Nov. 28, 1884.] 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



439 



remains for the perusal of the curious regarding ancient 

 rules of interpretation and the particular significance of 

 certain dreams. The current views of dreams in classic 

 antiquity are believed to be partly embodied in the 

 'Oi'ttfii)K()iTii:a of Artemidorus of Ephesus, who flourished 

 about the middle of the second century, and who reduces 

 dream interpretation to a body of elaborate rules, while 

 amongst Christian writers Synesius of Cyrene, who lived 

 two centuries later, holds a corresponding place. 



Both classic and patristic writers supply copious details 

 concerning the classes into which dreams were divided, and 

 which have some curious correspondences among the 

 Oriental nations, as well as in our dream-lore : i'.;/., when 

 Artemidorus says that he who dreams he hath lost a tooth 

 shall lose a friend, we may compare with this a quotation 

 which Brand gives from the " Sapho and Phao" of Lily, a 

 playwright of the time of Elizabeth. " Dreams have 

 their trueth. Dreams arc but dotings, which come either 

 by things we see in the day or meates that we eat, and so 

 the common-sense preferring it to be the imaginative. ' I 

 dreamed,' says Ismena, ' mine eyetooth was loose, and that 

 I thru.it it out with my tongue.' ' It foretelleth,' replies 

 Mileta, ' the loss of a friend ; and I ever thought thee so 

 full of prattle that thou wouldst thrust out the best friend 

 with thy tatling.' " 



It is, however, needless to quote from Artemidorus and 

 others of their kin. They do but furnish samples of the 

 ingenuity aisplied to profitless speculations on matters 

 which were fundamental then, and around which the mind 

 played unchecked and unchallenged. Moreover, the subtle 

 distinctions made between dreams in former times were 

 slowly effaced, or sank to their proper level in the gossip of 

 chap books — our European kee-kee-ivins. But the belief in 

 the dream as having a serious meaning, and in the spectral 

 appearances in visions as real existences, remained as strong 

 as in any barbiiiian or pagan. In an atmosphere charged 

 with the supernatural, apparitions and the like were 

 matters of course, the particular form of the illusion 

 to which the senses testified being in harmony with the 

 ideas of the age. The devil does not appear to Greek 

 or Roman, but he sorely troubled the saints, unless 

 their nerves were, like Luther's, strong enough to over- 

 master him. Luther speaks of him as coming into 

 his cell, and making a great noise behind the stove, and 

 of his walking in the cloister above his cell at night ; 

 "but as I knew it was the devil," he says, "I paid no 

 attention to him, and went to sleep.' Sceptics now and 

 again arose protesting against the current belief, but they 

 were as a voice crying in the desert. One Henry Cornelius 

 Agrippa, in the titteenth century, a man born out of due 

 time, says, " To this delusion not a few great philosophers 

 have given not a little credit, especially Democritus, Aris- 

 totle, Sinesius, (fee, so far building on examples of dreams, 

 which some accident bath made to be true, that thence they 

 endeavour to persuade men that there are no dreams but 

 ■what are real.'" 



His words have not yet lost theii- purport. For the 

 credulity of man, the persistence with which he clings to 

 the shadow of the supernatural after having surrendered 

 the substance, seem almost a constant quantity, varying 

 only in form. TJnteachable by experience, fools still pay 

 their guineas to mediums to rap out inane messages from 

 the departed, and send postage stamps to the Astronomer 

 Eoyal, asking him to "work the planets" for them, and 

 secure them luck in love and lawsuits. Nor is there any 

 cure for this but in wise culture of the mind, wise correc- 

 tion, and wholesome control of the emotions. By faith- 

 fully intending the mind to the realities of nature, as 

 Bacon has it, and by living and working among men in a 



healthy, sympathetic way, exaggeration of a particular line 

 of thought or feeling is prevented, and the balance of the 

 faculties best preserved. For, adds Dr. Maudsley,* in 

 pregnant arid well-chosen words, " there are not two 

 worlds — a world of nature and a world of human 

 nature — standing over against one another in a sort 

 of antagonism, but one world of nature, in the 

 orderly evolution of which human nature has its 

 subordinate part. Delusions and hallucinations may 

 be described as discordant notes in the grand har- 

 mony. It should, then, be every man's steadfast 

 aim, as a part of nature — his patient work — to cultivate 

 such entire sincerity of lelations with it; so to think, feel, 

 and act always in intimate unison with it ; to be so com- 

 pletely one with it in life, that when the summons comes 

 to surrender his mortal part to absorption into it, he does 

 so, not fearfully, as to an enemy who ha? vanquished him, 

 but trustfully, as to a mother who, when the day's task is 

 done, bids him lie down to sleep." 



Note. — The papers now concluded, as also the former series on 

 the " Birth and Growth of Myth," will, with the Editor's permis- 

 sion, and after revision and additions, be shortly published in one 

 volume under the title of "Myths and Dreams." The series of 

 papers ou " Evolution " already announced will, it is hoped, be 

 commenced at an early date. 



DICKENS'S STORY LEFT HALF TOLD, 



Now that Mr. Foster has explained his theory at 

 length, I should like to reply, as briefly as possible, 

 to some of his arguments. 



In my former letter (1343) I quoted from the Century 

 Magazine, to show that Mr. Fildes' opinion was that Jasper 

 murdered Edwin Drood. The following extract is taken 

 from Forster's " Life of Dickens," which I have not till 

 lately read, viz. : — 



" The story, I learnt immediately afterward, was to be 

 that of the murder of a nephew by his uncle ; the origi- 

 nality of which was to consist in the review of the mur- 

 derer's career by himself at the close, when its temptations 

 were to be dwelt upon as if not he the culprit, but some 

 other man, were the tempted. The last chapters were to 

 be written in the condemned cell, to which his wickedness, 

 all elaborately elicited from him as if told by another, had 

 brought him. Discovery by the murderer of the utter 

 needlessness of the murder for its object, was to follow 

 hard upon commission of the deed ; but all discovery of 

 the murderer was to be baffled till towards the close, when 

 by means of a gold ring which had resisted the corrosive 

 effects of the lime into which he had thrown the body, not 

 only the jierson murdered was to be identified, but the 

 locality of the crime and the man who committed it. So 

 much was told to me before any of the book was written ; 

 and it will be recollected that the ring taken by Drood to 

 be given to his betrothed only if their engagement went on, 

 was brought away with him from their last interview. 

 Eosa was to marry Tartar, and Crisparkle the sister of 

 Landless, who was himself, I think, to have perished in 

 assisting Tartar finally to unmask and seize the murderer." 



This in the main agrees with my article in the Cornhill, 

 which was solely based on internal evidence. 



Forster adds that Dickens had a "fear that he might 

 have plunged too soon into the incidents leading on to the 

 catastrophe, such as the Datchery assumption in the fifth 

 number (a misgiving he had certainly expressed to his 

 sister-in-law)." "Forster mentions this without giving the 



* Fortnightly Review, Sept., 1878, p. 386. 



