I had the most wonderful dream last night. I dreamt he came down the pipe and appeared surprisingly before us all, and his name was Mr. In. Queer name, wasn’t it? Sort of Japanesy. He did the most amazing things for us, made a great hit, the critics said. It was prize-fighting or piano-playing or speechifying or something; anyway we all thought he was remarkable, and, come to find out, he was the baby! — our baby, you know, that’s all!
Not much of a dream?
No, now that I write it down it doesn’t seem at all like it did when I dreamed it. It’s just foolish. Then it was really very striking, in a first-rate theatrical way.
There was some quality in the dream that my pencil misses. I’ve told the whole story the best I can, and find I’ve got it all — except the atmosphere. Which is about as bad as getting all of the joke except the point.
I have uncovered the weakness of all literature, all art. For art is art in proportion as it reports correctly atmosphere.
And the interesting, the vital and gripping element in any event of personality is its dream-stuff.
And what are we all doing except trying to utter our dreams? Some by writing, some by paint, others by music, others by business, fact, achievement, moulding dream-clay into images of success, others by passion or profligacy, or religion or what not — we’re all at it, endeavoring to make real that wonderful half-glimpsed thought.
It is that a dream-world, lying behind the curtain, that makes this world beautiful. We see it in sleep, or hours of revery, or moments of longing; we feel it in dim surgings of passion. But we never quite catch it.
There are wraiths and strains of it in Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde,” in Arnold Boecklin’s pictures, in Rodin’s sculpture. There’s a deal of it in Wordsworth’s poetry, and Richard Hovey’s. Now you see it and now you don’t.
There! there was a note of it in that tenor’s voice, there was a flash of it in that girl’s face — there! that falling cadence of the orchestra, did you hear it? There was a swish of dreams in that.
Back of the mountains, beyond the seas, the other side of the wall, yonder — oh, forever yonder — is our native land, the country of dreams, where our hearts live really, and we are homesick for it.
Religion calls it goodness, and art calls it beauty, and science calls it truth. But whatever it is we want it, as we want nothing else in this world, as we want not food nor finery. Whenever we meet a new man we peer into his soul for a message from it. The woman sweeps our heart-strings only by promising to reveal it. We become great for it. We ruin and lose ourselves for it. It is the price of life.
Dreams! Impotence and regret that we cannot utter them!
