III
THE DREAM
How much of our life seems and is a dream! How often we feel ourselves carried off our feet and borne along on a tide of circumstances, tossed backwards and forwards on a sea of conflicting events, now hurried along by a current of opinion, now blinded with the spray of false accusation, then motionless for a moment, trying to collect our shattered thoughts before the next onslaught: but all the time out of touch, consciously, with what is going on, utterly powerless, trying to gather up the threads and recover consciousness. Any action that we take, any word that we utter, is done without thought, without knowledge, and without any result. And yet neither the cause nor the effect are, strictly speaking, physical. The position is a mental attitude, in this case mental helplessness, and this is dependent solely upon the relation of the mind to exterior circumstances. When we are fully conscious, we are ourselves each the centre of a little world, which includes all that concerns us, and the appearance of this depends entirely upon its particular meaning for us. We do not, cannot, under these circumstances, see anything exactly as it is: its appearance is influenced by its importance for us or by the degree of approval, or disapproval which we ourselves attach to it. When our life becomes a dream, our sphere is broken into and usurped by the changing of values, shapes, and appearance of things within it. The old familiar forms are transfigured and tampered with, our mistaken or incomplete idea of persons is revealed, and a host of new and inexplicable forms appear; with the result that we are literally bewildered, and instead of regarding things with reference to their influence upon us, we see things as they are in themselves--when we can see at all--and feel what they actually do to us.
There can be no one who is not aware of this experience, in a greater or a less degree. I speak of it as dreaming because that is the analogy which best represents the circumstances, all of which have been explained except one. In the same way as we are not conscious that what we have been dreaming is a dream until we awake, so in these periods of our actual life in which we are deprived of will and are borne along by exterior circumstances and forces, we are not aware of our helplessness, of our utter weakness, of the significance of what we have seen and heard, until we have regained consciousness and woken again to our freedom.
In this sense I have recently had a dream, and only since have I realised that what I dreamt was fact; and then I was able to place it all within my sphere--its ideas, its causes, and its effects have become or are becoming the familiar forms and shapes, in the midst of which I am, like a spider at the centre of its web, placed with my hands on every thread. And this is that dream.
Full of life and happiness I set out with another, one who was a friend and had lived with me for a time, sharing the same hopes, methods, and ideals. Laughing as we went, with the smiling world around us and the glad faces of those we knew, we made our way to the house of one who, older than ourselves, had inspired and befriended in us those hopes and ideals. And there we learnt from him that the authorities of the community, the institution to which we belonged, had taken offence at our methods and by suppressing them had destroyed our aims and all that was most dear to us. As we sat there in silence, my mind cast back over the time--it was little more than a year--since our outlook had been entirely changed. I saw the school a throbbing piece of mechanism with its bells, its clocks, and its governors, set down in a place of great beauty. Blind to anything of beauty, it worked with a rhythm and a precision which became a twentieth-century development (although it had been set up in 1557, and was still running on very nearly its original lines--which was the reason, so they say, of why it "worked"
so "well"). I saw it at work and was myself made part of its raw material. Into its hungry mouth there went childhood at its best, full of energy, with every kind of ability, talent and promise, enterprise and ambition; through its teeth, its moulds, and its classrooms they passed, until they issued from the end a single and singular type of humanity, moulded, stamped, docketed and numbered--to take their place, or rather, and this is the saddest note of all, their very numerous and different places in the world.
While this was passing through my mind we got up and went out for a walk.
And then there came the War, and the men and institutions of Europe were put to a supreme test. And the immediate result was that men began to think, began to look about them, and realising the palpable evil of war, began to wonder whether they had not been mistaken in their values and systems. Men soon came to realise that they did not fulfil their entire duty if they followed as nearly as possible in the footsteps of their great-grandfathers, but that as the world moved it behoved them to move; that each man is made with the possibility of every attitude and achievement as seeds within him; that circumstances alone had caused him to live on some of these and not on others; that intolerance was therefore a crime of the most unpardonable character; that it was wrong and unprofitable to let one's self be borne along on the surface of the world's tide--and that it was every man's duty to use the world as he finds it for the development and fulfilment of all that is best within him, and not to depend upon one thing and reject another, favour one opinion, and oppose or even disregard another. And those in the school who first realised this, determined not to submit to the guiding and moulding of this mechanical institution, but to look at the world around and outside them--its beauty, its methods, its effects, its possibility, its wonder and its joy, and to develop for themselves, under the guidance and suggestion of those whom they trusted, their own powers, with their own principles to guide them and their own aims to reach.
And in the carrying out of this plan and in the suggesting of it to others and in witnessing the results in others and in the institution to which they belonged, they, and later I and all those who followed them, found great happiness--a happiness which I felt could come from nowhere else, and certainly a happiness such as I had never before experienced. A greater facility in all intellectual activity, and in avoiding and fighting everything which one felt to be wrong, a greater confidence, and determination through self-dependence in all things, are some of the natural immediate fruits of a self-conceived basis of thought and action which refused to accept blindly everything that was handed down or dealt out.
The permanent results in the shape of statistics and concrete evidence are proof and witness to the rightness of the undertaking. But now it is all of the past--the reasons are irrelevant; suffice it that they are iniquitous, and more than iniquitous, since they have murdered what is right.
And now we had come, after passing through a great field of green corn rustling in the light wind, to a fence, on which we sat. My retrospective thoughts had now caught up to the present--but I was still dreaming. All that I thought was unconscious, out of my control and wonderful. Our attempt had been very beautiful, had been a work of art, and in many ways had come to a beautiful and artistic end. Like a great and wonderful bubble, wrought in many and enchanting colours, it rose up complete at that moment from its birthplace and deathbed--and I was happy again.
Then from the place down below us--that place in which we had striven and apparently failed--I seemed to hear the voice of those who opposed and hated us in our ways--those who were making the school into a machine again--and were rejoicing in it, as they pumped in the oil:
"The Germans are verrmin--it is your work in life to _krrussch_ them!"
And at that very moment there came by three German prisoners--passed us, jumped over the fence and were gone; but the likeness! it was more than striking; never, never shall I forget it--and I was convinced.
The school, its very self, its soul, had struggled to its feet, and as a little child was taking its first conscious steps--the most beautiful, perhaps, that it was ever destined to take--when they, those mechanicians, with their mailed fists smote it in the face, crushed it heartlessly to the ground, with Louvain and Belgium not only before their eyes but on their very lips.
"Oh, this world is a rotten place," he said, at my side.
"I wonder," I murmured in reply, and I still do....
J. A. A. J.