Page:Works of Charles Dickens, ed. Lang - Volume 31.djvu/15

Rh painful sleep, in a letter to Mr. Forster. Dickens, in that letter, enumerates the ordinary reminiscences out of which he thinks that the dream was built. In the sketch he speaks more mystically. We may refer to the first of his two "Ghost Stories" here (vol. ii. p. 106):"I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange sort To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which such subjects are involved."

This is a sagacious remark. We are in a world "not realised," and common sense has long bullied us out of any serious attempt to realise some of its phenomena. Dickens was always much interested in stories which seem to suggest the existence of supernormal human faculties, but he also lived in an age when "spiritualistic" quackeries were leading even distinguished men through a wilderness of nightmares' nests. He therefore very judiciously kept a stern watch over his own "mystical" tendencies, and we often observe the contest between his sentiments and his common sense. Even to Forster, after all, he expresses his doubt as to whether he should regard his experience at Genoa as "a dream, or an actual Vision." He probably never made up his own mind. In "The Haunted House" he laughs naturally, nay inevitably, at the messages d'outre tombe revealed to the sect of "Rappers." These, certainly, do not suggest to any sane mind the idea of the presence of incarnate intelligences. But they are not always explicable as mere impostures, any more than was the hallucinatory presence of Dickens's father, then "alive and well," beside his bed. "Nothing ever came of it;" it might be an after-image of a forgotten dream, or perhaps