CHAPTER VII.
SHOWS THE FITNESS OF MY PUNISHMENT.
"But there will come another era, when it shall be light, and when man shall awaken from his lofty dreams and find his dreams still there, and that nothing is gone save his sleep."—Jean Paul.—Preface to "Hesperus."
The following paragraph is taken from a diary which I kept before my decease. I will explain later on my reason for giving the extract here:—
"It has been said that no man can realize to the full the certainty of his own dissolution; that each acknowledges the inevitability of death in regard to others and to the race, but cherishes a secret conviction that he himself will, through some strange and unforeseen circumstance, prove the solitary exception.
"Of the truth of this assertion as a general rule, I cannot of course speak, but I know that I at least have never so thought. On the contrary, there are moments when death (by which I do not mean annihilation, but the dying into life) seems the only certainty there is before me, all else being shadowy and unreal. I am a child of eternity dreaming the dream of time, and even while I dream I am half awake and know that I am but dreaming. Life is to me—not poetically only, but positively—a dream and unsubstantial. The world is a dream, things and persons are but dreams, and exist for me only in my thoughts of them. My self-consciousness becomes awake, and I look in and down upon myself with a wonder as fresh and novel as if the mystery of my own existence had never caused me wonder or surprise before. I stretch out my hand, as an infant does, and open and shut the fingers, and ask myself who I am and what I am doing here. I tell myself my name, and I see that the hand, the body, and the clothes that I look down upon have a strangely familiar aspect, but the name conveys no meaning to me, the familiarity is but the familiarity of an oft-dreamed dream, and is, I know, but the sign that I am still dreaming.
"I look out each day upon the face of the earth with as much wonder and surprise as if I were some new-comer thereon, and were opening my eyes upon it for the first and only time. Upon London and the life of it, though I passed half my days within the sound of St. Paul's, I gaze and wonder as upon some dream-pageant, with ever-increasing awe. I look up upon that ample dome, large-looming, and brooding like a Presence athwart the skies, until its surroundings and itself and those who come and go in the streets are to me as unsubstantial as 'a city visioned in a dream.'
"So supremely conscious am I at such times that
'We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep,'
that were I, while this mood is on me, to open my eyes one morning and find that all this present world and its dream-creations had passed away for ever, there would hardly stir in my heart one momentary thrill of surprise, for I should but sigh and say, 'Ah, then, at last it has come, and now I am asleep no longer!'
"What the awakened life for which I am waiting will be like, I know not consciously, but something there is within me that does know, and that has a dumb inarticulate knowledge of it, like the memory of a dream which we have not all forgotten, yet cannot all recall. That it will be Life, I am sure—a life which though orbing in ampler cycle and vaster sweep than this life, is yet on one and the same plane with it, and in no way separate and distinct. Nay, even now this dream-world would seem to be surrounded and insphered by the waking one, even as 'time is but a parenthesis in eternity;' for there are realities in this unreal existence, flowers and faces, love and poetry, and the morning and evening skies, which have to me no part in this perishable world, but which 'torment me ever with invitations to their own inaccessible home.'"
I have transcribed this extract from my earlier diary, not because I think there is anything in it worth preservation, but because I believe it very aptly illustrates the suitability of the punishment meted out to me in hell to my own peculiar temperament. I was one of those who lived only in thought. "The world is a dream," I said, "things and persons are but dreams, and exist for me only in my thought of them." Hence to make my punishment a thought, to confront me with the memory of my crime and of its consequences, and to leave me thus hell-haunted by the cry of an awakened conscience, was to inflict a torment upon me a thousand-fold more terrible than material pain.
To those, however, who think with Heine, that "mental torture is more easily to be endured than physical pain," I have a word to say. When I was in hell, I saw there the souls of men and women whom I had known in life, and I learnt something of the nature of their sufferings. Unlike my own, that punishment was, in many cases, not mental but physical; and to those who are incapable of realizing what agony a thought can bring, let me say that hell has too its bodily punishment, and punishment from which there is no escape.
