A DREAM REALLY DREAMED.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] Sm,—I venture to send you the account of a curious dream, really dreamed. It was in a vast concert-hall, vast as those halls can be whose place is not in the world of gravitation, but in the limitless and lawless regions of dreams. Its boundaries and ex- tent I did not see, perhaps because I did not look to see them, all my senses being, as it were, spell-bound, and not under my own control, as the senses are not in dreams. But I knew, half un- consciously, that the hall was crowded,—densely, mightily, over- poweringly peopled with wondering faces ; I knew it with that same sort of superfluous power of sense, when fixed on any one engrossing object, that the eye has to take in the surroundings of any one sight, however intently fixed the attention may be on that one. And all my attention was absorbed by one object, a man ; and as I looked, I knew, not from his likeness to any face I had before known, but from that unhesitating, untaught know- ledge that one only has in dreams, that this man was Beethoven. It was Beethoven ; and for the time, I felt that my only life was that of a disciple, that my only lord on earth was Beethoven, that my life would have half attained its ideal end of perfection could I but speak to, and be answered by, Beethoven.
He had been playing to us. What? In my dream this was no question. What he had been playing was not to me then a fixed and certain set of melody, whose memory yet haunted the brain, as the notes of the tense strings are given back by each harmonious fibre of the sounding-board. But he had been playing, it seemed, a music subtler than that that reaches the ears, the music that had so worked on my heart and soul, and as I felt, to the same degree on the hearts and souls of all that vast multitude, that we were all his bowed and will-less subjects, bound by the power of an infinite love and gratitude, of an infinite adoration for him, who had so fashioned our moods to harmony with his creations.
And now it was over, not the enchantment, but the enchant- ing, and he was going. That was all I knew ; I was losing him ; he was going away from me. And as the rest rose, and he passed quietly down the hushed and enchanted rows of faces, I pushed forward from my place in the upper tiers, I leaped, I flew, I moved, as one can move only in dreams, down from my place to the floor where he was passing. Did I call him ? I think so, but I know not what I said, nor how I dared to claim his attention. But he gave it. As he moved along the line, bowing to the silent worship of the multitude, he turned to me—he turned, and be spoke to me, he smiled on me.
How can I remember his words ? Even his smile lives only in a feeling of joy when I try to remember it, and his words, I know no more of them than of the music that had enthralled me. I can feel them, as, perhaps, the needle feels the far-off loadstone, but it is a feeling transcending all limits of intelligible speech. Only I felt then that I knew happiness, I cared not to ask what it was, but I had it ; I was happy, as only birds and flowers upon earth are happy, happy, even though he was now gone, and my dream
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