Two Dreamers

To accuse certain persons of being “happy” is as direct an insult as to inform some invalids that they look the pictures of health. Whatever outward show of satisfaction may be presented, the imputation of “ happiness” places the friendly spirit who makes it at once under a ban of disapproval; he is capable neither of penetration nor of sympathy. Yet who shall say that the discontent of the sensitive ones is not as real a woe as if they were free from all just rebuke of “ egocentricity ; ” as if they were by nature something other than the “ dreamers ” whom the world, since the days of Joseph himself, has been accustomed to regard with scorn ? Dreams and melancholy are close of kin, and the spirit productive of both is so abundant in two books which have recently come to us that there is every reason for looking at them side by side. They are striking-specimens of the effect that can be produced upon different minds by the habit of melancholy. Each of the writers is primarily a dreamer: one of them has spent all his energies in trying to see what stuff his dreams are made of ; the other, accepting the stuff without much question, has turned it over and over, and employed his other faculties in such wise as to produce still other dreams.

In The Melancholy of Stephen Allard ¹ Mr. Garnet Smith has set himself a task that must have been attractive to an analyst of the melancholy temperament. He has written what professes to be the private diary of a man of thirty, tired of the turmoil of “practical life,” who, for the sole purpose of revealing himself to himself, has deliberately fled the world, that, in the quiet of the country, he may commit to paper all his studies of his own emotions. It is a cold-blooded purpose, and, at the end of the year he has promised himself, a passing chill brings the diarist’s life and the diary to a sudden end.

Mr. Smith’s intention was admirable, but the writer of the diary seems to take the bit, as it were, between his teeth, and to run his own courses. For it soon appears that he is something far more energetic than a mere dreamer. He admits that, from his earliest days, the pursuit of knowledge has been his ruling passion. Not unnaturally, it has taken him to the works of the high-priests of melancholy. What is the result ? He begins in his diary to study his own case, symptom by symptom, and to deal with every supposed remedy ; but he must needs bring to each theme all the wisdom of all the writers upon it. His own experience is used but as a peg on which to hang discussions concerning the opinions of Maurice de Guérin, Alfred de Vigny, Amiel, Leopardi, and all the irritabile genus of writers whose own natures have been the object of their scrutiny. To be sure, it is not often found that the wisdom of the sages puts an end to the diarist’s misgivings. Indeed, nothing is capable of affording him permanent content. The remedies of action, love, faith, altruism, culture, and many another process which has been of service to man are shown in turn to be ineffective nostrums for his special malady. Love is impossible for one so destitute of passion, and so far at all times from forgetting himself and living for the life of another. Action is proved a far less worthy aim than silence. Faith is incompatible with reason. Thought itself is melancholy, and the sum of the writer’s searchings of heart is that he is only “a physician trying to heal himself —and aggravating his disease.”Abstine, sustine; sustine, abstine, strikes the note of renunciation and endurance, which after all seem the most hopeful things in a hopeless world. For a few short days before the end a visitation of peace comes to him ; he sets up for himself a few simple standards taken from the very truths he has been engaged in beating to pieces; but alas! just in time to save his reputation for unhappiness, the clearer vision, as he believes it to be, returns, and all the old doubts, with the doubting of the doubts themselves, come flooding back to leave the last page dark.

The sadness of this personal story is considerably mitigated by the reflection that the diarist could not possibly have been so inefficient a person as he would have himself appear. The knowledge of books and of thought that is displayed clearly shows the writer to be a person who has worked hard; and the effective manner in which the knowledge is brought to bear upon each point in turn reveals him also as a clever and careful craftsman. So large are the results of his researches that the book makes its appeal rather as a complete anatomy of melancholy, a study of its whole history and philosophy, than as the personal record of a distressed soul. It would seem an impertinence to suggest for a work of this nature the equipments of a book of reference, yet for devotees of melancholy, within and outside of themselves, followers of the “ goddess sage and holy,’’ready with her watchword, “ Hence, vain, deluding Joys,” there could hardly be a volume more full of the special food on which it is theirs to thrive ; and any means for bringing the nourishing power of this thesaurus more easily within reach should be welcome.

If the main interest of Stephen Allard’s diary is philosophical, the distinctive merit of the work ² of the other dreamer before us is in its human appeal. Mr. Garnet Smith has given us the philosophy of melancholy ; Mr. More, in The Great Refusal, shows forth its poetic practice. We are taking it for granted that both books, though ostensibly “edited ” by a surviving friend, are in reality original productions. The ruse is achieved with the greater success in Mr. More’s book, for his Introduction gives a very definite idea of the person whose letters fill the volume. He appears as a young New Yorker, who, after graduating at Columbia and traveling abroad, especially in the far East, returned home, and, to satisfy his people’s desire to see him “ doing something,” undertook to teach in a boys’ school. His temperament was so strongly opposed to the activity of New York that even this comparatively quiet work proved impossible for him, and, failing utterly as a teacher, he took up the life of a retired student on Staten Island. His favorite pupil at the school had a beautiful sister, whom by chance the teacher met, and at once set apart from other women as the Lady Esther. From his retreat he writes to her of his love, his studies, and his many doubts. Very often the letter is the means of sending her a bit of verse. After his supposed death, all the letters are put into the hands of his friend, Mr. More, who suppresses all references which could give a clue to identities, and prints enough to show what the dreamer was and did.

This plan, like Mr. Garnet Smith’s, has given the author an excellent opportunity for the study of an uncommon temperament. The slender thread of story is enough to reveal clearly a man who, like the other dreamer, is a student; but he is something more. The poet and the lover in him have made of his letters a work upon which the dust of books is not so thick as upon Stephen Allard’s diary. This is more true of the body of the volume than of its conclusion, for the progress of his mind does bring him in the end to the point where the teaching of his chosen sages is everything to him, the world in which he lives nothing. To describe this progress is to tell much of the structural plan of the book.

The opening letters show the writer under the first spell of the Lady Esther’s charm, and the too long imaginative poem, The Pedagogue, which he sends her, speaks at once for the occupation he has abandoned, and for the mysticism which must truly have rendered him inefficient in its practice. The voice of the schoolmaster, indeed, at other times, is a little too clearly heard, and one or two of the letters carry with them a tone of instruction which could hardly have been grateful to the recipient, and even impressed the writer with a sense of their possible tedium. As the book proceeds, he appears still as a lover, and equally as a student, struggling with the doubts to which a student is liable, bringing them all, together with the beautiful thoughts which skillfully blend his studies and his imaginings, and laying them at his mistress’s feet. The faiths and philosophies from which he seeks sustaining strength are found by degrees inadequate for him. Gradually he builds up for himself a Gospel of Love, with the Lady Esther as its central figure. He can never be more than a distant worshiper at her shrine. But his Oriental studies prove to him before long that even love, however abstract, is not for him ; for “ to him who is prepared, love, just in so far as it is attached to what is fair, becomes a more serious obstacle. We must renounce.” And this, in the end, he does, sending as his last missive to the Lady Esther a paraphrase of a Hindu book, which has for its burden Renunciation.

It is well that the Oriental researches, and the letters about them, began as late as they did, for they seem so much the least interesting part of the book that they would have been likely to lead the Lady Esther herself to renounce the correspondence which brought them to her. It is in the body of the volume that the qualities which give the letters a real element of distinction are to be found. These qualities are the writer’s genuine literary gift, his spirituality and his imagination. The form in which he has elected to cast his work gives his literary skill full play, and it is less hampered than helped by the influences of reading which are constantly to be seen in the letters. Perhaps there is nothing about them more attractive than the manner in which a thought picked up in some musty old schoolman’s book is set forth, first in prose and then in verse, to the honor or delight of the Lady Esther. This mingling of the two forms is one of the many evidences of the debt the writer owes to Dante, and the Vita Nuova rises inevitably to mind as one of the chief models for the letters. The double opportunity of prose and verse is seized with a satisfaction like that which all writers of rhymes are said to feel when they can read their own lines prefaced by an explanation of their origin. An example will show how Mr. More has made this practice his own. In Letter XXVI., he says he has been reading Saint Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, and has come upon a sentence which has haunted him “ with the evil persistence of a ghost that will not be laid.”It is to the effect that “ the gods desire our imitation more than sacrificial rites.” On this text he proceeds to talk, and comes to this conclusion : —

“ So it has happened with this sentence from Saint Augustine concerning imitation and sacrifice. And when, last night, its true connection with the love that binds together my thoughts was revealed, immediately I desired to make some record of my delight, if possible to give to you some reflex participation, however slight, in my great pleasure. I could think of no better method of conveyance than this poem which I copy within. Be pleased with it for its good intention.

“ ‘ IMITATIONE POTIUS QUAM SACRIFICIO.’

These lines show, too, the form in which many of the verses are written, — a fresh structure, which for flexibility within limits is surely worth the consideration of verse-makers. “ As for the verses,” one of the letters says, “ I have put them into a form never used before, so far as I know. It is fitting that she who has brought new beauty into the world should receive her homage of praise in a new form.”

The simplest metres are sometimes essayed, and often the results are attractive. In Letter XXIII., the writer tells of his efforts to interpret the song of a thrush. “ Study and practice, as you know,” he says, “ have taught me to spell the future in the lettered page of the firmament, but now that I would understand and translate for your sake the simple accents of a throstle, behold what awkwardness distracts my powers : —

One other passage, in prose, we are constrained to quote, and let it speak, better than any description of the writer’s style, for his power of writing English, and for the qualities of which we have already held him to be possessed: “ Was it Da Gama or Magellan — the latter, I think in his tragic voyage around the world — who was so alarmed by the new aspect of the sky as he sailed southward? Night after night the familiar northern constellations sank deeper into the mists of the horizon he was fleeing, and one by one were lost from view. At the same time, the southern stars rose constantly higher above him, till the great planets and the moon circled directly overhead, and new constellations of unknown appearance climbed out of the dim horizon before them. Most of all was he terrified when the Polar star, by which he had steered his course, was no longer visible; for over the south pole hung no steady light, but only a vague blurred nebula, not easily distinguishable from the vapors of the ocean. Imagine his situation: sailing on boundless unknown seas, towards lands unnamed, or mentioned only by rumor, while night after night the very stars of heaven shifted northward — it was, indeed, a new heaven and a new earth. One constellation, it is said, he greeted always with increasing delight as it mounted ever higher toward the zenith — the great Southern Cross which hung in the sky with unimaginable splendor. . . . And it is not unlikely that many a quiet scholar in these later days starts on a similar voyage of discovery in the still more fabulous lands and seas of ancient learning; with hopes akin to those of the early navigators ; through difficulties, too, not altogether despicable, and dangers to the spiritual life that only the dreamer knows. The old truths which guided him may sink away into the mists of doubt; over the new pole of his heavens may float only an uncertain nebula ; and out of the southern horizon may creep strange constellations, monstrous unspeakable fancies that fill him with awe — possibly, also, the great cross, with its marvelous magnificence. And one of them, if he returns safely from the fantastic dominion of dreams which the Hindu seers established so many centuries ago, will be proud to kneel before the Princess under whose flag he sails, with offerings of new similitudes and Oriental legends which may extend the empire of her beauty over generations of men yet to be born — if she will but be pleased to smile on the prostrate mariner. Great things may come out of the East, dear Princess.”

Probably enough has been said to show the book a thing for the few rather than the many. Those to whom it will appeal at all will find in it much to like, and, as we have already implied, something to complain of. A very occasional touch of cheapness should be mentioned in addition to the other shortcomings, and a tendency, perhaps indulged once or twice too often, to give to conceits the value of thoughts. Nevertheless, dignity and thought are constantly displayed throughout the book, thought of no commonplace and superficial kind. The letters are clearly the outcome of strenuous thinking. The faith which the dreamer finds himself incapable of holding is not dismissed in the easy-going manner of the day. “ Because I am a skeptic,” he says, “it” (thefaith) “means so much to me.” Indeed, in matter as in manner, it seems to us, as a first book, to have something more than common interest and promise. Let the writer follow his bent towards literature, holding his scholasticism as its servant rather than its lord, and it will be no strange thing if work of a very general power to appeal is the result. If, on the other hand, the Sufis enthrall him as they have enthralled his first hero, “ the few ” must of necessity grow fewer still.

“The grandeur of man lies in this — that he knows himself miserable.” We borrow this quotation, of which Mr. More makes use, in order to bring together again the two books of which it is largely the burden. Sincerity is the true excuse for being which such work can offer. Its spirit is one which mere “ practical ” persons must needs rebuke — yet without avail. It brings the poor dreamer nowhere ; but if he abandons it, he ceases to be a dreamer, and joins the fortunately larger army of “active workers.” Both of these writers show sincerity, and especially the “ dreamer in Gotham.” Indeed, there is in nearly all of his letters a refreshing absence of the attitude of posing; and whatever comes so directly from a man’s heart as the best passages of The Great Refusal is sure of a response from the hearts of the men who feel their kinship with him. Perhaps a new census will tell us the number of those who resent the charge of happiness, and that will give at least a hint of the growth of the class to which Stephen Allard and his American cousin belonged.