On the other hand, I have occasionally had in a dream so painful and unsatisfactory an interview with a friend, rousing in my mind such anger and resentment, that it has proved a cloud over my acquaintance.  It is not that on awaking I believe in the reality of the experience; but it seems to have given a real shock to a delicate sympathy, so that there has been an actual difficulty on meeting the friend upon the same terms as formerly, even though one may relate the dream incident and laugh over it with him.

These are indubitably very mysterious experiences; and I cannot say that I think that they are explicable upon any ordinary hypothesis; that one should thus create a sense of sympathy or misunderstanding by the exercise of involuntary imagination which should have a real power to affect one’s relations with a person—­here I feel myself on the threshold of a very deep mystery indeed.

XIX

It is generally taken for granted nowadays by fervent educationalists that the important thing to encourage in boys is keenness in every department of school life.  As a matter of fact, the keenness which is as a rule most developed in the public school product is keenness about athletic exercises.  In the intellectual region, a boy is encouraged to do his duty, but there is no question that a boy who manifested an intense enthusiasm for his school work, who talked, thought, dreamed of nothing but success in examinations, would be considered rather abnormal and eccentric both by his instructors and his schoolfellows, though he would not be thought singular by any one if he did the same about his athletic prospects.  What one cannot help wondering is whether this kind of enthusiasm is valuable to the character under its influence, whatever the subject of that enthusiasm may be.  The normal boy, who is enthusiastic about athletics, tends to be cynical about intellectual success; and indeed even eminent men are not ashamed to encourage this by uttering, as a Lord Chancellor lately did, good-humoured gibes about the futility of dons and schoolmasters, and the uselessness of lectures.  The other day a young friend of mine indulged in a glowing description, in my presence, of the methods and form of a certain short-distance runner.  It was a generous panegyric, full of ingenuous admiration.  He spoke of the runner’s devices—­I fear I cannot reproduce the technical terms—­with the same thrilled and awestruck emotion which Shelley might have used, as an undergraduate, in speaking of Homer or Shakespeare.  I suppose it is a desirable thing, on the whole, to be able to run faster than other people, though the practical utility of being able to do a hundred yards in a fraction of a second less than other runners is not easily demonstrable.  But for all that I cannot help wondering whether such enthusiasm is not thrown away or misapplied.  Perhaps the same indictment might be made against