The truth is, that this vision was not in itself a delusion, nor,
indeed, half bright enough. If one could only have been left to
do his own business, the vision would have accomplished itself
and brought out new paraheliacal visions, each as bright as the
original. The misery was and is, as we found out, I and Polly,
before long, that, besides the vision, and besides the usual human
and finite failures in life (such as breaking the old pitcher
that came over in the Mayflower, and putting into the fire the
alpenstock with which her father climbed Mont Blanc)—besides,
these, I say (imitating the style of Robinson Crusoe), there
were pitchforked in on us a great rowen-heap of humbugs, handed
down from some unknown seed-time, in which we were expected,
and I chiefly, to fulfil certain public functions before the
community, of the character of those fulfilled by the third row
of supernumeraries who stand behind the Sepoys in the spectacle
of the _Cataract of the Ganges_. They were the duties, in a word,
which one performs as member of one or another social class or
subdivision, wholly distinct from what one does as A. by himself A.
What invisible power put these functions on me, it would be very
hard to tell. But such power there was and is. And I had not been
at work a year before I found I was living two lives, one real and
one merely functional—for two sets of people, one my parish, whom
I loved, and the other a vague public, for whom I did not care two
straws. All this was in a vague notion, which everybody had and
has, that this second life would eventually bring out some great
results, unknown at present, to somebody somewhere.
Crazed by this duality of life, I first read Dr. Wigan on the
_Duality of the Brain_, hoping that I could train one side of my
head to do these outside jobs, and the other to do my intimate and
real duties. For Richard Greenough once told me that, in studying
for the statue of Franklin, he found that the left side of the
great man’s face was philosophic and reflective, and the right side
funny and smiling. If you will go and look at the bronze statue,
you will find he has repeated this observation there for posterity.
The eastern profile is the portrait of the statesman Franklin,
the western of Poor Richard. But Dr. Wigan does not go into these
niceties of this subject, and I failed. It was then that, on my
wife’s suggestion, I resolved to look out for a Double.
I was, at first, singularly successful. We happened to be
recreating at Stafford Springs that summer. We rode out one day,
for one of the relaxations of that watering-place, to the great
Monsonpon House. We were passing through one of the large halls,
when my destiny was fulfilled! I saw my man!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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