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We are too hasty when we set down our
ancestors in the gloss for fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies
(as they seem to us) involved in their creed of witchcraft. In
the relations of this visible world we find them to have been
as rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves.
But when once the invisible world was supposed to be opened, and
the lawless agency of bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability,
of decency, of fitness, or proportion -- of that which distinguishes
the likely from the palpable absurd -- could they have to guide
them in the rejection or admission of any particular testimony?
-- That maidens pined away, wasting inwardly as their waxen images
consumed before a fire -- that corn was lodged, and cattle lamed
-- that whirlwinds uptore in diabolic revelry the oaks of the
forest-or that spits and kettles only danced a fearful-innocent
vagary about some rustic's kitchen when no wind was stirring --
were all equally probable where no law of agency was understood.
That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the flower
and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak
fantasy of indigent eld -- has neither likelihood nor unlikelihood
à priori to us, who have no measure to guess at
his policy, or standard to estimate what rate those anile souls
may fetch in the devil's market. Nor, when the wicked are expressly
symbolized by a goat, was it to be wondered at so much, that he
should come sometimes in that body, and assert his metaphor. --
That the intercourse was opened at all between both worlds was
perhaps the mistake -- but that once assumed, I see no reason
for disbelieving one attested story of this nature more than another
on the score of absurdity. There is no law to judge of the lawless,
or canon by which a dream may be criticised.
I have sometimes thought that I could
not have existed in the days of received witchcraft; that I could
not have slept in a village where one of those reputed hags dwelt.
Our ancestors were bolder or more obtuse. Amidst the universal
belief that these wretches were in league with the author of all
evil, holding hell tributary to their muttering, no simple Justice
of the Peace seems to have scrupled issuing, or silly Headborough
serving, a warrant upon them -- as if they should subpoena Satan!
-- Prospero in his boat, with his books and wand about him, suffers
himself to be conveyed away at the mercy of his enemies to an
unknown island. He might have raised a storm or two, we think,
on the passage. His acquiescence is in exact analogy to the non-resistance
of witches to the constituted powers. -- What stops the Fiend
in Spenser from tearing Guyon to pieces -- or who had made it
a condition of his prey, that Guyon must take assay of the glorious
bait -- we have no guess. We do not know the laws of that country.
From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive
about witches and witch-stories. My maid, and more legendary aunt,
supplied me with, good store. But I shall mention the accident
which directed my curiosity originally into this channel. In my
father's book-closet, the History of the Bible, by Stackhouse,
occupied a distinguished station. The pictures with which it abounds
-- one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon's temple,
delineated with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if
the artist had been upon the spot -- attracted my childish attention.
There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which
I wish that I had never seen. We shall come to that hereafter.
Stackhouse is in two huge tomes -- and there was a pleasure in
removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining,
was as much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied
upon an upper shelf. I have not met with the work from that time
to this, but I remember it consisted of Old Testament stories,
orderly set down, with the objection appended to each story,
and the solution of the objection regularly tacked
to that. The objection was a summary of whatever difficulties
had been opposed to the credibility of the history, by the shrewdness
of ancient or modern infidelity, drawn up with an almost complimentary
excess of candour. The solution was brief, modest, and
satisfactory. The bane and antidote were both before you. To doubts
so put, and so quashed, there seemed to be an end for ever. The
dragon is dead, for the foot of the veriest babe to trample on.
But -- like as was rather feared than realised from that slain
monster in Spenser -- from the womb of those crushed errors young
dragonets would creep, exceeding the prowess of so tender a Saint
George as myself to vanquish. The habit of expecting objections
to every passage, set me upon starting more objections, for the
glory of finding a solution of my own for them. I became staggered
and perplexed, a sceptic in long coats. The pretty Bible stories
which I had read, or heard read in church, lost their purity and
sincerity of impression, and were turned into so many historic
or chronologic theses to be defended against whatever impugners.
I was not to disbelieve them, but -- the next thing to that --
I was to be quite sure that some one or other would or had disbelieved
them. Next to making a child an infidel, is the letting him know
that there are infidels at all. Credulity is the man's weakness,
but the child's strength. 0, how ugly sound scriptural doubts
from the mouth of a babe and a suckling -- I should have lost
myself in these mazes, and have pined away, I think, with such
unfit sustenance as these husks afforded, but for a fortunate
piece of ill-fortune, which about this time befel me. Turning
over the picture of the ark with too much haste, I unhappily made
a breach in its ingenious fabric-driving my inconsiderate fingers
right through the two larger quadrupeds the elephant, and the
camel -- that stare (as well they might) out of the two last windows
next the steerage in that unique piece of naval architecture.
Stackhouse was henceforth locked up, and became an interdicted
treasure. With the book, the objections and solution gradually
cleared out of my head, and have seldom returned since in any
force to trouble me. -- But there was one impression which I had
imbibed from Stackhouse, which no lock or bar could shut out,
and which was destined to try my childish nerves rather more seriously.
-- That detestable picture!
I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors.
The night-time solitude, and the dark, were my hell. The sufferings
I endured in this nature would justify the expression. I never
laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh
or eighth year of my life -- so far as memory serves in things
so long ago -- without an assurance, which realized its own prophecy,
of seeing some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted
in part, if I say, that to his picture of the Witch raising up
Samuel --(O that old man covered with a mantle!) I owe--not my
midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy -- but the shape and
manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a
hag that nightly sate upon my pillow -- a sure bed-fellow, when
my aunt or my maid was far from me. All day long, while the book
was permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delineation, and at
night (if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and
found the vision true. I durst not, even in the day-light, once
enter the chamber where I slept, without my face turned to the
window, aversely from the bed where my witch-ridden pillow was.
-- Parents do not know what they do when they leave tender babes
alone to go to sleep in the dark. The feeling about for a friendly
arm -- the hoping for a familiar voice -- when they wake screaming
-- and find none to soothe them -- what a terrible shaking it
is to their poor nerves! The keeping them up till midnight, through
candle-light and the unwholesome hours, as they are called, --
would, I am satisfied, in a medical point of view, prove the better
caution. -- That detestable picture, as I have said, gave the
fashion to my dreams -- if dreams they were -- for the scene of
them was invariably the room in which I lay. Had I never met with
the picture, the fears would have come self-pictured in some shape
or other -
Headless bear, black man, or
ape --
but, as it was, my imaginations took
that form. -- It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish
servants, which create these terrors in children. They can at
most but give them a direction. Dear little T.N. who of all children
has been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every
taint of superstition -- who was never allowed to hear of goblin
or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or to read or
hear of any distressing story -- finds all this world of fear,
from which he has been so rigidly excluded ab extra, in
his own "thick-coming fancies;" and from his little
midnight pillow, this nurse-child of optimism will start at shapes,
unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of the
cell-damned murderer are tranquillity.
Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras --
dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies may reproduce themselves
in the brain of superstition -- but they were there before. They
are transcripts, types -- the archetypes are in us, and eternal.
How else should the recital of that, which we know in a waking
sense to be false, come to affect us at all? -- or
-- Names, whose sense we see not,
Fray us with things that be not?
Is it that we naturally conceive terror
from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able
to inflict upon us bodily injury? -- O, least of all! These terrors
are of older standing. They date beyond body -- or, without the
body they would have been the same. All the cruel, tormenting,
defined devils in Dante -- tearing, mangling, choking, stifling,
scorching demons -- are they one half so fearful to the spirit
of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unembodied following
him -
Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and
dread,
And having once turn'd round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread*.
[Footnote] * Mr, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner
That the kind of fear here treated of
is purely spiritual -- that it is strong in proportion as it is
objectless upon earth -- that it predominates in the period of
sinless infancy -- are difficulties, the solution of which might
afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition,
and a peep at least into the shadow-land of pre-existence.
My night-fancies have long ceased to
be afflictive. I confess an occasional nightmare; but I do not,
as in early youth, keep a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the
extinguished taper, will come and look at me; but I know them
for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their presence, and I
fight and grapple with them. For the credit of my imagination,
I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams are
grown. They are never romantic, seldom even rural. They are of
architecture and of buildings cities abroad, which I have never
seen, and hardly have hope to see. I have traversed, for the seeming
length of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon -- their
churches, palaces, squares, market- places, shops, suburbs, ruins,
with an inexpressible sense of delight -- a map-like distinctness
of trace -- and a day-light vividness of vision, that was all
but being awake. -- I have formerly travelled among the Westmoreland
fells -- my highest Alps, -- but they are objects too mighty for
the grasp of my roaming recognition; and I have again and again
awoke with ineffectual struggles of the inner eye, to make out
a shape in any way whatever, of Helvellyn. Methought I was in
that country, but the mountains were gone. The poverty of my dreams
mortifies me. There is Coleridge, at his will can conjure up icy
domes, and pleasure-houses for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian maids,
and songs of Abara, and caverns,
Where Alph, the sacred river,
runs,
to solace his night solitudes -- when
I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry Cornwall has his tritons and his
nereids gamboling before him in nocturnal visions, and proclaiming
sons born to Neptune -- when my stretch of imaginative activity
can hardly, in the night season, raise up the ghost of a fish-wife.
To set my failures in somewhat a mortifying light -- it was after
reading the noble Dream of this poet, that my fancy ran strong
upon these marine spectra; and the poor plastic power, such as
it is, within me set to work, to humour my folly in a sort of
dream that very night. Methought I was upon the ocean billows
at some sea nuptials, riding and mounted high, with the customary
train sounding their conchs before me, (I myself, you may be sure,
the leading god,) and jollily we went careering over the
main, till just where Ino Leucothea should have greeted me (I
think it was Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually
subsiding, fell from a sea-roughness to a sea-calm, and thence
to a river-motion, and that river (as happens in the familiarization
of dreams) was no other than the gentle Thames, which landed me,
in the wafture of a lucid wave or two, alone, safe and inglorious,
somewhere at the foot of Lambeth palace. The degree of the soul's
creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical criterion of
the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking.
An old gentleman, a friend of mine, and a humorist, used to carry
this notion so far, that when he saw any stripling of his acquaintance
ambitious of becoming a poet, his first question would be, --
"Young man, what sort of dreams have you?" I have so
much faith in my old friend's theory, that when I feel that idle
vein returning upon me, I presently subside into my proper element
of prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that inauspicious
inland landing.
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