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+*** Project Gutenberg etext of Dreams, by Jerome K. Jerome ***
+
+
+Scanned and proofed by Ron Burkey (rburkey@heads-up.com) and Amy
+Thomte, from a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow", 
+published by A. L. Burt.
+
+Notes on the editing of this text:
+
+1.  Italicized phrases are delimited by the underline character ("_").
+2.  Hyphens have been left in the text only where it was the clear
+intention of the author.  For example, throughout the text, "tonight"
+and "tomorrow" appear as "to-night" and "to-morrow".  This is
+intentional, and is not simply a legacy of words having been broken
+across lines in the printed text.
+3.  The pound (currency) symbol has been replaced by the word
+"pounds".
+
+
+
+
+DREAMS.
+
+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 Project Gutenberg etext of Dreams, by Jerome K. Jerome.
+
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