Illusions

"Remember that man's life lies all within this present, as 'twere
but a hair's breadth of time, as for the rest, the past is gone,
the future yet unseen." Marcus Aurclius

For surely there is a pleasure in our illusions, so long as we do not know them to be illusions. So long, indeed, as we are ignorant of that, they are not illusions, but as blessed verities as any of the fixed truths of the universe. To believe a person great and good is to endow him with all the great and good qualities we revere, and if by the added exaltation which we might derive from him if he really exerted those qualities upon us, it does not actually matter, for, on the contrary, by insisting upon it that he shall have the noble characteristics, they have to be created somewhere, and if only in our imagination, then at least that far we have been exalted by being their creators ourselves. It is our own natures that have been the matrices of the statue we have reared to him, and he is none the worse and we are somewhat the better.

The illusion, too, that surrounds the dead with a halo is certainly a blessed one, all that was ignoble or unlovely in them sinking out of sight and memory and only the beautiful remaining, till, if they are not angels in the unseen sphere they visit, so much of them as remains in our memory is altogether angelic. And if we may have blessed illusions concerning those that are gone away from us, how equally blessed are those concerning the affairs that might have come to us but never do ! The songs we never sang are far the sweetest; the wife who was never wed, the hero for whom the maiden waits, the little children never born and never to be born what perfectness enwrap them all! Elia's Dream Children were lovelier and sweeter, and dearer, too, than any children that Charles Lamb ever met. It is a thing to be thankful for when any experience of our earlier years is left to us untouched by the tarnishing fingers of time; that we can still visit the house that used to seem to us in our childhood the House Beautiful, and find there the fair chamber looking to the east ; that the young girl who hardly needed wings for her translation seems as ethereal still ; that the child who went early and never grew up to mundane coarseness is still to us a cherub out of heaven, who folded his wings awhile ere he fled back to heaven again.

And perhaps it is another thing to be quite as thankful for, the illusions we all have more or less about ourselves. As we never fairly see ourselves in the mirror, the right side there becoming the left, so that we get none but a false and distorted vision of ourselves, what virtues, what triumphs of truth, kindness and generosity do we not seem in that inner vision to possess! For would we not make such and such great gifts, and perform such and such magnanimous acts, if things were only a little different with us? If we had the bank account of that billionaire, would we not be paying off the national debt? As it is, we have hardly enough for ourselves. And what Ithuriels we are, too, in that inner vision we who scorn all untruth except that which may be absolutely necessary to save ourselves from other people's ill opinion! and what angels of mercy are we in that picture we delight to look at we who roll the last scandal under our tongue for a choice morsel, and are glad when what we have is better than what our neighbor has! Well, if we are to sit in sackcloth and ashes for our sins, our bad traits, hereditary or otherwise, our good traits uncultivated, we shall have a sad time of it; and so blessed be these, with all the other of our illusions that hinder us ever from seeing a grain of sawdust in any doll we have. For if a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things, how often the reverse is true, and how we find ourselves forced to smile at the very affairs that seemed unbearable in the bearing, but which have proved to be, if not angels in disguise, yet things that took a glory on their flying wings. Last year how bitter and detestable was that experience! This year the conditions are changed; the situation is otherwise; it seems to have been a very trifle about which to make such a fuss; we laugh at ourselves and at that trouble of the past.

The fact is that a person must be of a very sympathetic cast in order to feel intensely the troubles of others; it is not quite possible to realize them; every one has not sufficient self-forgetfulness to be able to displace himself, or sufficient imagination to plant himself on another centre as regards the universe, and occupy the position of another party. But that is what must be done if one would feel very keenly the pains of the past, for to-day you are yourself, but yesterday, as it has been said, you were quite another person; the kaleidoscope has taken another turn, and the relation of atoms is a new one.