Leaves in the Wind

by A. G. Gardiner

Some turn the wheel of electricity, some suspend rings to a loadstone and find that what they did yesterday they can do again to-day. Some register the changes of the wind, and die fully convinced that the wind is changeable. There are men yet more profound, who have heard that two colourless liquors may produce a colour by union, and that two cold bodies will grow hot if they are mingled; they mingle them, and produce the effect expected, say it is strange, and mingle them again.

Admirable old boy! What wit you had! We can still enjoy it even though time has turned it to foolishness and planted its barb in your own breast. All your roaring, sir, will not take the barb out. All your genius for argument will not prevail against the witness you see of the mighty fruits of those little experiments that filled your Olympian mind with scorn. But you will have your compensations. Even you will be astonished at the place you fill in our thoughts so long after your queer figure and brown wig were last seen in Fleet Street. You will find that the very age in which you lived is remembered as the Age of Johnson, and that the thunders of your voice, transmitted by the faithful Bozzy, are among the immortal reverberations from the past. Yes, sir, in spite of the scientists, you will go back very well content with your visit.

And it may be that the victory of the scientists will assuage the disappointment of Jeremy himself. It is possible that when, back once more in whatever region of heaven is reserved for philosophers, he begins to reflect on all he has seen, Jeremy will recover his spirits. This moral catastrophe of man, he will say, must be seen in relation to his astonishing intellectual victory. I forgot that stage in the journey to the heavenly city of Utilitarianism. This century that has passed has witnessed that stage. It has been a period of inconceivable triumph over matter. Man has discovered all the wonders of the earth and is dazzled and drunk with the conquest of things. His moral and social sense has not been able to keep pace with this breathless material development. He has lost his spiritual bearings in the midst of the gigantic machine that his genius has fashioned. He has become the slave of his own creation, the victim of the monster of his invention, and this calamity into which he has fallen is his blind effort to readjust his life to the new scheme of things that the machine has imposed on him. The great parturition is upon him and he is shedding gouts of blood in his agony. But he will emerge from his pains. The material century is accomplished; the conquest of the machine is at hand, and with that conquest the moral sense of man will revive with a grandeur undreamed of in the past. The march is longer than I thought, but it will gain impetus and majesty from this immense overthrow. The road I built was only premature. Man was not ready to take it. But it is still there—a little grass-grown and neglected, but still beckoning him on to the earthly paradise. When he rises from his wrestle in the dark, his sight will clear and he will surely take it.... Yes, I think I shall go back after all....

Unteachable old optimist, murmurs the cynic at his side.

ON SLEEP AND THOUGHT

In the middle of last night I found myself suddenly and quite acutely awake. It is an unusual experience for me. I knew the disturbance had not come from without myself, but from within—from some low but persistent knocking at the remote door of consciousness. Who was the knocker? I ran over the possible visitors before opening the door just as one sometimes puzzles over the writing of an address before opening a letter. Ah, yes, the disquieting discovery I had made yesterday—that was the intruder. And, saying this, I opened the door and let the fellow in, to sit upon my pillow and lord it over me in the darkness. I had succeeded in suppressing him before I went to bed—burying him beneath talk about this and that, some variations of Rameau, a few of those Hungarian songs from Korbay's collection, so incomparable in their fierce energy and passion, and so on; the mound nicely rounded off with Duruy's "History of France," and the headstone of sleep duly erected. Now, I thought, I shall hear nothing more of him until I face him squarely to-morrow. And here, up from the depths he had come and taken his seat upon the headstone itself.

It is with sleep as with affairs. One cracked bell will shatter a whole ring; one scheming, predatory power will set the whole world in flames. And one disorderly imp of the mind will upset the whole comity of sleep. He will neither slumber forgetfully nor play with the others in dreams, turning the realities and solemnities of the day into a wild travesty of fun or agony, in which everything that is incredible seems as natural as sneezing, and you stand on your head on the cross of St. Paul's or walk up the Strand carrying your head under your arm without any sense of surprise or impropriety. Nor is he one of those obliging subjects of the mind who obey their orders like a sensible house-dog, sleeping with one eye open and ready to bark, as it were, if anything goes wrong. You know that sort of decent fellow. You say to him overnight, "Now, remember, I have that train to catch in the morning, and I must be awake without fail at seven." Or it may be six, or four. And whatever the hour you name, sure enough the good dog barks in time. If he has a failing, it is barking too soon and leaving you to discuss the nice question whether you dare go to sleep again or whether you had better remain awake. In the midst of which you probably go to sleep again and miss your train.

This control of the kingdom of sleep by the apparently dormant consciousness can be carried far. A friend of mine tells me that he has even learned to put his dreams under the check of conscious or sub-conscious thought. He had one persistent dream which took the form of missing the train. Sometimes his wife was on board, and he rushed on to the platform just in time to see the train in motion and her head out of the window with agony written on her face. Sometimes he was in the train and his wife just missed it. Sometimes they were both inside, but saw their luggage being brought up too late. Sometimes the luggage got in and they didn't. Always something went wrong. He determined to have that dream regularised. And so before going to bed he thought hard of catching the train. He saturated himself with the idea of catching the train. And the thing worked like a charm. He never misses a train now, nor his wife, nor his luggage. They all steam away on their dream journeys together without a hitch. So he tells me, and I believe him, for he is a truthful man.

You and I, and I suppose everybody, have had evidences of this sub-conscious operation in sleep. That it is common enough is shown by the familiar saying, "I will sleep on it." I have gone to bed more than once with problems that have seemed insoluble, have fallen to sleep, and have wakened in the morning with the course so clear that I have wondered how I could have been in doubt. And Sir Edward Clarke in his reminiscences of the Bar tells how, after a night over his briefs he would go to bed with his way through the tangle obscure and perplexing, and would wake from sleep with the path plain as a pikestaff. The phenomenon is doubtless due in some measure to rest. The mind clears in sleeping as muddy waters clear in standing. But this is not the whole explanation. Some process has taken place in the interval far down in the hinterlands of thought. You may observe this even in your waking hours. Lord Leverhulme, who I suppose has one of the biggest letter-bags in the country, once told me that his habit in dealing with his correspondence is to answer at once those letters he can reply to off-hand, and to put aside those that need consideration. When he turns to the latter he finds the answers have fashioned themselves without any conscious act of thought. This experience is not uncommon, and as it occurs when the mind is at the maximum of activity it disposes of the idea that rest is the complete explanation.