Part 16 (1/2)
yes, perhaps, it will be better to stay away.
But all the answers of time will not be so disquieting. It is probable, for example, that Benjamin Franklin will enjoy his visit immensely. He will find much to delight his curious and adventurous mind. I see him watching the flying machines as joyously as a child and as fondly as a parent. For among his mult.i.tudinous activities he experimented with balloons and suffered the gibes of the foolish. Why, asked his critic, did he waste his time over these childish things?
What, in the name of heaven, was the use of balloons? And Benjamin made the immortal reply, ”What is the use of a new-born baby?” If he is among the presences who watch the events of to-day he will be almost as astonished as his critics to see the dimensions his ”new-born baby”
has grown to. He will be astonished at other things. He will recall the day when, in his fine flowered-silk garment, he entered, as the delegate of the insurgent farmers of New England, the reception of the great--was it not in Downing Street?--and was spat upon by the n.o.ble lords, to whose dim vision the future of the new-born baby across the Atlantic was undecipherable. He will recall how he put his outraged garment away, never to wear it again until he had signed the Declaration of Independence. And now, what miracle is this? England and America reconciled at last. England, no less than France, straining her eyes across the Atlantic for the relief that is hastening to her help in the extremest peril of her history from the giant by whose unquiet cradle he played his part a century and a half ago....
Well, no one will rejoice more at the reconciliation or watch the tide of relief streaming across the ocean with more goodwill than Benjamin, who deplored the breach with England as much as anybody. But the n.o.ble lords who spat on him!...
And I can see Napoleon, with his unpleasant familiarity, pinching the spiritual ears of the French scientists of his day and saying, ”How now, gentlemen? What do you say to the steamboat now?” Poor wretches, how humiliated they will be. For when Napoleon asked the Academie des Sciences to report as to the possibilities of the newly-invented steamboat, their verdict was, ”Idee folle, erreur grossiere, absurdite.” They saw in it only a foolish toy, and not a new-born baby destined to be the giant who is performing such prodigies on the seas of the world to-day.
But it is not the scientists who will need to hang their heads before the revelations that await them. They will look on with the complacency of those who see the mighty harvest of their sowing.
Perhaps among the presences who surround them they may descry a bulky man, with rolling gait, whom they knew in their day on earth as the intellectual autocrat of his generation and who levelled the shafts of his wit at their foolish experiments. They will have lost the very human frailty of retaliation if they do not remind him of some of those shafts that, to the admiring circle which sat at his feet, seemed so well-directed and piercing. Perhaps they will read this to him:
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 a.s.suage 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 astonis.h.i.+ng intellectual victory. I forgot that stage in the journey to the heavenly city of Utilitarianism. This century that has pa.s.sed 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 fas.h.i.+oned. 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 gra.s.s-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 pa.s.sion, 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.