home > Books by FWB > The Silver Shadow > ON GWINE BACK TO DIXIE

That is a great day in a man’s life, the day on which he finds himself gwine back to Dixie. But it must be done carefully, circumspectly, even scientifically, or it will end in bitter disillusionment and pitiful disaster. You cannot pack your bag, put on your hat, and set out for Dixie just as the fancy takes you. As I shall show before I lay down my pen, the soil of Dixie is sacramental soil; and sacramental soil is only to be approached after a diligent preparation of spirit. The shoes must be taken from off the feet. 

Only this afternoon I was sitting in this very chair, chatting with an old friend who, since I met him last, has revisited the Homeland after an absence of thirty years. He is a Manxman. During his long residence here in Australia, his mother had gone to her rest, but, so far as he knew, his father still lived. He told me how, during the long sea voyage, he was alternately tortured and transported by strangely conflicting emotions. At one moment his heart would stand still, and his blood freeze in his veins, as he reflected that, very possibly, he would find his father dead and the whole place changed beyond recognition. At the next, he could scarcely restrain his excitement at the possibility of again hearing his father’s voice and revisiting the scenes of his boyhood. These opposite sensations increased in intensity as he neared his destination. At length he landed in England; crossed from Liverpool to Douglas; and actually stood once more on the shores of his island home. He assured me that as he drew near to his native village he could almost hear the beating of his own heart. And when the old cottage came in sight — the cottage in which he was born and in which his bedridden father now lay — he had to sit down for awhile at the side of the road in order to regain his self-mastery. Tears stood in his eyes as he told me of the meeting with his father; of the aching void which had taken the place of his mother; of the visit to the grave in the little cemetery; and of all the other experiences of those memorable weeks. ‘I shall be a better man as long as I live as a result of that visit!’ he told me. And as I beheld the evidence of the deep impression it had made, I could easily believe it. But, then, he had been preparing himself for thirty years to stand again on that sacred, that consecrated soil. He had faced all the possibilities of disappointment; he had focused his anticipations on the essential rather than on the accidental things; and his going back to Dixie became in consequence one of the notable events in his soul’s secret history. 

But, as against this, many a man has gone back to Dixie and has regretted having done so for ever afterwards. If I am going back to Dixie just to have another look at Dixie, depend upon it I shall be disappointed. Places change: that is bad. People change: that is worse. But even that is not the worst of all. The worst of all is that we ourselves change; and the change in us is greater than the change in the place or the change in the people. When we left Dixie behind us, we brought Dixie with us. There it stands, in its entirety, in that mysterious inner realm which we call Memory. 

But it is not allowed to stand there like a bee in amber, like a picture on the wall, or like a curiosity in a glass case. It is tampered with. A countless host of queer little imps and pixies are constantly engaged on a strange and mischievous work of demolition and reconstruction. Every day they slyly take away from my mind a little bit of the real Dixie ; every day they build up in my mind a little bit of an ideal Dixie. And thus, gradually, line upon line, here a little and there a little, the real Dixie passes from my memory, and a dream-Dixie, a Dixie-that-never-was-and-never-will-be, is silently erected. The consequence is that, when I go back to Dixie, I am amazed and bewildered and disappointed. Has not Dickens told us of the emotions with which he revisited Rochester? Rochester was the scene of his childhood, and the memory specially delights in exaggerating the objects most familiar to our infancy. Dickens tells how he thought the Rochester High Street must be at least as wide as Regent Street, whilst on his return he discovered that it was little better than a lane. He tells how the public clock in that street, which he had imagined to be the finest clock in the world, turned out to be as moon-faced and feeble a clock as a man’s eyes ever saw. And he tells how, in its town-hall, which had appeared to him once so glorious a structure that he had set it up in his mind as the model on which the Genie of the Lamp built the Palace for Aladdin, he had painfully to recognize a mere mean little heap of bricks ‘like a chapel gone demented.’ And then he suddenly reflected that the change was not in Rochester, but in himself. The imps and pixies had been assiduously at work all through the years demolishing the real Rochester in his memory and erecting the ideal Rochester, the Rochester-that-never-was. ‘Who was I,’ he asks, ‘that I should quarrel with the town for having changed to me, when I myself had come back so changed to it?’

On the whole, however, I fancy that we are most of us the happier for the work of the imps and pixies. 

Their elfish pranks may lead to a certain amount of disillusionment and disappointment to those who go back to Dixie. But, then, the great majority of us can never go back to Dixie ; and the pixies are bent on conferring the greatest good on the greatest number. Since we can never actually walk the streets of Dixie again, is it not an amiable deception that they practise upon us ? Is it not delightful to be able to carry about in our hearts perpetually an idealized, magnified, glorified Dixie? The Dixie that the pixies give us is a Dixie from which everything disfiguring and unclean has been scrupulously eliminated ; a Dixie in which everything fair and beautiful has been intensified and made emphatic. 

And thus the pixies help us to live in two places and in two periods at the same time. I open my eyes and I am in Melbourne; I close them and I am back in Dixie. I open them and it is the twentieth century; I close them and it is the nineteenth. In his Roundabout Papers, Thackeray has a fine passage in which he enlarges upon the incalculable enrichment which life sustains from this capacity for preserving and accentuating in the mind the romance of buried years. We leave a place, perhaps for ever ; and yet we carry that place about with us as long as we live. Thackeray instances the vivid recollection, that comes back to him after an interval of thirty years, of his first day at Calais. He describes all the whimsical sights that met his eye, and the fantastic sounds that fell upon his ear: ‘The voices of the women crying out at night as the vessel came alongside the pier; the supper at Quillacq’s, and the flavour of the cutlets and wine; the red calico canopy under which I slept; the tiled floor and the fresh smell of the sheets; and the wonderful postilion in his jack-boots and pig-tail — all return with perfect clearness to my mind, and I am seeing them, and not the objects which are actually under my eyes. A man can be alive in 1860 and 1830 at the same time, don’t you see?’ And thus, leaving Dixie for ever behind us, we carry Dixie for ever with us, and Dixie grows more and more lovely as the days go by. 

George Gissing was only twelve years of age when Dickens died, so that the two men can never have opened their hearts to each other. This is part of the tyranny of time. It says to one man, ‘Stand thou here in such and such a century!’ And it says to another man, ‘Stand thou there in such and such a century!’ And, although their souls are twin, they can say not a word to each other. We shall escape from this humiliating limitation some day; meanwhile it is terribly exasperating. I should dearly love to see George Gissing and Charles Dickens sitting in opposite arm-chairs beside a roaring fire discussing this matter of gwine back to Dixie. For Gissing and Dickens represent two diametrically opposite points of view. 

Gissing thought that a man should never go back to Dixie. He has a good deal to say about it; this among other things. ‘While I was reading this afternoon,’ he says, ‘my thoughts strayed, and I found myself recalling a hillside in Suffolk where, after a long walk, I rested drowsily one midsummer day twenty years ago. A great longing seized me; I was tempted to set off at once, and find again that spot under the high elm-trees where, as I smoked a delicious pipe, I heard about me the crack-crack-crack of broompods bursting in the glorious heat of the noontide sun. Had I acted upon that impulse, what chance was there of enjoying such another hour as that which my memory cherished? No, no; it is not the place that I remember; it is the time of life, the circumstances, the mood, which at the moment fell so happily together. Can I dream that a pipe, smoked on that same hillside, under the same glowing sky, would taste as it did then, or bring the same solace? Would the turf be so soft beneath me? Would the great elm branches temper so delightfully the noonday rays beating upon them? And when the hour of rest was over, should I spring to my feet as then I did, eager to put forth my strength again?’ And so Gissing elected to cherish in his soul the picture of the hillside as the pixies had painted it rather than the real and geographical hillside in Suffolk. He declined to go back to Dixie. 

Dickens, on the other hand, not only revelled in revisiting old scenes; he even argues that we should cultivate the habit of ‘revisiting’ places to which we have never been! ‘I never was in Robinson Crusoe’s island,’ he says, ‘yet I frequently return there.’ He delighted to stroll along the sands on which Crusoe saw the footprint ; he loved to crawl into the cave where the flaring eyes of the old goat made such a goblin appearance in the dark; he liked to climb the hill from which Crusoe at last beheld the ship. ‘I was never,’ he says again, ‘I was never in the robber’s cave, where Gil Bias lived, but I often go back there and find the trap-door just as heavy to raise as it used to be, while that wicked old disabled black lies everlastingly cursing in bed. I was never in Don Quixote’s study, where he read his books of chivalry until he rose and hacked at imaginary giants, yet you could not move a book in it without my knowledge. I was never in company with the little old woman who hobbled out of the chest and told the merchant Abudah to go in search of the Talisman of Oromanes, yet I make it my business to know that she is as well preserved and as intolerable as ever. I was never at the school where the boy Horatio Nelson got out of bed to steal the pears, yet I have several times been back at the Academy to see him let down out of the window in a sheet,’ Now here are two opposite ways of looking at the matter ! We need not take sides. It would be invidious and unseemly to decide between them; but common decency demanded that, in discussing the merits and demerits of a return to Dixie, we should make ourselves eaves-droppers during the progress of this lively conversation. 

It only shows that there are two ways of looking at everything. Indeed, there are two ways of looking at those very imps and pixies who are always at work taking down our real Dixies and building up the Dixies-that-never-were-and-never-will-be. You may argue that their work is good or bad, just as the fancy takes you. 

It is good — say you ? But, once upon a time, did they not set to work, in the memories of the Israelites, to take down the real Egypt — the Egypt of chains and slavery — and to erect a dream-Egypt, an Egypt-that-never-was, an Egypt after which, by a strange perversion of sentiment, the erstwhile slaves hankered continually ? It was an elfish trick, and they have sometimes perpetrated a similar one on me. 

Bad — say you? But why, if they be bad, did they render Jacob so conspicuous a service? See how, within the realm of his fancy, they took down the real Bethel, the Bethel of his terrified flight and his stony pillow, and they built up within his mind a Bethel in which his radiant dream of the heavenly staircase was emphasized and beautified! And straightway Jacob went back to Dixie. He returned to Bethel and renewed the vows that he had made there long years before. 

I forgive the pixies for sometimes exaggerating the piquancy of the Egyptian leeks and the flavour of the Egyptian fleshpots when I remember how often, by transfiguring the most hallowed associations of the past, they have led me back to the old altar that, in the flurry of life, I had so shamefully forsaken. 

– F.W. Boreham