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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Dreams, by Jerome K. Jerome
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Dreams
+       From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow"
+
+Author: Jerome K. Jerome
+
+Posting Date: July 26, 2008 [EBook #856]
+Release Date: March 1997
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DREAMS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ron Burkey, and Amy Thomte
+
+
+
+
+
+DREAMS
+
+By Jerome K. Jerome
+
+
+The most extraordinary dream I ever had was one in which I fancied that,
+as I was going into a theater, the cloak-room attendant stopped me in
+the lobby and insisted on my leaving my legs behind me.
+
+I was not surprised; indeed, my acquaintanceship with theater harpies
+would prevent my feeling any surprise at such a demand, even in my
+waking moments; but I was, I must honestly confess, considerably
+annoyed. It was not the payment of the cloak-room fee that I so much
+minded--I offered to give that to the man then and there. It was the
+parting with my legs that I objected to.
+
+I said I had never heard of such a rule being attempted to be put in
+force at any respectable theater before, and that I considered it a most
+absurd and vexatious regulation. I also said I should write to The Times
+about it.
+
+The man replied that he was very sorry, but that those were his
+instructions. People complained that they could not get to and from
+their seats comfortably, because other people's legs were always in
+the way; and it had, therefore, been decided that, in future, everybody
+should leave their legs outside.
+
+It seemed to me that the management, in making this order, had clearly
+gone beyond their legal right; and, under ordinary circumstances, I
+should have disputed it. Being present, however, more in the
+character of a guest than in that of a patron, I hardly like to make a
+disturbance; and so I sat down and meekly prepared to comply with the
+demand.
+
+I had never before known that the human leg did unscrew. I had always
+thought it was a fixture. But the man showed me how to undo them, and I
+found that they came off quite easily.
+
+The discovery did not surprise me any more than the original request
+that I should take them off had done. Nothing does surprise one in a
+dream.
+
+I dreamed once that I was going to be hanged; but I was not at all
+surprised about it. Nobody was. My relations came to see me off, I
+thought, and to wish me "Good-by!" They all came, and were all very
+pleasant; but they were not in the least astonished--not one of
+them. Everybody appeared to regard the coming tragedy as one of the
+most-naturally-to-be-expected things in the world.
+
+They bore the calamity, besides, with an amount of stoicism that would
+have done credit to a Spartan father. There was no fuss, no scene. On
+the contrary, an atmosphere of mild cheerfulness prevailed.
+
+Yet they were very kind. Somebody--an uncle, I think--left me a packet
+of sandwiches and a little something in a flask, in case, as he said, I
+should feel peckish on the scaffold.
+
+It is "those twin-jailers of the daring" thought, Knowledge and
+Experience, that teach us surprise. We are surprised and incredulous
+when, in novels and plays, we come across good men and women, because
+Knowledge and Experience have taught us how rare and problematical is
+the existence of such people. In waking life, my friends and relations
+would, of course, have been surprised at hearing that I had committed a
+murder, and was, in consequence, about to be hanged, because Knowledge
+and Experience would have taught them that, in a country where the
+law is powerful and the police alert, the Christian citizen is usually
+pretty successful in withstanding the voice of temptation, prompting him
+to commit crime of an illegal character.
+
+But into Dreamland, Knowledge and Experience do not enter. They stay
+without, together with the dull, dead clay of which they form a part;
+while the freed brain, released from their narrowing tutelage, steals
+softly past the ebon gate, to wanton at its own sweet will among the
+mazy paths that wind through the garden of Persephone.
+
+Nothing that it meets with in that eternal land astonishes it because,
+unfettered by the dense conviction of our waking mind, that nought
+outside the ken of our own vision can in this universe be, all things
+to it are possible and even probable. In dreams, we fly and wonder
+not--except that we never flew before. We go naked, yet are not ashamed,
+though we mildly wonder what the police are about that they do not stop
+us. We converse with our dead, and think it was unkind that they did
+not come back to us before. In dreams, there happens that which human
+language cannot tell. In dreams, we see "the light that never was on sea
+or land," we hear the sounds that never yet were heard by waking ears.
+
+It is only in sleep that true imagination ever stirs within us. Awake,
+we never imagine anything; we merely alter, vary, or transpose. We give
+another twist to the kaleidoscope of the things we see around us, and
+obtain another pattern; but not one of us has ever added one tiniest
+piece of new glass to the toy.
+
+A Dean Swift sees one race of people smaller, and another race of people
+larger than the race of people that live down his own streets. And he
+also sees a land where the horses take the place of men. A Bulwer Lytton
+lays the scene of one of his novels inside the earth instead of outside.
+A Rider Haggard introduces us to a lady whose age is a few years more
+than the average woman would care to confess to; and pictures crabs
+larger than the usual shilling or eighteen-penny size. The number of so
+called imaginative writers who visit the moon is legion, and for all
+the novelty that they find, when they get there, they might just as well
+have gone to Putney. Others are continually drawing for us visions of
+the world one hundred or one thousand years hence. There is always a
+depressing absence of human nature about the place; so much so, that one
+feels great consolation in the thought, while reading, that we ourselves
+shall be comfortably dead and buried before the picture can be realized.
+In these prophesied Utopias everybody is painfully good and clean and
+happy, and all the work is done by electricity.
+
+There is somewhat too much electricity, for my taste, in these worlds
+to come. One is reminded of those pictorial enamel-paint advertisements
+that one sees about so often now, in which all the members of an
+extensive household are represented as gathered together in one room,
+spreading enamel-paint over everything they can lay their hands upon.
+The old man is on a step-ladder, daubing the walls and ceiling with
+"cuckoo's-egg green," while the parlor-maid and the cook are on their
+knees, painting the floor with "sealing-wax red." The old lady is doing
+the picture frames in "terra cotta." The eldest daughter and her young
+man are making sly love in a corner over a pot of "high art yellow,"
+with which, so soon as they have finished wasting their time, they
+will, it is manifest, proceed to elevate the piano. Younger brothers
+and sisters are busy freshening up the chairs and tables with
+"strawberry-jam pink" and "jubilee magenta." Every blessed thing in that
+room is being coated with enamel paint, from the sofa to the fire-irons,
+from the sideboard to the eight-day clock. If there is any paint left
+over, it will be used up for the family Bible and the canary.
+
+It is claimed for this invention that a little child can make as much
+mess with it as can a grown-up person, and so all the children of
+the family are represented in the picture as hard at work, enameling
+whatever few articles of furniture and household use the grasping
+selfishness of their elders has spared to them. One is painting the
+toasting fork in a "skim-milk blue," while another is giving aesthetical
+value to the Dutch oven by means of a new shade of art green. The
+bootjack is being renovated in "old gold," and the baby is sitting on
+the floor, smothering its own cradle with "flush-upon-a-maiden's cheek
+peach color."
+
+One feels that the thing is being overdone. That family, before another
+month is gone, will be among the strongest opponents of enamel paint
+that the century has produced. Enamel paint will be the ruin of that
+once happy home. Enamel paint has a cold, glassy, cynical appearance.
+Its presence everywhere about the place will begin to irritate the old
+man in the course of a week or so. He will call it, "This damn'd sticky
+stuff!" and will tell the wife that he wonders she didn't paint herself
+and the children with it while she was about it. She will reply, in an
+exasperatingly quiet tone of voice, that she does like that. Perhaps he
+will say next, that she did not warn him against it, and tell him what
+an idiot he was making of himself, spoiling the whole house with his
+foolish fads. Each one will persist that it was the other one who first
+suggested the absurdity, and they will sit up in bed and quarrel about
+it every night for a month.
+
+The children having acquired a taste for smudging the concoction about,
+and there being nothing else left untouched in the house, will try to
+enamel the cat; and then there will be bloodshed, and broken windows,
+and spoiled infants, and sorrows and yells. The smell of the paint will
+make everybody ill; and the servants will give notice. Tradesmen's
+boys will lean up against places that are not dry and get their clothes
+enameled and claim compensation. And the baby will suck the paint off
+its cradle and have fits.
+
+But the person that will suffer most will, of course, be the eldest
+daughter's young man. The eldest daughter's young man is always
+unfortunate. He means well, and he tries hard. His great ambition is
+to make the family love him. But fate is ever against him, and he only
+succeeds in gaining their undisguised contempt. The fact of his being
+"gone" on their Emily is, of itself, naturally sufficient to stamp him
+as an imbecile in the eyes of Emily's brothers and sisters. The father
+finds him slow, and thinks the girl might have done better; while the
+best that his future mother-in-law (his sole supporter) can say for him
+is, that he seems steady.
+
+There is only one thing that prompts the family to tolerate him, and
+that is the reflection that he is going to take Emily away from them.
+
+On that understanding they put up with him.
+
+The eldest daughter's young man, in this particular case, will, you
+may depend upon it, choose that exact moment when the baby's life is
+hovering in the balance, and the cook is waiting for her wages with
+her box in the hall, and a coal-heaver is at the front door with a
+policeman, making a row about the damage to his trousers, to come in,
+smiling, with a specimen pot of some new high art, squashed-tomato-shade
+enamel paint, and suggest that they should try it on the old man's pipe.
+
+Then Emily will go off into hysterics, and Emily's male progenitor will
+firmly but quietly lead that ill-starred yet true-hearted young man to
+the public side of the garden-gate; and the engagement will be "off."
+
+Too much of anything is a mistake, as the man said when his wife
+presented him with four new healthy children in one day. We should
+practice moderation in all matters. A little enamel paint would have
+been good. They might have enameled the house inside and out, and have
+left the furniture alone. Or they might have colored the furniture, and
+let the house be. But an entirely and completely enameled home--a
+home, such as enamel-paint manufacturers love to picture on their
+advertisements, over which the yearning eye wanders in vain, seeking one
+single square inch of un-enameled matter--is, I am convinced, a mistake.
+It may be a home that, as the testimonials assure us, will easily wash.
+It may be an "artistic" home; but the average man is not yet educated up
+to the appreciation of it. The average man does not care for high art.
+At a certain point, the average man gets sick of high art.
+
+So, in these coming Utopias, in which out unhappy grandchildren will
+have to drag out their colorless existence, there will be too much
+electricity. They will grow to loathe electricity.
+
+Electricity is going to light them, warm them, carry them, doctor them,
+cook for them, execute them, if necessary. They are going to be weaned
+on electricity, rocked in their cradles by electricity, slapped by
+electricity, ruled and regulated and guided by electricity, buried by
+electricity. I may be wrong, but I rather think they are going to be
+hatched by electricity.
+
+In the new world of our progressionist teachers, it is electricity that
+is the real motive-power. The men and women are only marionettes--worked
+by electricity.
+
+But it was not to speak of the electricity in them, but of the
+originality in them, that I referred to these works of fiction. There
+is no originality in them whatever. Human thought is incapable of
+originality. No man ever yet imagined a new thing--only some variation
+or extension of an old thing.
+
+The sailor, when he was asked what he would do with a fortune, promptly
+replied:
+
+"Buy all the rum and 'baccy there is in the world."
+
+"And what after that?" they asked him.
+
+"Eh?"
+
+"What would you buy after that--after you had bought up all the rum and
+tobacco there was in the world--what would you buy then?"
+
+"After that? Oh! 'um!" (a long pause). "Oh!" (with inspiration) "why,
+more 'baccy!"
+
+Rum and tobacco he knew something of, and could therefore imagine about.
+He did not know any other luxuries, therefore he could not conceive of
+any others.
+
+So if you ask one of these Utopian-dreaming gentry what, after they had
+secured for their world all the electricity there was in the Universe,
+and after every mortal thing in their ideal Paradise, was done and said
+and thought by electricity, they could imagine as further necessary to
+human happiness, they would probably muse for awhile, and then reply,
+"More electricity."
+
+They know electricity. They have seen the electric light, and heard of
+electric boats and omnibuses. They have possibly had an electric shock
+at a railway station for a penny.
+
+Therefore, knowing that electricity does three things, they can go on
+and "imagine" electricity doing three hundred things, and the very great
+ones among them can imagine it doing three thousand things; but for
+them, or anybody else, to imagine a new force, totally unconnected
+with and different from anything yet known in nature, would be utterly
+impossible.
+
+Human thought is not a firework, ever shooting off fresh forms and
+shapes as it burns; it is a tree, growing very slowly--you can watch it
+long and see no movement--very silently, unnoticed. It was planted in
+the world many thousand years ago, a tiny, sickly plant. And men guarded
+it and tended it, and gave up life and fame to aid its growth. In
+the hot days of their youth, they came to the gate of the garden and
+knocked, begging to be let in, and to be counted among the gardeners.
+And their young companions without called to them to come back, and play
+the man with bow and spear, and win sweet smiles from rosy lips, and
+take their part amid the feast, and dance, not stoop with wrinkled
+brows, at weaklings' work. And the passers by mocked them and called
+shame, and others cried out to stone them. And still they stayed there
+laboring, that the tree might grow a little, and they died and were
+forgotten.
+
+And the tree grew fair and strong. The storms of ignorance passed over
+it, and harmed it not. The fierce fires of superstition soared around
+it; but men leaped into the flames and beat them back, perishing, and
+the tree grew. With the sweat of their brow have men nourished its green
+leaves. Their tears have moistened the earth about it. With their blood
+they have watered its roots.
+
+The seasons have come and passed, and the tree has grown and flourished.
+And its branches have spread far and high, and ever fresh shoots are
+bursting forth, and ever new leaves unfolding to the light. But they
+are all part of the one tree--the tree that was planted on the first
+birthday of the human race. The stem that bears them springs from the
+gnarled old trunk that was green and soft when white-haired Time was a
+little child; the sap that feeds them is drawn up through the roots that
+twine and twist about the bones of the ages that are dead.
+
+The human mind can no more produce an original thought than a tree can
+bear an original fruit. As well might one cry for an original note in
+music as expect an original idea from a human brain.
+
+One wishes our friends, the critics, would grasp this simple truth, and
+leave off clamoring for the impossible, and being shocked because they
+do not get it. When a new book is written, the high-class critic opens
+it with feelings of faint hope, tempered by strong conviction of coming
+disappointment. As he pores over the pages, his brow darkens with
+virtuous indignation, and his lip curls with the Godlike contempt that
+the exceptionally great critic ever feels for everybody in this world,
+who is not yet dead. Buoyed up by a touching, but totally fallacious,
+belief that he is performing a public duty, and that the rest of the
+community is waiting in breathless suspense to learn his opinion of the
+work in question, before forming any judgment concerning it themselves,
+he, nevertheless, wearily struggles through about a third of it. Then
+his long-suffering soul revolts, and he flings it aside with a cry of
+despair.
+
+"Why, there is no originality whatever in this," he says. "This book is
+taken bodily from the Old Testament. It is the story of Adam and Eve all
+over again. The hero is a mere man! with two arms, two legs, and a head
+(so called). Why, it is only Moses's Adam under another name! And the
+heroine is nothing but a woman! and she is described as beautiful, and
+as having long hair. The author may call her 'Angelina,' or any other
+name he chooses; but he has evidently, whether he acknowledges it
+or not, copied her direct from Eve. The characters are barefaced
+plagiarisms from the book of Genesis! Oh! to find an author with
+originality!"
+
+One spring I went a walking tour in the country. It was a glorious
+spring. Not the sort of spring they give us in these miserable times,
+under this shameless government--a mixture of east wind, blizzard, snow,
+rain, slush, fog, frost, hail, sleet and thunder-storms--but a sunny,
+blue-sky'd, joyous spring, such as we used to have regularly every year
+when I was a young man, and things were different.
+
+It was an exceptionally beautiful spring, even for those golden days;
+and as I wandered through the waking land, and saw the dawning of the
+coming green, and watched the blush upon the hawthorn hedge, deepening
+each day beneath the kisses of the sun, and looked up at the proud old
+mother trees, dandling their myriad baby buds upon their strong fond
+arms, holding them high for the soft west wind to caress as he passed
+laughing by, and marked the primrose yellow creep across the carpet of
+the woods, and saw the new flush of the field and saw the new light on
+the hills, and heard the new-found gladness of the birds, and heard
+from copse and farm and meadow the timid callings of the little new-born
+things, wondering to find themselves alive, and smelt the freshness of
+the earth, and felt the promise in the air, and felt a strong hand in
+the wind, my spirit rose within me. Spring had come to me also, and
+stirred me with a strange new life, with a strange new hope I, too,
+was part of nature, and it was spring! Tender leaves and blossoms were
+unfolding from my heart. Bright flowers of love and gratitude were
+opening round its roots. I felt new strength in all my limbs. New blood
+was pulsing through my veins. Nobler thoughts and nobler longings were
+throbbing through my brain.
+
+As I walked, Nature came and talked beside me, and showed me the world
+and myself, and the ways of God seemed clearer.
+
+It seemed to me a pity that all the beautiful and precious thoughts and
+ideas that were crowding in upon me should be lost to my fellow-men, and
+so I pitched my tent at a little cottage, and set to work to write them
+down then and there as they came to me.
+
+"It has been complained of me," I said to myself, "that I do not write
+literary and high class work--at least, not work that is exceptionally
+literary and high-class. This reproach shall be removed. I will write
+an article that shall be a classic. I have worked for the ordinary,
+every-day reader. It is right that I should do something now to improve
+the literature of my beloved country."
+
+And I wrote a grand essay--though I say it who should not, though I
+don't see why I shouldn't--all about spring, and the way it made you
+feel, and what it made you think. It was simply crowded with elevated
+thoughts and high-class ideas and cultured wit, was that essay. There
+was only one fault about that essay: it was too brilliant. I wanted
+commonplace relief. It would have exhausted the average reader; so much
+cleverness would have wearied him.
+
+I wish I could remember some of the beautiful things in that essay, and
+here set them down; because then you would be able to see what they
+were like for yourselves, and that would be so much more simpler than
+my explaining to you how beautiful they were. Unfortunately, however, I
+cannot now call to mind any of them.
+
+I was very proud of this essay, and when I got back to town I called on
+a very superior friend of mine, a critic, and read it to him. I do not
+care for him to see any of my usual work, because he really is a very
+superior person indeed, and the perusal of it appears to give him pains
+inside. But this article, I thought, would do him good.
+
+"What do you think of it?" I asked, when I had finished.
+
+"Splendid," he replied, "excellently arranged. I never knew you were
+so well acquainted with the works of the old writers. Why, there is
+scarcely a classic of any note that you have not quoted from. But
+where--where," he added, musing, "did you get that last idea but two
+from? It's the only one I don't seem to remember. It isn't a bit of your
+own, is it?"
+
+He said that, if so, he should advise me to leave it out. Not that it
+was altogether bad, but that the interpolation of a modern thought among
+so unique a collection of passages from the ancients seemed to spoil the
+scheme.
+
+And he enumerated the various dead-and-buried gentlemen from whom he
+appeared to think I had collated my article.
+
+"But," I replied, when I had recovered my astonishment sufficiently to
+speak, "it isn't a collection at all. It is all original. I wrote the
+thoughts down as they came to me. I have never read any of these people
+you mention, except Shakespeare."
+
+Of course Shakespeare was bound to be among them. I am getting to
+dislike that man so. He is always being held up before us young authors
+as a model, and I do hate models. There was a model boy at our school,
+I remember, Henry Summers; and it was just the same there. It was
+continually, "Look at Henry Summers! he doesn't put the preposition
+before the verb, and spell business b-i-z!" or, "Why can't you write
+like Henry Summers? He doesn't get the ink all over the copy-book and
+half-way up his back!" We got tired of this everlasting "Look at Henry
+Summers!" after a while, and so, one afternoon, on the way home, a few
+of us lured Henry Summers up a dark court; and when he came out again he
+was not worth looking at.
+
+Now it is perpetually, "Look at Shakespeare!" "Why don't you write like
+Shakespeare?" "Shakespeare never made that joke. Why don't you joke like
+Shakespeare?"
+
+If you are in the play-writing line it is still worse for you. "Why
+don't you write plays like Shakespeare's?" they indignantly say.
+"Shakespeare never made his comic man a penny steamboat captain."
+"Shakespeare never made his hero address the girl as 'ducky.' Why don't
+you copy Shakespeare?" If you do try to copy Shakespeare, they tell you
+that you must be a fool to attempt to imitate Shakespeare.
+
+Oh, shouldn't I like to get Shakespeare up our street, and punch him!
+
+"I cannot help that," replied my critical friend--to return to our
+previous question--"the germ of every thought and idea you have got
+in that article can be traced back to the writers I have named. If
+you doubt it, I will get down the books, and show you the passages for
+yourself."
+
+But I declined the offer. I said I would take his word for it, and would
+rather not see the passages referred to. I felt indignant. "If," as
+I said, "these men--these Platos and Socrateses and Ciceros and
+Sophocleses and Aristophaneses and Aristotles and the rest of them had
+been taking advantage of my absence to go about the world spoiling my
+business for me, I would rather not hear any more about them."
+
+And I put on my hat and came out, and I have never tried to write
+anything original since.
+
+I dreamed a dream once. (It is the sort of thing a man would dream.
+You cannot very well dream anything else, I know. But the phrase sounds
+poetical and biblical, and so I use it.) I dreamed that I was in a
+strange country--indeed, one might say an extraordinary country. It was
+ruled entirely by critics.
+
+The people in this strange land had a very high opinion of
+critics--nearly as high an opinion of critics as the critics themselves
+had, but not, of course, quite--that not being practicable--and they had
+agreed to be guided in all things by the critics. I stayed some years in
+that land. But it was not a cheerful place to live in, so I dreamed.
+
+There were authors in this country, at first, and they wrote books. But
+the critics could find nothing original in the books whatever, and said
+it was a pity that men, who might be usefully employed hoeing potatoes,
+should waste their time and the time of the critics, which was of still
+more importance, in stringing together a collection of platitudes,
+familiar to every school-boy, and dishing up old plots and stories that
+had already been cooked and recooked for the public until everybody had
+been surfeited with them.
+
+And the writers read what the critics said and sighed, and gave up
+writing books, and went off and hoed potatoes; as advised. They had
+had no experience in hoeing potatoes, and they hoed very badly; and
+the people whose potatoes they hoed strongly recommended them to leave
+hoeing potatoes, and to go back and write books. But you can't do what
+everybody advises.
+
+There were artists also in this strange world, at first, and they
+painted pictures, which the critics came and looked at through
+eyeglasses.
+
+"Nothing whatever original in them," said the critics; "same old colors,
+same old perspective and form, same old sunset, same old sea and land,
+and sky and figures. Why do these poor men waste their time, painting
+pictures, when they might be so much more satisfactorily employed on
+ladders painting houses?"
+
+Nothing, by the by, you may have noticed, troubles your critic more than
+the idea that the artist is wasting his time. It is the waste of time
+that vexes the critic; he has such an exalted idea of the value of other
+people's time. "Dear, dear me!" he says to himself, "why, in the time
+the man must have taken to paint this picture or to write this book,
+he might have blacked fifteen thousand pairs of boots, or have carried
+fifteen thousand hods of mortar up a ladder. This is how the time of the
+world is lost!"
+
+It never occurs to him that, but for that picture or book, the artist
+would, in all probability, have been mouching about with a pipe in his
+mouth, getting into trouble.
+
+It reminds me of the way people used to talk to me when I was a boy.
+I would be sitting, as good as gold, reading "The Pirate's Lair," when
+some cultured relative would look over my shoulder and say: "Bah! what
+are you wasting your time with rubbish for? Why don't you go and do
+something useful?" and would take the book away from me. Upon which I
+would get up, and go out to "do something useful;" and would come home
+an hour afterward, looking like a bit out of a battle picture, having
+tumbled through the roof of Farmer Bate's greenhouse and killed a
+cactus, though totally unable to explain how I came to be on the roof of
+Farmer Bate's greenhouse. They had much better have left me alone, lost
+in "The Pirate's Lair!"
+
+The artists in this land of which I dreamed left off painting pictures,
+after hearing what the critics said, and purchased ladders, and went off
+and painted houses.
+
+Because, you see, this country of which I dreamed was not one of those
+vulgar, ordinary countries, such as exist in the waking world, where
+people let the critics talk as much as ever they like, and nobody pays
+the slightest attention to what they say. Here, in this strange land,
+the critics were taken seriously, and their advice followed.
+
+As for the poets and sculptors, they were very soon shut up. The idea of
+any educated person wanting to read modern poetry when he could obtain
+Homer, or caring to look at any other statue while there was still some
+of the Venus de Medicis left, was too absurd. Poets and sculptors were
+only wasting their time.
+
+What new occupation they were recommended to adopt, I forget. Some
+calling they knew nothing whatever about, and that they were totally
+unfitted for, of course.
+
+The musicians tried their art for a little while, but they, too, were
+of no use. "Merely a repetition of the same notes in different
+combinations," said the critics. "Why will people waste their time
+writing unoriginal music, when they might be sweeping crossings?"
+
+One man had written a play. I asked what the critics had said about him.
+They showed me his tomb.
+
+Then, there being no more artists or _litterateurs_ or dramatists or
+musicians left for their beloved critics to criticise, the general
+public of this enlightened land said to themselves, "Why should not our
+critics come and criticise us? Criticism is useful to a man. Have we
+not often been told so? Look how useful it has been to the artists and
+writers--saved the poor fellows from wasting their time? Why shouldn't
+we have some of its benefits?"
+
+They suggested the idea to the critics, and the critics thought it an
+excellent one, and said they would undertake the job with pleasure. One
+must say for the critics that they never shirk work. They will sit and
+criticise for eighteen hours a day, if necessary, or even, if quite
+unnecessary, for the matter of that. You can't give them too much to
+criticise. They will criticise everything and everybody in this world.
+They will criticise everything in the next world, too, when they get
+there. I expect poor old Pluto has a lively time with them all, as it
+is.
+
+So, when a man built a house, or a farm-yard hen laid an egg, the
+critics were asked in to comment on it. They found that none of the
+houses were original. On every floor were passages that seemed mere
+copies from passages in other houses. They were all built on the same
+hackneyed plan; cellars underneath, ground floor level with the street,
+attic at the top. No originality anywhere!
+
+So, likewise with the eggs. Every egg suggested reminiscences of other
+eggs.
+
+It was heartrending work.
+
+The critics criticised all things. When a young couple fell in love,
+they each, before thinking of marriage, called upon the critics for a
+criticism of the other one.
+
+Needless to say that, in the result, no marriage ever came of it.
+
+"My dear young lady," the critics would say, after the inspection had
+taken place, "I can discover nothing new whatever about the young man.
+You would simply be wasting your time in marrying him."
+
+Or, to the young man, it would be:
+
+"Oh, dear, no! Nothing attractive about the girl at all. Who on
+earth gave you that notion? Simply a lovely face and figure, angelic
+disposition, beautiful mind, stanch heart, noble character. Why, there
+must have been nearly a dozen such girls born into the world since its
+creation. You would be only wasting your time loving her."
+
+They criticised the birds for their hackneyed style of singing, and the
+flowers for their hackneyed scents and colors. They complained of the
+weather that it lacked originality--(true, they had not lived out an
+English spring)--and found fault with the Sun because of the sameness of
+his methods.
+
+They criticised the babies. When a fresh infant was published in a
+house, the critics would call in a body to pass their judgment upon it,
+and the young mother would bring it down for them to sample.
+
+"Did you ever see a child anything like that in this world before?" she
+would say, holding it out to them. "Isn't it a wonderful baby? _You_
+never saw a child with legs like that, I know. Nurse says he's the most
+extraordinary baby she ever attended. Bless him!"
+
+But the critics did not think anything of it.
+
+"Tut, tut," they would reply, "there is nothing extraordinary about
+that child--no originality whatever. Why, it's exactly like every other
+baby--bald head, red face, big mouth, and stumpy nose. Why, that's only
+a weak imitation of the baby next door. It's a plagiarism, that's what
+that child is. You've been wasting your time, madam. If you can't do
+anything more original than that, we should advise you to give up the
+business altogether."
+
+That was the end of criticism in that strange land.
+
+"Oh! look here, we've had enough of you and your originality," said the
+people to the critics, after that. "Why, _you_ are not original, when
+one comes to think of it, and your criticisms are not original. You've
+all of you been saying exactly the same thing ever since the time of
+Solomon. We are going to drown you and have a little peace."
+
+"What, drown a critic!" cried the critics, "never heard of such a
+monstrous proceeding in our lives!"
+
+"No, we flatter ourselves it is an original idea," replied the public,
+brutally. "You ought to be charmed with it. Out you come!"
+
+So they took the critics out and drowned them, and then passed a short
+act, making criticism a capital offense.
+
+After that, the art and literature of the country followed,
+somewhat, the methods of the quaint and curious school, but the land,
+notwithstanding, was a much more cheerful place to live in, I dreamed.
+
+But I never finished telling you about the dream in which I thought I
+left my legs behind me when I went into a certain theater.
+
+I dreamed that the ticket the man gave me for my legs was No. 19, and I
+was worried all through the performance for fear No. 61 should get hold
+of them, and leave me his instead. Mine are rather a fine pair of legs,
+and I am, I confess, a little proud of them--at all events, I prefer
+them to anybody else's. Besides, number sixty-one's might be a skinny
+pair, and not fit me.
+
+It quite spoiled my evening, fretting about this.
+
+Another extraordinary dream I had was one in which I dreamed that I
+was engaged to be married to my Aunt Jane. That was not, however, the
+extraordinary part of it; I have often known people to dream things like
+that. I knew a man who once dreamed that he was actually married to his
+own mother-in-law! He told me that never in his life had he loved the
+alarm clock with more deep and grateful tenderness than he did that
+morning. The dream almost reconciled him to being married to his real
+wife. They lived quite happily together for a few days, after that
+dream.
+
+No; the extraordinary part of my dream was, that I knew it was a dream.
+"What on earth will uncle say to this engagement?" I thought to myself,
+in my dream. "There's bound to be a row about it. We shall have a deal
+of trouble with uncle, I feel sure." And this thought quite troubled me
+until the sweet reflection came: "Ah! well, it's only a dream."
+
+And I made up my mind that I would wake up as soon as uncle found out
+about the engagement, and leave him and Aunt Jane to fight the matter
+out between themselves.
+
+It is a very great comfort, when the dream grows troubled and alarming,
+to feel that it is only a dream, and to know that we shall awake soon
+and be none the worse for it. We can dream out the foolish perplexity
+with a smile then.
+
+Sometimes the dream of life grows strangely troubled and perplexing, and
+then he who meets dismay the bravest is he who feels that the fretful
+play is but a dream--a brief, uneasy dream of three score years and ten,
+or thereabouts, from which, in a little while, he will awake--at least,
+he dreams so.
+
+How dull, how impossible life would be without dreams--waking dreams, I
+mean--the dreams that we call "castles in the air," built by the kindly
+hands of Hope! Were it not for the mirage of the oasis, drawing his
+footsteps ever onward, the weary traveler would lie down in the desert
+sand and die. It is the mirage of distant success, of happiness that,
+like the bunch of carrots fastened an inch beyond the donkey's nose,
+seems always just within our reach, if only we will gallop fast enough,
+that makes us run so eagerly along the road of Life.
+
+Providence, like a father with a tired child, lures us ever along the
+way with tales and promises, until, at the frowning gate that ends the
+road, we shrink back, frightened. Then, promises still more sweet he
+stoops and whispers in our ear, and timid yet partly reassured, and
+trying to hide our fears, we gather up all that is left of our little
+stock of hope and, trusting yet half afraid, push out our groping feet
+into the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Dreams, by Jerome K. Jerome
+
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