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                           IGNORANT ESSAYS.




                         _IGNORANT_

                                 _ESSAYS._

                    [Illustration: text decoration]

                                LONDON:

                           WARD AND DOWNEY,

                 12, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.

                                 1887.

                       [_All Rights Reserved._]

                        RICHARD CLAY AND SONS,

                          LONDON AND BUNGAY.




CONTENTS.


                                PAGE

THE ONLY REAL GHOST IN FICTION     1

THE BEST TWO BOOKS                30

LIES OF FABLE AND ALLEGORY        55

MY COPY OF KEATS                  83

DECAY OF THE SUBLIME             117

A BORROWED POET                  132

THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER          160

A GUIDE TO IGNORANCE             175





IGNORANT ESSAYS.




THE ONLY REAL GHOST IN FICTION.


My most ingenious friend met me one day, and asked me whether I
considered I should be richer if I had the ghost of sixpence or if I had
not the ghost of sixpence.

“What side do you take?” I inquired, for I knew his disputatious turn.

“I am ready to take either,” he answered; “but I give preference to the
ghost.”

“What!” I said. “Give preference to the ghost!”

“Yes. You see, if I haven’t the ghost of sixpence I have nothing at
all; but if I have the ghost of a sixpence----”

“Well?”

“Well, I am the richer by having the ghost of a sixpence.”

“And do you think when you add one more delusion to those under which
you already labour”--he and I could never agree about the difference
between infinity and zero--“that you will be the better off?”

“I have not admitted a ghost is a delusion; and even if I had I am not
prepared to grant that a delusion may not be a source of wealth. Look at
the South Sea Bubble.”

I was willing, so there and then we fell to and were at the question--or
rather, the questions to which it led--for hours, until we finally
emerged upon the crystallization of cast-iron, the possibility of a
Napoleonic restoration, or some other kindred matter. How we wandered
about and writhed in that talk I can no more remember than I can recall
the first articulate words that fell into my life. I know we handled
ghosts (it was broad day and in a public street) with a freedom and
familiarity that must have been painful to spirits of refinement and
reserve. I know we said much about dreams, and compared the phantoms of
the open lids with the phantoms of the closed eyes, and pitted them one
against another like cocks in a main, and I remember that the case of
the dreamer in Boswell’s Johnson came up between us. The case in Boswell
submitted to Johnson as an argument in favour of a man’s reason being
more acute in sleep than in waking, showed the phantom antagonistic able
to floor the dreamer in his proper person. Johnson laughed at such a
delusion, for, he pointed out, only the dreamer was besotted with sleep
he would have perceived that he himself had furnished the confounding
arguments to the shadowy disputant. That is very good, and seems quite
conclusive as far as it goes; but is there nothing beyond what Johnson
saw? Was there no ghostly prompter in the scene? No _suggeritore_
invisible and inaudible to the dreamer, who put words and notes into the
mouth of the opponent? No thinner shade than the spectral being visible
in the dream? If in our waking hours we are subject to phantoms which
sometimes can be seen and sometimes cannot, why not in our sleeping
hours also? Are all ghosts of like grossness, or do some exist so fine
as to be beyond our carnal apprehension, and within the ken only of the
people of our sleep? If we ponderable mortals are haunted, who can say
that our insubstantial midnight visitors may not know wraiths finer and
subtler than we, may not be haunted as we are? In physical life
parasites have parasites. Why in phantom life should not ghosts have
ghosts?

The firm, familiar earth--our earth of this time, the earth upon which
we each of us stand at this moment--is thickly peopled with living
tangible folk who can eat, and drink, and talk, and sing, and walk, and
draw cheques, and perform a number of other useful, and hateful, and
amusing actions. In the course of a day a man meets, let us say, forty
people, with whom he exchanges speech. If a man is a busy dreamer, with
how many people in the course of one night does he exchange speech? Ten,
a hundred, a thousand? In the dreaming of one minute by the clock a man
may converse with half the children of Adam since the Fall! The command
of the greatest general alive would not furnish sentries and vedettes
for the army of spirits that might visit one man in the interval between
one beat of the pendulum of Big Ben and another!

Shortly after that talk with my friend about the ghost of the sixpence,
I was walking alone through one of the narrow lanes in the tangle of
ways between Holborn and Fleet Street, when my eye was caught by the
staring white word “Dreams” on a black ground. The word is, so to speak,
printed in white on the black cover of a paper-bound book, and under the
word “Dreams” are three faces, also printed in white on a black ground.
Two of the faces are those of women: one of a young woman, purporting to
be beautiful, with a star close to her forehead, and the other of a
witch with the long hair and disordered eyes becoming to a person of her
occupation. I dare say these two women are capable not only of
justification, but of the simplest explanation. For all I know to the
contrary, the composition may be taken wholly, or in part, from a
well-known picture, or perhaps some canon of ghostly lore would be
violated if any other design appeared on the cover. About such matters I
know absolutely nothing. The word “Dreams” and the two female faces are
now much less prominent than when I saw the book first, for, Goth that I
am, long ago I dipped a brush in ink and ran a thin wash over the
letters and the two faces; as they were, to use artist’s phrases, in
front of the third face, and killing it.

The third face is that of a man, a young man clean shaven and handsome,
with no ghastliness or look of austerity. His arms are resting on a
ledge, and extend from one side of the picture to the other. The left
arm lies partly under the right, and the left hand is clenched softly
and retired in half shadow. The right arm rises slightly as it crosses
the picture, and the right wrist and hand ride on the left. The fore and
middle fingers are apart, and point forward and a little downward,
following the sleeve of the other arm. The third finger droops still
more downward, and the little finger, with a ring on it, lies directly
perpendicular along the cuff of the sleeve beneath. The hand is not well
drawn, and yet there is some weird suggestiveness in the purposeless
dispersion of the fingers.

