"Therefore trust to thy heart, and what the world calls illusions."--LONGFELLOW.
This curious sentence of Longfellow's deserves reading again. He is an earnest man, and does not mean to cheat us; he has done good work in the world by his poems and writings; he has backed up many, and lifted the hearts of many, by pure thought; he means what he says. Yet, what is altogether lighter than vanity? The human heart, answers the religionist. What is altogether deceitful upon the scales? The human heart. What is a Vanity Fair, a mob, a hubbub and babel of noises, to be avoided, shunned, hated? The world. And, lastly, what are our thoughts and struggles, vain ideas, and wishes? Vain, empty illusions, shadows, and lies. And yet this man, with the inspiration which God gives every true poet, tells us to trust to our hearts, and what the world calls illusions. And he is right.
Now there are, of course, various sorts of illusions. The world is itself illusive. None of us are exactly what we seem; and many of those things that we have the firmest faith in really do not exist. When the first philosopher declared that the world was round, and not a plane as flat and circular as a dinner-plate or a halfpenny, people laughed at him, and would have shut him up in a lunatic asylum. They said he had an "illusion;" but it was they who had it. He was so bold as to start the idea that we had people under us, and that the sun went to light them, and that they walked with their feet to our feet. So they do, we know well now; but the pope and cardinals would not have it, and so they met in solemn conclave, and ordered the philosopher's book to be burnt, and they would have burnt him, too, in their hardly logical way of saving souls, only he recanted, and, sorely against his will, said that it was all an "illusion." But the pope and his advisers had an illusion, too, which was, that dressing up men who did not believe in their faith, in garments on which flames and devils were represented--such a garment they called a san benito--and then burning them, was really something done for the glory of God. They called it with admirable satire an auto da fé (an "act of faith"), and they really did believe--for many of the inquisitors were mistaken but tender men--that they did good by this; but surely now they have outgrown this illusion. How many of these have we yet to outgrow; how far are we off the true and liberal Christianity which is the ideal of the saint and sage; how ready are we still to persecute those who happen, by mere circumstances attending their birth and education, to differ from us!
The inner world of man, no less than the external world, is full of illusions. They arise from distorted vision, from a disorder of the senses, or from an error of judgment upon data correctly derived from their evidence. Under the influence of a predominant train of thought, an absorbing emotion, a person ready charged with an uncontrolled imagination will see, as Shakspeare has it--
"More devils than vast hell can hold."
Half, if not all, of the ghost stories, which are equally dangerous and absorbing to youth, arise from illusion--there they have their foundation; but believers in them obstinately refuse to believe anything but that which their overcharged and predisposed imagination leads them to. Some of us walk about this world of ours--as if it were not of itself full enough of mystery--as ready to swallow any thing wonderful or horrible, as the country clown whom a conjurer will get upon his stage to play tricks with. Fooled by a redundant imagination, delighted to be tricked by her potency, we dream away, flattered by the idea that a supernatural messenger is sent to us, and to us alone. We all have our family ghosts, in whom we more than half believe. Each one of us has a mother or a wise aunt, or some female relation, who, at one period of her life, had a dream, difficult to be interpreted, and foreboding good or evil to a child of the house.
We are so grand, we men, "noble animals, great in our deaths and splendid even in our ashes," that we can not yield to a common fate without some overstrained and bombast conceit that the elements themselves give warning. Casca, in "Julius Caesar," rehearses some few of the prodigies which predicted Caesar's death:
"A common slave (you know him well by sight)
Held up his left hand, which did flame, and burn
Like twenty torches join'd; and yet his hand,
Not sensible of fire, remained unscorched....
And, yesterday, the bird of night did sit,
Even at noon-day, upon the market-place,
Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies
Do so conjointly meet, let not men say,
'These are their reasons--they are natural;
For, I believe, they are portentous things."
A great many others besides our good Casca believe in these portents and signs, and their dignity would be much hurt if they were persuaded that the world would go on just the same if they and their family were utterly extinct, and that no eclipse would happen to portend that calamity. In Ireland, in certain great families, a Banshee, or a Benshee, for they differ who spell it, sits and wails all night when the head of the family is about to stretch his feet towards the dim portals of the dead; and in England are many families who, by some unknown means, retain a ghost which walks up and down a terrace, as it did in that fanciful habitation of Sir Leicester Dedlock. In Scotland, they have amongst them prophetic shepherds, who, on the cold, misty mountain top, at eventide, shade their shaggy eyebrows with their hands, and, peering into the twilight, see funerals pass by, and the decease of some neighbor portended by all the paraphernalia of death.
With us all these portents "live no longer in the faith of Reason;" we assert, in Casca's words, that "they are natural;" but we offend the credulous when we do so. "Illusions of the senses," says an acute writer, "are common in our appreciation of form, distance, color, and motion; and also from a lack of comprehension of the physical powers of Nature, in the production of images of distinct objects. A stick in the water appears bent or broken; the square tower at the distance looks round; distant objects appear to move when we are in motion; the heavenly bodies appear to revolve round the earth." And yet we know that all these appearances are mere illusions. At the top of a mountain in Ireland, with our back to the sun, we, two travelers, were looking at the smiling landscape gilded by the sunshine; suddenly a white cloud descended between us and the valley, and there upon it were our two shadows, distorted, gigantic, threatening or supplicatory, as we chose to move and make them. Here was an exactly similar apparition to the Specter of the Brocken. The untaught German taxed his wits to make the thing a ghost; but the philosopher took off his hat and bowed to it, and the shadow returned the salute; and so with the Fata Morgana, and the mirage. We now know that these things had no supernatural origin, but are simply due to the ordinary laws of atmospheric influence and light; so all our modern illusions are easily rectified by the judgment, and are fleeting and transitory in the minds of the sane.
But, beyond these, there are the illusions of which we first spoke, from which we would not willingly be awakened. The sick man in Horace, who fancied that he was always sitting at a play, and laughed and joked, or was amazed and wept as they do in a theater, rightly complained to his friends that they had killed him, not cured him, when they roused him from his state of hallucination. There are some illusions so beautiful, so healthful, and so pleasant, that we would that no harshness of this world's ways, no bitter experience, no sad reality, could awaken us from them. It is these, we fancy, that the poet tells us to trust to; such are the illusions--so-called by the world--to which we are always to give our faith. It will be well if we do so. Faith in man or woman is a comfortable creed; but you will scarcely find a man of thirty, or a woman either, who retains it. They will tell you bitterly "they have been so deceived!" One old gentleman we know, deceived, and ever again to be deceived, who is a prey to false friends, who lends his money without surety and gets robbed, who fell in love and was jilted, who has done much good and has been repaid with much evil. This man is much to be envied. He can, indeed, "trust in his heart and what the world calls illusions." To him the earth is yet green and fresh, the world smiling and good-humored, friends are fast and loving, woman a very well-spring of innocent and unbought love. The world thinks him an old simpleton; but he is wiser than the world. He is not to be scared by sad proverbs, nor frightened by dark sayings. An enviable man, he sits, in the evening of life, loving and trusting his fellow-men, and, from the mere freshness of his character, having many gathered round him whom he can still love and trust.
With another sort of philosophers all around is mere illusion, and the mind of man shall in no way be separated from it; from the beginning to the end it is all the same. Our organization, they would have us believe, creates most of our pleasure and our pain. Life is in itself an ecstasy. "Life is as sweet as nitrous oxide; and the fisherman, dripping all day over a cold pond, the switchman at the railway intersection, the farmer in the field, the negro in the rice-swamp, the fop in the street, the hunter in the woods, the barrister with the jury, the belle at the ball--all ascribe a certain pleasure to their employment which they themselves give to it. Health and appetite impart the sweetness to sugar, bread, and meat." So fancy plays with us; but, while she tricks us, she blesses us. The mere prosaic man, who strips the tinsel from every thing, who sneers at a bridal and gladdens at a funeral; who tests every coin and every pleasure, and tells you that it has not the true ring; who checks capering Fancy and stops her caracoling by the whip of reality, is not to be envied. "In the life of the dreariest alderman, Fancy enters into all details, and colors them with a rosy hue," says Emerson. "He imitates the air and action of people whom he admires, and is raised in his own eyes.... In London, in Paris, in Boston, in San Francisco, the masquerade is at its height. Nobody drops his domino. The chapter of fascinations is very long. Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions."
Happy are they with whom this domino is never completely dropped! Happy, thrice happy, they who believe, and still maintain that belief, like champion knights, against all comers, in honor, chastity, friendship, goodness, virtue, gratitude. It is a long odds that the men who do not believe in these virtues have none themselves; for we speak from our hearts, and we tell of others that which we think of ourselves. The French, a mournful, sad, and unhappy nation--even at the bottom of all their external gaiety--have a sad word, a participle, désillusionné, disillusioned; and by it they mean one who has worn out all his youthful ideas, who has been behind the scenes, and has seen the bare walls of the theater, without the light and paint, and has watched the ugly actors and gaunt actresses by daylight. The taste of life is very bitter in the mouth of such a man; his joys are Dead Sea apples--dust and ashes in the mouths of those who bite them. No flowers spring up about his path; he is very melancholy and suspicious, very hard and incredulous; he has faith neither in the honesty of man nor in the purity of woman. He is désillusionné--by far too wise to be taken in with painted toys. Every one acts with self-interest! His doctor, his friend, or his valet will be sorry for his death merely from the amount of money interest that they have in his life. Bare and grim unto tears, even if he had any, is the life of such a man. With him, sadder than Lethe or the Styx, the river of time runs between stony banks, and, often a calm suicide, it bears him to the Morgue. Happier by far is he who, with whitened hair and wrinkled brow, sits crowned with the flowers of illusion; and who, with the ear of age, still remains a charmed listener to the songs which pleased his youth, trusting "his heart and what the world calls illusions."