Now Octavius is Gautier, who makes a work of art cut of the dream, preserves it for humanity and gives us a valuable thing of beauty. Gautier makes up for the ugliness of to-day by preserving the beauty of the past. Gautier satisfies his longing for the old pagan world now vanished by making his hero live in it and realise the love of one of its courtesans.
This story reveals the author as much as his Madamoiselle de Maupin does. We have the same Gautier for whom only the material world existed, the Gautier who was obsessed by sex, hated Christianity and worshipped art alone. The trained psychoanalyst who wishes to go deep into the unconscious of Gautier will, I think, find some perverse qualities like fetichism, revealed not only in this tale but in others.
Gautier pursues the motive of this story in several other tales. He lives constantly in his fantasies amidst the beauties of the ancient world. It is hard to believe that many of his tales of phantom love scenes laid in ancient times were not actually dreamed by him.
His novel, The Mummy's Foot, his stories, The Golden Chain, One of Cleopatra's Nights, King Candaules, and two that are considered his best, The Dead Leman and The Fleece of Gold, show the unconscious worshipper of physical beauty in Gautier. All these stories may be analysed like dreams, for they are creatures of the author's imagination whereby he consoled himself for the loss of the pagan world. He was really a pagan transported into our time and he lived those times over in his stories.
III
Kipling's dream story The Brushwood Boy is a very good confirmation of Freud's theories. We will analyse it psychoanalytically; it will be seen that the artificial dream in it is inspired by the same causes as real dreams are. The story was published in the Century Magazine, December, 1895, and appeared in book form in 1901, a year after Freud's great work on Dreams had been issued. Kipling had no knowledge of Freud's theories, but he shows his hero suffering an unconscious repression; Georgie saw for many years visions of a girl he had met in childhood and apparently forgotten. He dreamed of her often and these dreams give us an insight into the hero's anxieties and longings.
Georgie, the Brushwood Boy, dreamed at the age of three of a policeman. At the age of six he had both day and night dreams which always began with a pile of brushwood near the beach. There was a girl he saw at the pile of brushwood who merged with a princess he saw in an illustration of Grimm's Fairy Tales. He called her Annie-an-louise. At the age of seven he saw at Oxford, on a visit, a girl who looked like the child in the illustrations of Alice in Wonderland, and he flirted with her. He went to India as a young man. In his dreams he saw the old policeman of his infant dreams, who was saying, "I am Policeman Day coming back from the city of Sleep." One day in a dream he stepped into a steamer, and saw a stone lily floating on the water. He met the same girl of his early dreams at the Lily Lock and they took a pony on the Thirty Mile Road. He often dreamed of her and in his dreams was happy when with her and unhappy when away from her. When he got back to England he heard a girl guest at his house sing a song of Policeman Day and the City of Sleep, and he guessed that it was she who wrote the music and composed the song. Her name was Miss Lacy; she was the girl he met as a child at Oxford. He took a ride with her and each found that the other had dreamed the same dreams. She knew all about the Thirty Mile Road and she had once kissed him in his sleep. At that very moment he had dreamed that she had bestowed the kiss. Each had cherished the other as an ideal, now to be realised, in marriage.
What is the meaning of this story? How did Georgie come to love a girl he had known apparently only in his dreams? Where does the Policeman come in and what is the secret of the dream journeys on the Thirty Mile Road? Georgie's dreams were the fulfilment of his unconscious desires in waking life. He had actually seen his love in his childhood, was attracted towards her but apparently forgot about her. But the love was there nevertheless; it was repressed. He neither knew why he dreamed of her nor did he believe she actually existed. He conjured her up in the books he read and identified her with the princess of the fairy tales. Like the neurotic patient he did not know the cause of his anxieties; he could not fit altogether in the scheme of life; he was dreaming inexplicable dreams which were having an effect upon him in his waking hours. In a case like this we know that the dreams have a reality that makes them almost equivalent to events of the day. When he took those trips with her in his sleep he was fulfilling the unconscious wishes of his waking life. He suffered nightmares when anything interfered to take him away from her. The anxiety dream as Freud has explained shows that there has been an interference with the satisfying of the love desire.
Policeman Day is the cause of terror because he represents the time when the dreams do not occur, day time, when he becomes the symbol of love unrealised, for in the day Georgie is no longer with his love. Policeman Day is consciousness opposed to unconsciousness, reality opposed to illusion. Miss Lacy also felt this when she sang the song with the refrain,
Oh pity us! Ah, pity us!