No More Learning

. . . After he had been a pretty
while well exercised in the trade, there chanced to
ride by a couple of scholars, who had formerly been
of his acquaintance. The scholar had quickly spied
out these old friends among the gipsies, and their
amazement to see him among such society had well-nigh
discovered him; but by a sign he prevented them owning
him before that crew, and taking one of them aside
privately desired him with his friend to go to an inn,
not far distant, promising there to come to them. They
accordingly went thither and he follows: after their
first salutation his friends inquire how he came to
lead so odd a life as that was, and so joined himself
into such a beggarly company. The scholar gipsy having
given them an account of the necessity which drove
him to that kind of life, told them that the people
he went with were not such impostors as they were
taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of
learning among them and could do wonders by the power
of imagination, and that himself had learned much of
their art and improved it further than themselves
could. And to evince the truth of what he told them,
he said he'd remove into another room, leaving them to
discourse together; and upon his return tell them the
sense of what they had talked of; which accordingly
he performed, giving them a full account of what had
passed between them in his absence. The scholars
being amazed at so unexpected a discovery, earnestly
desired him to unriddle the mystery. In which he gave
them satisfaction by telling them that what he did
was by the power of imagination, his phantasy leading
theirs; and that himself had dictated to them the
discourse they had held together while he was from
them; that there were warrantable ways of heightening
the imagination to that pitch as to bend another's, and
that when he had compassed the whole secret, some parts
of which he was yet ignorant of, he intended to leave
their company and give the world an account of what he
had learned.

If all who have described events like this have not dreamed, we should
rewrite our histories, for all men, certainly all imaginative men,
must be for ever casting forth enchantments, glamours, illusions; and
all men, especially tranquil men who have no powerful egotistic life,
must be continually passing under their power. Our most elaborate
thoughts, elaborate purposes, precise emotions, are often, as I think,
not really ours, but have on a sudden come up, as it were, out of
hell or down out of heaven. The historian should remember, should he
not? angels and devils not less than kings and soldiers, and plotters
and thinkers. What matter if the angel or devil, as indeed certain
old writers believed, first wrapped itself with an organized shape in
some man's imagination?
what matter 'if God himself only acts or is in
existing beings or men,' as Blake believed? we must none the less admit
that invisible beings, far wandering influences, shapes that may have
floated from a hermit of the wilderness, brood over council-chambers
and studies and battle-fields. We should never be certain that it was
not some woman treading in the wine-press who began that subtle change
in men's minds, that powerful movement of thought and imagination about
which so many Germans have written; or that the passion, because of
which so many countries were given to the sword, did not begin in the
mind of some shepherd boy, lighting up his eyes for a moment before it
ran upon its way.


V

We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more
visibly and obviously, and in all likelihood more easily and fully
than we do, for our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive
meditative life, and our education that enlarges the separated,
self-moving mind, have made our souls less sensitive. Our souls that
were once naked to the winds of heaven are now thickly clad, and have
learned to build a house and light a fire upon its hearth, and shut
to the doors and windows. The winds can, indeed, make us draw near
to the fire, or can even lift the carpet and whistle under the door,
but they could do worse out on the plains long ago. A certain learned
man, quoted by Mr. Lang in his _Making of Religion_, contends that the
memories of primitive man and his thoughts of distant places must have
had the intensity of hallucination, because there was nothing in his
mind to draw his attention away from them--an explanation that does not
seem to me complete--and Mr. Lang goes on to quote certain travellers to
prove that savages live always on the edges of vision. One Laplander
who wished to become a Christian, and thought visions but heathenish,
confessed to a traveller, to whom he had given a minute account of many
distant events, read doubtless in that traveller's mind, 'that he knew
not how to make use of his eyes, since things altogether distant were
present to them. ' I myself could find in one district in Galway but one
man who had not seen what I can but call spirits, and he was in his
dotage. 'There is no man mowing a meadow but sees them at one time or
another,' said a man in a different district.

If I can unintentionally cast a glamour, an enchantment, over persons
of our own time who have lived for years in great cities, there is
no reason to doubt that men could cast intentionally a far stronger
enchantment, a far stronger glamour, over the more sensitive people
of ancient times, or that men can still do so where the old order of
life remains unbroken. 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?