No More Learning

Why should not the Scholar Gipsy cast his spell
over his friends? Why should not St. Patrick, or he of whom the story
was first told, pass his enemies, he and all his clerics, as a herd
of deer? Why should not enchanters like him in the _Morte d'Arthur_
make troops of horse seem but grey stones? Why should not the Roman
soldiers, though they came of a civilization which was ceasing to be
sensitive to these things, have trembled for a moment before the
enchantments of the Druids of Mona? Why should not the Jesuit father,
or the Count Saint Germain, or whoever the tale was first told of, have
really seemed to leave the city in a coach and four by all the Twelve
Gates at once? Why should not Moses and the enchanters of Pharaoh have
made their staffs as the medicine men of many primitive peoples make
their pieces of old rope seem like devouring serpents? Why should not
that mediaeval enchanter have made summer and all its blossoms seem to
break forth in middle winter?

May we not learn some day to rewrite our histories, when they touch
upon these things too?

Men who are imaginative writers to-day may well have preferred to
influence the imagination of others more directly in past times.
Instead of learning their craft with paper and a pen they may have
sat for hours imagining themselves to be stocks and stones and beasts
of the wood, till the images were so vivid that the passers-by became
but a part of the imagination of the dreamer, and wept or laughed or
ran away as he would have them. Have not poetry and music arisen,
as it seems, out of the sounds the enchanters made to help their
imagination to enchant, to charm, to bind with a spell themselves and
the passers-by? These very words, a chief part of all praises of music
or poetry, still cry to us their origin. And just as the musician or
the poet enchants and charms and binds with a spell his own mind when
he would enchant the minds of others, so did the enchanter create or
reveal for himself as well as for others the supernatural artist or
genius, the seeming transitory mind made out of many minds, whose work
I saw, or thought I saw, in that suburban house. He kept the doors too,
as it seems, of those less transitory minds, the genius of the family,
the genius of the tribe, or it may be, when he was mighty-souled
enough, the genius of the world.
Our history speaks of opinions and
discoveries, but in ancient times when, as I think, men had their eyes
ever upon those doors, history spoke of commandments and revelations.
They looked as carefully and as patiently towards Sinai and its
thunders as we look towards parliaments and laboratories. We are always
praising men in whom the individual life has come to perfection,
but they were always praising the one mind, their foundation of all
perfection.


VI

I once saw a young Irish woman, fresh from a convent school, cast into
a profound trance, though not by a method known to any hypnotist. In
her waking state she thought the apple of Eve was the kind of apple
you can buy at the greengrocer's, but in her trance she saw the Tree
of Life with ever-sighing souls moving in its branches instead of sap,
and among its leaves all the fowls of the air, and on its highest bough
one white fowl bearing a crown. When I went home I took from the shelf
a translation of _The Book of Concealed Mystery_, an old Jewish book,
and cutting the pages came upon this passage, which I cannot think I
had ever read: 'The Tree, . . . is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and
of Evil . . . in its branches the birds lodge and build their nests, the
souls and the angels have their place. '

I once saw a young Church of Ireland man, a bank clerk in the west of
Ireland, thrown in a like trance. I have no doubt that he, too, was
quite certain that the apple of Eve was a greengrocer's apple, and yet
he saw the tree and heard the souls sighing through its branches, and
saw apples with human faces, and laying his ear to an apple heard
a sound as of fighting hosts within. Presently he strayed from the
tree and came to the edge of Eden, and there he found himself not by
the wilderness he had learned of at the Sunday-school, but upon the
summit of a great mountain, of a mountain 'two miles high. ' The whole
summit, in contradiction to all that would have seemed probable to his
waking mind, was a great walled garden.