boxes, better tales than he could fashion for
himself.
Here is one, exactly as it came to him. It seemed he was the son of a
very rich and wicked man, the owner of broad acres and a most damnable
temper. The dreamer (and that was the son) had lived much abroad, on
purpose to avoid his parent; and when at length he returned to England,
it was to find him married again to a young wife, who was supposed to
suffer cruelly and to loathe her yoke. Because of this marriage (as the
dreamer indistinctly understood) it was desirable for father and son to
have a meeting; and yet both being proud and both angry, neither would
condescend upon a visit. Meet they did accordingly, in a desolate, sandy
country by the sea; and there they quarrelled, and the son, stung by some
intolerable insult, struck down the father dead. No suspicion was
aroused; the dead man was found and buried, and the dreamer succeeded to
the broad estates, and found himself installed under the same roof with
his father’s widow, for whom no provision had been made. These two lived
very much alone, as people may after a bereavement, sat down to table
together, shared the long evenings, and grew daily better friends; until
it seemed to him of a sudden that she was prying about dangerous matters,
that she had conceived a notion of his guilt, that she watched him and
tried him with questions. He drew back from her company as men draw back
from a precipice suddenly discovered; and yet so strong was the
attraction that he would drift again and again into the old intimacy, and
again and again be startled back by some suggestive question or some
inexplicable meaning in her eye. So they lived at cross purposes, a life
full of broken dialogue, challenging glances, and suppressed passion;
until, one day, he saw the woman slipping from the house in a veil,
followed her to the station, followed her in the train to the seaside
country, and out over the sandhills to the very place where the murder
was done. There she began to grope among the bents, he watching her,
flat upon his face; and presently she had something in her hand—I cannot
remember what it was, but it was deadly evidence against the dreamer—and
as she held it up to look at it, perhaps from the shock of the discovery,
her foot slipped, and she hung at some peril on the brink of the tall
sand-wreaths. He had no thought but to spring up and rescue her; and
there they stood face to face, she with that deadly matter openly in her
hand—his very presence on the spot another link of proof. It was plain
she was about to speak, but this was more than he could bear—he could
bear to be lost, but not to talk of it with his destroyer; and he cut her
short with trivial conversation. Arm in arm, they returned together to
the train, talking he knew not what, made the journey back in the same
carriage, sat down to dinner, and passed the evening in the drawing-room
as in the past. But suspense and fear drummed in the dreamer’s bosom.
“She has not denounced me yet”—so his thoughts ran—“when will she
denounce me? Will it be to-morrow?” And it was not to-morrow, nor the
next day, nor the next; and their life settled back on the old terms,
only that she seemed kinder than before, and that, as for him, the
burthen of his suspense and wonder grew daily more unbearable, so that he
wasted away like a man with a disease. Once, indeed, he broke all bounds
of decency, seized an occasion when she was abroad, ransacked her room,
and at last, hidden away among her jewels, found the damning evidence.
There he stood, holding this thing, which was his life, in the hollow of
his hand, and marvelling at her inconsequent behaviour, that she should
seek, and keep, and yet not use it; and then the door opened, and behold
herself. So, once more, they stood, eye to eye, with the evidence
between them; and once more she raised to him a face brimming with some
communication; and once more he shied away from speech and cut her off.
But before he left the room, which he had turned upside down, he laid
back his death-warrant where he had found it; and at that, her face
lighted up. The next thing he heard, she was explaining to her maid,
with some ingenious falsehood, the disorder of her things. Flesh and
blood could bear the strain no longer; and I think it was the next
morning (though chronology is always hazy in the theatre of the mind)
that he burst from his reserve. They had been breakfasting together in
one corner of a great, parqueted, sparely-furnished room of many windows;
all the time of the meal she had tortured him with sly allusions; and no
sooner were the servants gone, and these two protagonists alone together,
than he leaped to his feet. She too sprang up, with a pale face; with a
pale face, she heard him as he raved out his complaint: Why did she
torture him so? she knew all, she knew he was no enemy to her; why did
she not denounce him at once? what signified her whole behaviour? why did
she torture him? and yet again, why did she torture him? And when he had
done, she fell upon her knees, and with outstretched hands: “Do you not
understand?” she cried. “I love you!”
Hereupon, with a pang of wonder and mercantile delight, the dreamer
awoke. His mercantile delight was not of long endurance; for it soon
became plain that in this spirited tale there were unmarketable elements;
which is just the reason why you have it here so briefly told. But his
wonder has still kept growing; and I think the reader’s will also, if he
consider it ripely. For now he sees why I speak of the little people as
of substantive inventors and performers. To the end they had kept their
secret. I will go bail for the dreamer (having excellent grounds for
valuing his candour) that he had no guess whatever at the motive of the
woman—the hinge of the whole well-invented plot—until the instant of that
highly dramatic declaration. It was not his tale; it was the little
people’s! And observe: not only was the secret kept, the story was told
with really guileful craftsmanship. The conduct of both actors is (in
the cant phrase) psychologically correct, and the emotion aptly graduated
up to the surprising climax. I am awake now, and I know this trade; and
yet I cannot better it. I am awake, and I live by this business; and yet
I could not outdo—could not perhaps equal—that crafty artifice (as of
some old, experienced carpenter of plays, some Dennery or Sardou) by
which the same situation is twice presented and the two actors twice
brought face to face over the evidence, only once it is in her hand, once
in his—and these in their due order, the least dramatic first. The more
I think of it, the more I am moved to press upon the world my question:
Who are the Little People? They are near connections of the dreamer’s,
beyond doubt; they share in his financial worries and have an eye to the
bank-book; they share plainly in his training; they have plainly learned
like him to build the scheme of a considerate story and to arrange
emotion in progressive order; only I think they have more talent; and one
thing is beyond doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a
serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim. Who
are they, then? and who is the dreamer?
Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer that, for he is no less a
person than myself;—as I might have told you from the beginning, only
that the critics murmur over my consistent egotism;—and as I am
positively forced to tell you now, or I could advance but little farther
with my story. And for the Little People, what shall I say they are but
just my Brownies, God bless them! who do one-half my work for me while I
am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well,
when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do it for myself. That part
which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies’ part beyond
contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means
necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it
even then. Here is a doubt that much concerns my conscience. For
myself—what I call I, my conscious ego, the denizen of the pineal gland
unless he has changed his residence since Descartes, the man with the
conscience and the variable bank-account, the man with the hat and the
boots, and the privilege of voting and not carrying his candidate at the
general elections—I am sometimes tempted to suppose he is no story-teller
at all, but a creature as matter of fact as any cheesemonger or any
cheese, and a realist bemired up to the ears in actuality; so that, by
that account, the whole of my published fiction should be the
single-handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen
collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, while I get all the
praise and he but a share (which I cannot prevent him getting) of the
pudding. I am an excellent adviser, something like Molière’s servant; I
pull back and I cut down; and I dress the whole in the best words and
sentences that I can find and make; I hold the pen, too; and I do the
sitting at the table, which is about the worst of it; and when all is
done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the registration; so that, on
the whole, I have some claim to share, though not so largely as I do, in
the profits of our common enterprise.
I can but give an instance or so of what part is done sleeping and what
part awake, and leave the reader to share what laurels there are, at his
own nod, between myself and my collaborators; and to do this I will first
take a book that a number of persons have been polite enough to read, the
_Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_. I had long been trying to
write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong
sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon and
overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature. I had even written one,
_The Travelling Companion_, which was returned by an editor on the plea
that it was a work of genius and indecent, and which I burned the other
day on the ground that it was not a work of genius, and that _Jekyll_ had
supplanted it. Then came one of those financial fluctuations to which
(with an elegant modesty) I have hitherto referred in the third person.
For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and
on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene
afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the
powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All the
rest was made awake, and consciously, although I think I can trace in
much of it the manner of my Brownies. The meaning of the tale is
therefore mine, and had long pre-existed in my garden of Adonis, and
tried one body after another in vain; indeed, I do most of the morality,
worse luck! and my Brownies have not a rudiment of what we call a
conscience. Mine, too, is the setting, mine the characters. All that
was given me was the matter of three scenes, and the central idea of a
voluntary change becoming involuntary. Will it be thought ungenerous,
after I have been so liberally ladling out praise to my unseen
collaborators, if I here toss them over, bound hand and foot, into the
arena of the critics? For the business of the powders, which so many
have censured, is, I am relieved to say, not mine at all but the
Brownies’. Of another tale, in case the reader should have glanced at
it, I may say a word: the not very defensible story of _Olalla_. Here
the court, the mother, the mother’s niche, Olalla, Olalla’s chamber, the
meetings on the stair, the broken window, the ugly scene of the bite,
were all given me in bulk and detail as I have tried to write them; to
this I added only the external scenery (for in my dream I never was
beyond the court), the portrait, the characters of Felipe and the priest,
the moral, such as it is, and the last pages, such as, alas! they are.
And I may even say that in this case the moral itself was given me; for
it arose immediately on a comparison of the mother and the daughter, and
from the hideous trick of atavism in the first. Sometimes a parabolic
sense is still more undeniably present in a dream; sometimes I cannot but
suppose my Brownies have been aping Bunyan, and yet in no case with what
would possibly be called a moral in a tract; never with the ethical
narrowness; conveying hints instead of life’s larger limitations and that
sort of sense which we seem to perceive in the arabesque of time and
space.
For the most part, it will be seen, my Brownies are somewhat fantastic,
like their stories hot and hot, full of passion and the picturesque,
alive with animating incident; and they have no prejudice against the
supernatural. But the other day they gave me a surprise, entertaining me
with a love-story, a little April comedy, which I ought certainly to hand
over to the author of _A Chance Acquaintance_, for he could write it as
it should be written, and I am sure (although I mean to try) that I
cannot.—But who would have supposed that a Brownie of mine should invent
a tale for Mr. Howells?
IX
BEGGARS