Dream Life: A Fable of the Seasons

by Donald Grant Mitchell

In such mood come swift dreams of wealth,—not of mere accumulation, but of the splendor and parade which in our Western world are, alas! its chiefest attractions. You grow observant of markets, and estimate percentages. You fondle some speculation in your thought, until it grows into a gigantic scheme of profit; and if the venture prove successful, you follow the tide tremulously, until some sudden reverse throws you back upon the resources of your professional employ.

But again as you see this and that one wearing the blazonry which wealth wins, and which the man of the world is sure to covet,—your weak soul glows again with the impassioned desire, and you hunger, with brute appetite and bestial eye, for riches. You see the mania around you, and it is relieved of odium by the community of error. You consult some gray old veteran in the war of gold, scarred with wounds, and crowned with honors, and watch eagerly for the words and the ways which have won him wealth.

Your fingers tingle with mad expectancies; your eyes roam, lost in estimates. Your note-book shows long lines of figures. Your reading of the news centres in the stock-list. Your brow grows cramped with the fever of anxiety. Through whole church-hours your dreams range over the shadowy transactions of the week or the month to come.

Even with old religious habit clinging fast to your soul, you dream now only of nice conformity, comfortable faith, high respectability; there lies very little in you of that noble consciousness of Duty performed,—of living up to the Life that is in you,—of grasping boldly and stoutly at those chains of Love which the Infinite Power has lowered to our reach. You do not dream of being, but of seeming. You spill the real essence, and clutch at the vial which has only a label of Truth. Great and holy thoughts of the Future,—shadowy, yet bold conceptions of the Infinite,—float past you dimly, and your hold is never strong enough to grapple them to you. They fly, like eagles, too near the sun; and there lies game below for your vulture beak to feed upon.

[Great thoughts belong only and truly to him whose mind can hold them. No matter who first puts them in words, if they come to a soul and fill it, they belong to it,—whether they floated on the voice of others, or on the wings of silence and the night.]

To be up with the fashion of the time, to be ignorant of plain things and people, and to be knowing in brilliancies, is a kind of Pelhamism that is very apt to overtake one in the first blush of manhood. To hold a fair place in the after-dinner table-talk, to meet distinction as a familiarity, to wear salon honors with aplomb, to know affection so far as to wield it into grace of language, are all splendid achievements with a man of the world. Instruction is caught without asking it; and no ignorance so shames as ignorance of those forms by which natural impulse is subdued to the tone of civilian habit. You conceal what tells of the man, and cover it with what smacks of the roué.

Perhaps under such training, and with a slight memory of early mortification to point your spirit, you affect those gallantries of heart and action which the world calls flirtation. You may study brilliancies of speech to wrap their net around those susceptible hearts whose habit is too naïve by nature to wear the leaden covering of custom. You win approaches by artful counterfeit of earnestness, and dash away any naïveté of confidence with some brave sophism of the world. A doubt or a distrust piques your pride, and makes attentions wear a humility that wins anew. An indifference piques you more, and throws into your art a counter-indifference,—lit up by bold flashes of feeling,—sparkling with careless brilliancies, and crowned with a triumph of neglect.

It is curious how ingeniously a man's vanity will frame apologies for such action.—It is pleasant to give pleasure; you like to see a joyous sparkle of the eye, whether lit up by your presence or by some buoyant fancy. It is a beguiling task to weave words into some soft, melodious flow, that shall keep the ear and kindle the eye; and to strew it over with half-hidden praises, so deftly couched in double terms that their aroma shall only come to the heart hours afterward, and seem to be the merest accidents of truth. It is a happy art to make such subdued show of emotion as seems to struggle with pride, and to flush the eye with a moisture, of which you seem ashamed, and yet are proud. It is a pretty practice to throw an earnestness into look and gesture, that shall seem full of pleading, and yet—ask nothing!

And yet it is hard to admire greatly the reputation of that man who builds his triumphs upon womanly weakness; that distinction is not over-enduring whose chiefest merit springs out of the delusions of a too trustful heart. The man, who wins it, wins only a poor sort of womanly distinction. Without power to cope with men, he triumphs over the weakness of the other sex only by hypocrisy. He wears none of the armor of Romans, and he parleys with Punic faith.

----Yet even now there is a lurking goodness in you that traces its beginning to the old garret-home,—there is an air in the harvest heats that whispers of the bloom of spring.