[265] Quoted by Paul Delior, Remy de Gourmont et son Œuvre, p. 14.
[266] Thus even Leonardo da Vinci (Solmi, Frammenti, p. 285) acknowledged the benefit which he had gained by gazing at clouds or at mud-bespattered walls; and recommended the practice to other artists, for thereby, he says, they will receive suggestions for landscapes, battlepieces, 'and infinite things,' which they may bring to perfection. He compared this to the possibility of hearing words in the sounds of bells. Some other distinguished artists have adopted somewhat similar practices which are fundamentally the child's habit of seeing pictures in the fire.
[267] Thus Tennyson (Memoir, by his son, vol. i. p. 320) was subject from boyhood to a kind of waking trance. 'This has generally come upon me,' he wrote, 'through repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently.' (It thus seems to have been a sort of auto-hypnotisation.) In this state, individuality seemed to dissolve, he said, and he found in it a proof that the extinction of personality by death would not involve loss of life, but rather a fuller life. We are so easily convinced in these matters!
[268] See e.g., De Manacéïne, Sleep, p. 314; Arturo Morselli, 'Dei Sogni nei Genii,' La Cultura, 1899.
[269] Thus I once planned in a dream a paper on the Progress of Psychology, which seemed to me on awakening to present a quite workable though not notably brilliant scheme.
[270] Sante de Sanctis, however (I Sogni, p. 369), reproduces a dream poem of twelve lines.
[271] See note in J. D. Campbell's edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works, p. 592.
[272] Tartini composed the sonata—a noble and beautiful work which still survives—at the age of twenty-one. In old age he told Lalande the astronomer (as the latter relates in his Voyage d'un Français en Italie, 1765, vol. ix. p. 55) that he had had a dream in which he sold his soul to the Devil, and it occurred to him in his dream to hand his fiddle to the Devil to see what he could do with it. 'But how great was my astonishment when I heard him play with consummate skill a sonata of such exquisite beauty as surpassed the boldest flights of my imagination. I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted; my breath was taken away, and I awoke. Seizing my violin I tried to retain the sounds I had heard. But it was in vain. The piece I then composed, the "Devil's Sonata," was the best I ever wrote, but how far below the one I had heard in my dream!' The dream, it will be seen, was of a fairly common type, and to Tartini's excitable temperament it served as a stimulus to his finest energies. But the real 'Devil's Sonata' was hopelessly lost. (See the articles on Tartini in Fetis, Biographic Universelle des Musiciens, and Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians.)
[273] Helen Keller, the blind deaf-mute, has written some interesting chapters on her dreams in The World I Live in. For the most part it would seem that the dream life of the blind (which has been studied by, among others, Jastrow, Fact and Fable in Psychology, pp. 337 et seq.) is not usually rich or vivid.
[274] See e.g., Marie de Manacéïne, Sleep, p. 313.