No More Learning

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? 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.