Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/53

 he was in his bedroom, about eight o'clock in the evening; and he was dressed for the most part in shabby corduroy, with a wisp of dirty black silk round his neck. His man Jackson had brought up from the kitchen some ashes for the smearing of his hands and face. A cadger's basket stood on the table hard by.

 

 From The Cornhill Magazine.

of science have recently called our attention to the phenomena of dual consciousness. To the unscientific mind it often seems that consciousness in its normal state must be rather multiple than dual. We lead, habitually, many lives at once, which are blended and intercalated in strangely complex fashion. Particular moods join most naturally, not with those which are contiguous in time, but with those which owe a spontaneous affinity to their identity of composition. When in my study, for example, it often seems as if that part alone of the past possessed reality which had elapsed within the same walls. All else — the noisy life outside, nay, even the life, sometimes rather noisy too, in the next room, becomes dreamlike. I can fancy that my most intimate self has never existed elsewhere, and that all other experiences recorded by memory have occurred to other selves in parallel but not continuous currents of life. And so, after a holiday, the day on which we resume harness joins on to the day on which we dropped it, and the interval fades into a mere hallucination.

There are times when this power (or weakness) has a singular charm. We can take up dropped threads of life, and cancel the weary monotony of daily drudgery; though we cannot go back to the well-beloved past, we can place ourselves in immediate relations with it, and break the barriers which close in so remorsely to hide it from longing eyes. To some of us the charm is worked instantaneously by the sight of an Alpine peak. The dome of Mont Blanc or the crags of the Wetterhorn are spells that disperse the gathering mists of time. We can gaze upon them till we "beget the golden time again." And there is this peculiar fascination about the eternal mountains. They never recall the trifling or the vulgarizing associations of old days. There are times when the bare sight of a letter, a ring, or an old house, overpowers some people with the rush of early memories. I am not so happily constituted. Relics of the conventional kind have a perverse trick of reviving those petty incidents which one would rather forget. They recall the old follies that still make one blush, or the hasty word which one would buy back with a year of the life that is left. Our English fields and rivers have the same malignant freakishness. Nature in our little island is too much dominated by the petty needs of humanity to have an affinity for the simpler and deeper emotions. With the Alps it is otherwise. There, as after a hot summer day the rocks radiate back their stores of heat, every peak and forest seems to be still redolent with the most fragrant perfume of memory. The trifling and vexatious incidents cannot adhere to such mighty monuments of bygone ages. They retain whatever of high and tender and pure emotion may have once been associated with them. If I were to invent a new idolatry (rather a needless task) I should prostrate myself, not before beast, or ocean, or sun, but before one of those gigantic masses to which, in spite of all reason, it is impossible not to attribute some shadowy personality. Their voice is mystic and has found discordant interpreters; but to me at least it speaks in tones at once more tender and more awe-inspiring than that of any mortal teacher. The loftiest and the sweetest strains of Milton or Wordsworth may be more articulate, but do not lay so forcible a grasp upon my imagination.

In the summer there are distractions. The business of eating, drinking, and moving is carried on by too cumbrous and clanking a machinery. But I had often fancied that in the winter, when the whole region becomes part of dreamland, the voice would be more audible and more continuous. Access might be attained to those lofty reveries in which the true mystic imagines time to be annihilated, and rises into beatific visions untroubled by the accidental and the temporary. Pure undefined emotion, indifferent to any logical embodiment, undisturbed by external perception, seems to belong to the sphere of the transcendental. Few people have the power to rise often to such regions or remain in them long. The indulgence, when habitual, is perilously enervating. But most people are amply secured from the danger by incapacity for the enjoyment. The temptation assails very exceptional natures. We — the positive and matter-of-fact part of the world — need be no more afraid of dreaming too 