Volume 3 — From the Month. OF DREAMERS AND WORKERS.

Nearly all men are born either dreamers or workers; not perhaps only the one or only the other, but one of these two points is the centre of their oscillation. Like a pendulum, they can move only so far toward their opposite, some more, some less; but, like the pendulum, they invariably return to their centre. Do we not all know some man with abstracted eye, high, retreating forehead, rather refined and often slightly attenuated frame and features, and placidly resolute in demeanor, who has held the same position in the opinion of his fellow-men, or, it may be, has occupied the same bench on the Sunday quietly for twenty years or more? He is a specimen of the extreme type of dreamers--venerative, mystical, and benevolent; but to all appearance practically useless, helpless, and inert. Viewed physiologically, these men are chiefly fair-haired and of the nervous lymphatic temperament; sometimes this is combined with the bilious temperament, and in such cases (to some of which we shall have more particularly to allude) they become remarkable characters. It has been said that the religion natural to dreamers is a mild form of Buddhism; but this is probably because most Buddhists are dreamers and mystics in the highest degree. One thing is certain, dreamers are in politics either conservative or utopian, and in religion are little disposed either to reject what they have been taught or to influence others to do so. If they have been educated as Catholics, mild and devout Catholics they live and die; if as Protestants, they are unusually gentle and tolerant, and oppose alike reforms that would be innovations, and innovations that would be reforms. A man who lives by faith, thus resting on the invisible, has at times an apparent resemblance to a dreamer. It is not our object in this paper to point out the distinction, wide as it indeed is. Dreamers are the subject of wonderful anecdotes about their absence of mind: it is related of them that they forget their meals, start on a journey without their hats, walk with their eyes wide open over precipices, ride on their walking-sticks, and are surprised when toll is not demanded of them for their charger. There is no occasion to believe all these preposterous tales, but no doubt there are many very curious and perfectly well-authenticated cases of abstraction of mind so entire as to cause catastrophes both painful and ludicrous. To these men their real life is their dream, their working-day is only their interruption and annoyance. They are in heart mystics, and only need a certain activity of brain and speech to proclaim themselves as such. They possess great store of happiness within themselves, owing to their peculiarity of caring less than others for those {419} substantial and golden rewards which cause the unrest of the world. They love the unseen and mysterious better than the visible and sensuous, and would in general barter any amount of distinct and limited reality for indefinite prospects; so that the single streak of wan and dying light, which sleeps on the edge of the dark horizon, is more precious to them, as suggesting Infinity, than any view which could be offered of noble cities or fertile plains. Almost all things are to them symbolical. No action is in their thought simply what it seems to be; but there is about every deed performed, circumstance encountered, or season passed, a secret sense of omen or prescience, of brightness or of shadow. Light becomes a sentiment calling up images of corresponding radiance and beauty, but especially perhaps that early morning light which seems, while yet sleeping, to float in on the world, as opposed to the fading colors of departing day. Darkness, again, sometimes lends a sense of peril; but more often is peopled by spirits--a realm of shadows and shadowy delights, all called into being, moved, governed, and colored by the dreamer in his dream. The many gradations between brightness and gloom have each their especial fascination for dreamers, who are in this respect as discriminative and fanciful as the Jews, who, in olden times, distinguished two kinds of twilight: the doves' twilight, or crepusculum of the day, and ravens' twilight, or the crepusculum of the night. In truth, their tendency is to behold all actual things as illusions, and to consider the spiritual and unseen world as the only true one: thus, in the cloudy mantle of constant reverie they hide all the ills and infirmities of humanity, and slumber in the "golden sleep of halcyon quiet apart from the everlasting storms of life." For when a man can sit calmly on an uncomfortable pole, like the Indian mystic, and say "I am the Universe, and the Universe is me," he has attained to the greatest conceivable height and perfection of dream-life. From the age of Plato to our own times dreamers have been born perpetually among the sons of men. St. John is claimed by them as being the most profound and loving mystic ever given to the world. There have been countless others; we need not add a list of names; those of Swedenborg, Boehmen, and Irving, will occur to the memory as representing one class of dreamers. These leaders are, as one might predict, regarded with the extreme veneration characteristic of the order. Indeed, of some it may be chronicled, as it was of the ancient deities, Buddha, etc., "Once a man, now a God!" In general, dreamers have tenanted our madhouses rather than filled our prisons; if, however, they do commit crimes, they are serious ones. Religious and political assassinations have been commonly the fruits of mad dreamers. In the ranks have been numbered many holy men, and as a rule they have influenced mankind rather by the example of their life and the teaching of their pen than by busy practical action. Only certain professions and occupations are suitable for dreamers. In the olden times they were poets, shepherds, prophets, soothsayers, diviners, alchemists, rhabdomantists. [Footnote 68] In these days they are by rights clergymen, authors, poets, philanthropists, and, philosophers. If they enter trade they commonly end in the Gazette; and placed in positions of authority, where severity of discipline has to be exercised, they are uniformly unsuccessful; in situations of trust, they are invariably single-hearted and faithful, but in every place and at all times they are the most frequent victims of fraudulent representations and impudent imposture. A certain number of the priesthood among all nations, gentle, speculative, and saintly men, {420} have been of this order; weaving their work and their dreams together into a fair fabric of many colors, which if it seems to ordinary eyes shadowy and unsubstantial as the mist, is yet, like the air, elastic, solid, and capable of resisting a very heavy pressure. Idealists are, however, rarely formidable in action unless the bilious is largely transfused in their temperament. They then become missionaries and martyrs; patriots, revolutionists, fanatics; they head revolutions, plan massacres, overthrow monarchies, and shatter creeds. Peter the Hermit, John of Leyden, are examples of this order.

The workers born into the world are widely different in temperament and disposition, and antagonistic in principles, sentiment, and action. They consist both of those who work with their hands alone, and of those who work up into a practical form the reveries and speculative schemes of the dreamers. Physiologically viewed, the extreme type of the worker exhibits most frequently the bullet-shaped head, square jaw, muscular, thick neck, large chest development, and elemental hand, commonly also the sanguine, sanguine-nervous, or sanguine-bilious temperament, They have an irresistible propensity to do, to acquire, to conquer or invade; they are fertile in resource, opulent in stratagem, full of quarrel, and essentially aggressive. A contest is to them an occasion of inexplicable delight; and naturally dedicated to action, they are as unable to conceive of disappointment as the other class are to resist that which is or seems to be their destiny. They become engineers, manufacturers, merchants, inventors, mighty hunters, soldiers, sailors, pioneers, emigrants, rough-riders, pugilists, smugglers, aeronauts, acrobats, and celebrated performers in travelling circuses and menageries, lion-tamers, snake-charmers, rat-catchers, burglars, thieves, and highwaymen. They are gamekeepers, and devote their lives to circumvent and strive in mortal strife with poachers; or they are poachers, and spend their days and nights in plotting against and harassing and threatening the gamekeepers. As clergymen they are most hard-working, zealous and excellent, but also the most quarrelsome and intolerant. When they come on to the earth as younger members of the aristocracy, who may neither dig, trade, nor fight in the ring, and have not the wherewithal to keep racehorses and hunters, they enter the army or navy, and there in times of peace, when no legitimate outlet presents itself for the expenditure of these energies, they form a very insubordinate and turbulent item of the population. The lower classes of the workers who cannot get work, then crusade against the upper classes, who are in the same predicament; and we see the result in the perpetual placarding in some journals and newspapers of "deplorable blackguardism in high life." Three parts out of five, or even a larger proportion, of the Anglo-Saxon population are composed of workers as opposed to dreamers; and the seething unquiet mass of humanity known and described by some writers as our "dangerous classes" is almost entirely recruited from their ranks. Many centuries ago they were Vikings, pirates, and border robbers; they scoured the seas, made raids, reived the cattle, and levied black-mail; anon they were crusaders, for though Peter the Hermit was a dreamer, his followers were workers; subsequently they destroyed monasteries; and in these days they have made railroads and abolished the corn-laws. But, nevertheless, the men who first built churches, and dwelt in monasteries, and discovered the mysterious agency by which the engine was to do its work, were not workers, but dreamers, and were reviled in their day as visionaries and enthusiasts. Where a dreamer would have been an alchemist, a modern worker finds his mission to be a gold-digger; where one is a shepherd, the other will be a hunter or trapper:--the first works that he may retire to dream. {421} the second dreams how he shall arise and work.

The dreamers among men select as mates the workers among women, or are (perhaps more often) selected by them, and vice versa. It is the old eternal law of nature--the duality pervading all things, types, and classes, man and woman, positive and negative, matter and spirit, reason and faith; and, in spite of the gentle scorn which dreamers cherish for workers, and the undisguised contempt with which workers regard dreamers, so they will continue to exist side by side until the day comes when the worker can work no more, and the dreamer shall have dreamed for the last time.