There are hours claimed by Sleep,
but refused to him. None the less are they his
by some state within the mind, which answers rhythmically
and punctually to that claim. Awake and at work,
without drowsiness, without languor, and without gloom,
the night mind of man is yet not his day mind; he
has night-powers of feeling which are at their highest
in dreams, but are night’s as well as sleep’s.
The powers of the mind in dreams, which are inexplicable,
are not altogether baffled because the mind is awake;
it is the hour of their return as it is the hour of
a tide’s, and they do return.
In sleep they have their free way.
Night then has nothing to hamper her influence, and
she draws the emotion, the senses, and the nerves of
the sleeper. She urges him upon those extremities
of anger and love, contempt and terror to which not
only can no event of the real day persuade him, but
for which, awake, he has perhaps not even the capacity.
This increase of capacity, which is the dream’s,
is punctual to the night, even though sleep and the
dream be kept at arm’s length.
The child, not asleep, but passing
through the hours of sleep and their dominions, knows
that the mood of night will have its hour; he puts
off his troubled heart, and will answer it another
time, in the other state, by day. “I shall
be able to bear this when I am grown up” is not
oftener in a young child’s mind than “I
shall endure to think of it in the day-time.”
By this he confesses the double habit and double experience,
not to be interchanged, and communicating together
only by memory and hope.
Perhaps it will be found that to work
all by day or all by night is to miss something of
the powers of a complex mind. One might imagine
the rhythmic experience of a poet, subject, like a
child, to the time, and tempering the extremities
of either state by messages of remembrance and expectancy.
Never to have had a brilliant dream,
and never to have had any delirium, would be to live
too much in the day; and hardly less would be the loss
of him who had not exercised his waking thought under
the influence of the hours claimed by dreams.
And as to choosing between day and night, or guessing
whether the state of day or dark is the truer and the
more natural, he would be rash who should make too
sure.
In order to live the life of night,
a watcher must not wake too much. That is, he
should not alter so greatly the character of night
as to lose the solitude, the visible darkness, or
the quietude. The hours of sleep are too much
altered when they are filled by lights and crowds;
and Nature is cheated so, and evaded, and her rhythm
broken, as when the larks caged in populous streets
make ineffectual springs and sing daybreak songs when
the London gas is lighted. Nature is easily
deceived; and the muse, like the lark, may be set all
astray as to the hour. You may spend the peculiar
hours of sleep amid so much noise and among so many
people that you shall not be aware of them; you may
thus merely force and prolong the day. But to
do so is not to live well both lives; it is not to
yield to the daily and nightly rise and fall and to
be cradled in the swing of change.
There surely never was a poet but
was now and then rocked in such a cradle of alternate
hours. “It cannot be,” says Herbert,
“that I am he on whom Thy tempests fell all
night.”
It is in the hours of sleep that the
mind, by some divine paradox, has the extremest sense
of light. Almost the most shining lines in English
poetry — lines that cast sunrise shadows — are
those of Blake, written confessedly from the side
of night, the side of sorrow and dreams, and those
dreams the dreams of little chimney-sweepers; all is
as dark as he can make it with the “bags of
soot”; but the boy’s dream of the green
plain and the river is too bright for day. So,
indeed, is another brightness of Blake’s, which
is also, in his poem, a child’s dream, and was
certainly conceived by him in the hours of sleep, in
which he woke to write the Songs of Innocence:-
O what land is the land of dreams?
What are its mountains, and what
are its streams?
O father, I saw my mother there,
Among the lilies by waters fair.
Among the lambs clothed in white,
She walk’d with her Thomas
in sweet delight.
To none but the hours claimed and
inspired by sleep, held awake by sufferance of sleep,
belongs such a vision.
Corot also took the brilliant opportunity
of the hours of sleep. In some landscapes of
his early manner he has the very light of dreams, and
it was surely because he went abroad at the time when
sleep and dreams claimed his eyes that he was able
to see so spiritual an illumination. Summer is
precious for a painter, chiefly because in summer so
many of the hours of sleep are also hours of light.
He carries the mood of man’s night out into
the sunshine — Corot did so — and
lives the life of night, in all its genius, in the
presence of a risen sun. In the only time when
the heart can dream of light, in the night of visions,
with the rhythmic power of night at its dark noon
in his mind, his eyes see the soaring of the actual
sun.
He himself has not yet passed at that
hour into the life of day. To that life belongs
many another kind of work, and a sense of other kinds
of beauty; but the summer daybreak was seen by Corot
with the extreme perception of the life of night.
Here, at last, is the explanation of all the memories
of dreams recalled by these visionary paintings, done
in earlier years than were those, better known, that
are the Corots of all the world. Every man who
knows what it is to dream of landscape meets with
one of these works of Corot’s first manner with
a cry, not of welcome only, but of recognition.
Here is morning perceived by the spirit of the hours
of sleep.