Illusion

MEN look back with regret to the illusions of their youth, regard with tenderness those of childhood, and are fiercely resentful of anything in literature or talk which is disillusionizing; but no one likes to believe himself, at a given moment, the dupe of illusion; and those who beg to have their illusions left to them would often be at a loss to tell what they are. Thus, judging from autobiographic data, every one has been, but nobody actually is, illusion’s victim and slave. From the objective point of view the statistics are different. We constantly see other people in the very meshes of the net, and find room for ceaseless wonder in the illusions harbored by our neighbors, the absurdities which they believe, the flatteries they swallow, the baseless hopes with which they delude themselves. If the unconscious desire of the human heart could suddenly rise to the murmur of an articulate litany, we should find ourselves praying in one breath to be delivered from all bareness and disillusion, from all illusion and cozenage, from all absence of hope and of fancy, and from all the hopes and fancies whereby other men are beguiled,— those of us, at least, who are old enough to be inconsistent; for youth, with a title to illusion’s best, falls too often a victim to its most baleful form, the craving for disillusionment.

‘Dream delivers us to dream,’ says Emerson, ‘and there is no end to illusion.’ There are whimsical beckonings of fire to the spirit, broad glamours of day, magnified phantoms of mist and of darkness. There are light, capricious illusions, and stodgy, matter-of-fact ones. There are the individual illusions which we cherish, struggle with, or succumb to in private; illusions which are epidemic in societies; illusions which travel down through history, to vanish like reabsorbed springs, one knows not when or where; illusions which are part and parcel of the human consciousness. We may well pray—and in vain — to be delivered.

The inconsistencies of the average mind in regard to illusion loom large, on the one hand and the other, in the attitude toward it of literature and thought. Its delights and its dangers are the theme of all folk-lore and ballad, of the poetry of the people. In the Greek tragedies, illusion is at once the tempter and avenger, the crime and the punishment. The Greek perceived that the great tragedy of life is not the loss of illusion, but its excess. Plato, recognizing in it the arch enemy of reason and of society, and in the imagination its natural ally, banished the poets from his republic. Illusion may since have enjoyed a small but savory revenge in seeing all sorts of æstheticism fathered upon Plato, and admiration of his poetic prose well-nigh obscuring that of his immortal reason, with its illustration of homely simile. Perhaps, too, in the long mediæval centuries her lips were curved now and then to a faint Greek smile at the sight of her other Hellenic enemy, Aristotle, enthroned as the head of scholastic philosophy. In those Middle Ages there were few intrenchments against illusion; reason and unreason were huddled together, like knight and serf in crusade or pestilence. The stone of the cathedrals is full of fossilized illusions; which in the great poem of Dante burst into life and truth.

Martin Luther threw his inkstand and got the better of illusion; and generations of stern Protestants walked in the fear of God and burned witches in a terror of illusion, illusively inspired. Copernicus laid bare a universal illusion which, though universally acknowledged, still persists; and happily so, for the recognition of illusion in our everyday impressions is the greatest gain to reality and truth.

In all times philosophers have warred with illusion, singly or in schools. Spinoza set up his adequate thought, Kant his categorical imperative for a reality, over against it; Descartes encamped on the plain with his philosophy des honnêtes hommes and foreshadowing of modern science. But the philosophers are subject to illusion, particularly in their belief in the acceptability of reason to the human mind in general. Ridicule has made wider havoc. The laughter of Molière and his immortal good sense clear the air of magic, like magic itself. Never had illusion such a gallant, gay antagonist, or one so sure of thrust.

In Shakespeare, on the other hand, what evocation of this element, and what mastery! How he changes swords with it, creates, banishes, recalls, defeats it. Nowhere are its horrors more alive than in the madness of Lear, the anguish of Macbeth, the waverings of Hamlet; nowhere is the dread of it more poignantly uttered than in Horatio’s swift cry: —

where all the futile anguish of illusive suffering is in the one phrase, ‘toys of desperation.’ And all the majesty and glory of illusion, all its arts and wiles, nay, the very spell of its impalpable essence, are in The Tempest, shining with ‘the innumerable laughter of the waves.’ Prospero is its king, a king who abdicates in the end to become the citizen of reason and of common life. It reads just a little, this abdication, like an acceptance on the part of poetry itself of Plato’s sentence against the poets. But Spenser and Keats make no such renouncement; the one pricketh o’er the plain and through the forests of illusion, the other lingers willingly in its twilight. Milton dwells in a high illusion, lit by lofty truth; and even the unpoetic eighteenth century fashions for itself an illusion of line and rule, on the level of our earth.

But the poets themselves have no greater love for illusion than those prose poets, the essayists. Note how genially Montaigne smiles at and upon her; how she diverts Addison and Goldsmith; how tender is the adoration of Charles Lamb, even of Thackeray, though he contrives to get up a passing illusion of cynicism. To the clear-eyed Emerson she is a sort of half-accredited messenger of the gods, to be received with courtesy, with comprehension, and a certain celestial equality. Carlyle is not of this company: to him illusion is the accredited emissary of the devil, to be blackened with a well of ink and burned by lightnings from heaven. And yet Mr. Burroughs cites Carlyle, with some truth, as a cherisher of anthropomorphic illusion, and the foe of scientific investigation.

They form a class apart, the intimates of illusion: Rousseau, its favorite child, and the chosen victim of its altar; Chateaubriand, heaping up illusory magnificence without, devoured by disillusion within; Coleridge, who did not believe in ghosts because he had seen too many; Obermann, standing outside the circle, but with his gaze riveted to its centre. Amiel’s name is forever linked with that of his belle dame sans merci; their story has been accepted as a sort of Lassalle romance of meditative literature. His longing for, yet shrinking from, the experiences of life, his withdrawals before the loneliness of thought, as before the complications of social existence, are they not all written and printed, a scorn to the strong and objective, a savor to minds curious of mental processes and of intellectual sentiment? But the critics have insisted a little too much upon the unity of the romance: they pass over the escape from bondage which Amiel found again and again in his critical faculty, in a certain serene detachment; the dénouement is less tragic than is commonly supposed.

It is in the autobiography of Herbert Spencer that

La belle dame has here one of the mighty in thrall. Here is a mind admirably articulated and energized for action, with all its springs new, no worn-out gearing of historical or literary ideas, no idle tendency toward dreaming and conjecture. Here is a philosophy which starts at the highest point yet reached by human knowledge, to examine downward into all the paths leading thither, — biological, psychological, sociological, with no détour into the underbrush of mere individual thought or achievement. All the results of this philosophy are massed into one great affirmative synthesis. It will have naught to do with the unknowable until every branch of the knowable has been explored, and it can go behind a certitude to name the unseen and unknown also as a force translatable into horsepower. Here is surely no room for illusion, no crevice into which she may creep. Even the midge did not venture, nor love find out the way.

The only thing that baffled this prodigious investigator of life was life itself: not the combination of forces, nor the primordial cell, but the common, everyday existence of which we somehow find ourselves a part. His terror of being tricked or duped by it is abject; he will none of its blessings for fear of a witch’s curse. He wanted to marry; there were even moments when the idea linked itself to the favored personality of some individual woman; but he was silent, not from fear lest the lady’s sentiments fail to respond, but in fastidious hesitation, —

A denial has been published of the romantic inferences drawn from his pages on George Eliot; so it must have been some other lady who was silently set aside as an imperfect specimen. Read in connection with his life, Herbert Spencer’s philosophy shines by its disinterestedness. The sage of antiquity was an Ananias in comparison with him; for one, if not the chief, of his aims was the attainment of a fund of wisdom for his own private use, and this the great sociologist was content to forego.

The latest declared and proclaimed enemy of illusion, of the widespread illusion of convention in particular, is Mr. Bernard Shaw, who tells the truth wittily to shame the devil and Mrs. Grundy. It is a truth ‘bonny wi’ ill favourdness,’ marked by that enhancement of ugliness which competes favorably with beauty in the eyes of fashion. There is, however, a certain geniality of optimism to be detected in his assumption that illusion and error are detachable adjuncts of the human mind; and it is noticeable that the substitution proposed for illusion is not reason or reality, but individualism, a somewhat uncertain quantity where clearness of vision is concerned.

But illusion contrives not to suffer from her apparent unpopularity. She smiles secure in her beauty, knowing that her hour will come again, that her spell is a potent one, and that those who disdain her most proudly are not always the last in her train of adorers. Especially subtle is the smile with which she greets the reasoning penitent. When the man of science turneth away from his science, and after weighing and measuring the ears and reactions of his fellow mortals, takes to measuring and weighing disembodied spirits, she sits gayly in the balance, knowing well that they have been weighed already and found wanting. To the man whose beliefs are firmly based upon the evidence of his own eyesight, she can bring, through the agency of the commonest medium, enlargement of vision, evidence ocular and tangible, a solid array of spirits, uttering platitudes of unanswerable veracity.

One of her most plausible agents is coincidence. The commonest and ordinarily least noted of phenomena, it is brought by any association with the marvelous into abrupt and isolated relief. The innumerable faces in the long procession of life are so many combinations of one small set of features; what wonder that there should be resemblances? The same happenings, in the main, fall to us all, notwithstanding the many variations; it would be strange indeed if there were no simultaneous repetitions among them. As for our thoughts, the variety of them, taking the whole range of thought, is marked by limitations; and the number we actually employ, in our daily meditations, or even under investigation by the psychical society, bears an infinitesimal proportion to this limited whole; we think so much alike that the fact that any two of us are thinking the same thing at the same moment ought to attract no attention at all. But people ignore a thousand coincidences and seize upon one as a marvel; they forget all the unfulfilled prophecies and unanswered petitions the moment the event appears to respond. We demand of science and fact a uniform testimony, but illusion may fail over and over without loss of prestige.

It is our privilege to live in an age which is not wholly unproductive of illusions, and in a country in which they lie under no heavy penalty. We have in America innumerable acres of intellectual waste land, affording soil for the riotous growth of any chance seed, native or foreign. And, with the indiscriminate amiability which Matthew Arnold deplored in our literary appreciations, we look benignly on aberrations of thought, however noxious to social well-being, if only they do not endanger our property; not distinguishing between the freedom of utterance which, as citizens of thought, we should secure to all its forms, and the duty laid upon us as thinking individuals, of discrimination, selection, the seeking and finding of truth. In purely theoretical aberrations — political, for instance — we indulge less than other countries; our wildest theories generally take the lucrative form of nostrums and diets, for the sale of which the name of science is daily taken in vain. And science at the present moment lends itself singularly, by no fault of its own, to thaumaturgical ends. Her great discoveries of half a century ago were in the line of theory; hence their subversive effect upon belief, of which we are now feeling the reaction. To-day her advance is in the discovery of new substances and forces; and its results are being instantly applied to practice, partly along therapeutic lines, thus bringing science to the very door of the unscientific, and leaving it at the mercy of selfish and charlatan aims. Then is waged the battle of belief and disbelief regarding matters which belong properly to the spheres of knowledge and ignorance.

The havoc wrought by illusion is largely the work of one alone among her attendant spirits, — the mischief-making elf, who pours into the ear of sleeping mortals the philter of self-love. The stars and the census ought to be daily and yearly correctives to an error of this sort ; but perhaps nobody really preserves the everyday habit of regarding himself as a billionth part of a number of billions. And, in fact, it seems almost necessary to exaggerate a little our importance to the universe lest we become too unimportant and a dead weight upon it. We need a sufficient opinion of ourselves, and sense of the respect of others, to carry us through the day’s work. And suppose the illusion be in excess, is it not a pardonable, absurd, and trivial error? Yet the link is here that holds together illusion’s most ridiculous comedy and the darkest of her tragedies. In the dungeon of self-absorption are her conquered, — the insane. Others, wounded but not bound, lie without, beside the pool, waiting for the troubling of the too still waters. Hither come many, even of the purest and most unselfish minds, far removed, it may be, from the sin of self-seeking, caught in the toils of personality, in that strange interlocking of body and mind, or hovering with weary wing over that fatal point, the fixed idea.

The adjustment of our relation to illusion is a crucial problem of life; not necessarily the conscious adjustment, for in this matter, as in religion, character, and social success, a peculiar blessing attaches itself to unconscious grace; but into some relation we are forced by the very laws of being, and it behooves us to make the best of it. We are all property-owners in Spain to a greater or less degree; and which of us would not be a trifle less astonished to find himself, on waking in the morning, an inmate of his favorite castle there, than he is to open his eyes on the suburban-villa reality with the necessity attached of getting up and going to town? What would-be author ever believes in the unavailable character of his manuscript? What artist is not amazed at the exclusion of his picture? Who so unattractive as not to expect homage from others? And if the supply fails, who does not attribute the lack to some special spite or hatred, instead of to forgetfulness or to that kindly contempt with which we are wont inwardly to regard one another? We cannot love or hate without illusion: for hatred is blindness to every aspect save one; and we love, not from a mere reasoning conviction of the virtues and charms of the beloved, but because they alone, of all graces and perfections, have for us a halo, a mystery, and a delight. Our faith is in the unseen and illusive; for, whatever truth may underlie the phenomena of life and thought, illusion is assuredly among the conditions of its revelation to mankind. Our unfaith tosses us toward other unrealities; the anguish of skepticism lies, not in the loss of beautiful and once-cherished beliefs, in the reduction of our hopes to truths that appear harsh and bare, but in the doubt lest these too should be but phantasms, and the substratum of the whole a monstrous illusion.

The first care of the intellect in its relation to illusion should be recognition, the distinguishing of what we see, know, or think, from what we dream, surmise, or imagine. Why believe a miracle on the authority of a number of persons, no half-dozen of whom can be brought to report alike on the most ordinary scene or occurrence? Why, if judgments so vary, accept our own as an absolute criterion? Our senses make conflicting reports, the key-board of our impressions gives out true or false notes, most resonant under the action of the nerves, which play the louder the more they are out of tune. Have they not lied to us time and again? Do they not bring from a wooden leg messages of a suffering foot? And shall we leave it to our nerves, fearfully and wonderfully as they are made, to love, hate, judge, and act for us? Yet an enormous amount of human intercourse is conducted by these overworked switch-tenders. A wholesome distrust of hearsay and of one’s own impressions is an aid to security. How significant is the attitude toward illusion preserved by old Samuel Johnson ! He was baptized into it, as it were, being almost the last child in England to receive the royal touch for scrofula; he was subject all his life to hypochondria; he was naturally credulous; the question of the return of departed spirits to this earth remained to him always an open and a haunting one; yet illusion knocked at the door of his sturdy mind for threescore and ten years in vain. For above all wavering and susceptibility rose his great sense of reality, his love of truth; and to the persistent lures of dream and inertia he opposed a constant activity of mind and variety of interest. The matter with much of our disillusion is that its content is as poor as that of illusion itself. Illusion must be confronted with realities solid enough to stand against it; and excellent material for their construction lies all about us in the world as we find it.

Yet illusion, after all, is a vapor, — our swords cut without dividing it. The realities that move against spirit should be those of spirit itself; ‘for it alone is high fantastical.’ When we look at the great facts of life we find illusion to be one of them. It envelops our birth, ‘a sleep and a forgetting’; it holds the curtain ready to drop on our exit; it dangles the ball of happiness before us day by day. It is Maia and Ceres, sower and scatterer of the harvest; We must approach illusion reverently; we must abstain from creating it, lest we come to be ruled by the creature of our making, and from renouncing it too proudly, for it is sure to turn up again, like the imp in the household goods of the family who had moved to get rid of it.