The Substance of a Dream
Bain F. W.
English
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Below is a summary of The Substance of a Dream
THE SUBSTANCE OF A DREAM
Translated from the Original Manuscript
by
F. W. BAIN
_Mix, with sunset's fleeting glow,
Kiss of friend, and stab of foe,
Ooze of moon, and foam of brine,
Noose of Thug, and creeper's twine,
Hottest flame, and coldest ash,
Priceless gems, and poorest trash;
Throw away the solid part,
And behold--a woman's heart._
NIDRÁDARPANA
Methuen & Co. Ltd.
36 Essex Street W.C.
London
Second Edition
First Published . October 16th 1919
Second Edition ... 1919
DEDICATED
to
THE INEXPRESSIBLY GENTLE GENIUS
of
MY OWN MOTHER
INTRODUCTION
I could almost persuade myself, that others will like this little
fable as much as I do: so curiously simple, and yet so strangely
profound is its delicate epitome of the old old story, the course of
true love, which never did run smooth.
And since so many people have asked me questions as to the origin of
these stories, I will say a word on the point here. Where do they come
from? I do not know. I discovered only the other day that some believe
them to have been written by a woman. That appears to me to be
improbable. But who writes them? I cannot tell. They come to me, one
by one, suddenly, like a flash of lightning, all together: I see them
in the air before me, like a little Bayeux tapestry, complete, from
end to end, and write them down, hardly lifting the pen from the
paper, straight off "from the MS." I never know, the day before, when
one is coming: it arrives, as if shot out of a pistol. Who can tell?
They may be all but so many reminiscences of a former birth.
The _Substance of a Dream_ is half a love-story, and half a fairy
tale: as indeed every love-story is a fairy tale. Because, although
that unaccountable mystery, the mutual attraction of the sexes, is the
very essence of life, and everything else merely accidental or
accessory, yet only too often in the jostle of the world, in the
trough and tossing of the waves of time, the accidental smothers the
essential, and life turns into a commonplace instead of a romance. And
so, like every other story, this little story will perhaps be very
differently judged, according to the reader's sex. The bearded critic
will see it with eyes very different from those with which it may be
viewed by the fair voter with no beard upon her chin; for women, as
the great god says at the end, have scant mercy on their own sex, and
the heroine of the story is a strange heroine, an enigmatical Mona
Lisa, so to say, who will not appeal to everybody so strongly as she
does to the Moony-crested Deity, when he sums her up at the close. I
venture, with humility, to concur in the opinion of the Deity, for she
holds me under the same spell as her innumerable other lovers. The
reader, a more formidable authority even than the god, must decide:
only I must warn him that to understand, he must go to the very end.
He will not think his time wasted, if he take half the delight in
reading, as I did, in transcribing, the evidence in the case. Only,
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