CHAPTER TWELVE
The Great Vision
IT is hard to lock up a house entirely. Lock and bar and shutter as one may, there will nearly always be a window not securely fastened—to the great joy of the burglar, or even to the house-holder who forgot his key.
Swedenborg, so watchfully impersonal, did leave an opening leading directly into his inner life at its most difficult period. It was a diary,1 mainly of his dreams, which he kept in 1743 and 1744, while he was in Holland and in England. The hand, probably a family hand, which tore out the notes he had made of his dreams in 1736—39, did not apparently have a chance to meddle with the record he made in this diary. At any rate, someone discovered and published the diary in the middle of the nineteenth century, causing a full Victorian uproar.
There were people who objected that he never meant such intimate notes to be published, referring to his frank descriptions of sexual dreams. By their attitude they unwittingly lent color to the theory which now would seem all too obvious, the theory that Swedenborg was in a state of melancholy because of "guilt feelings" due to suppressed sex. But that easy explanation has to be examined. Fortunately Swedenborg has left no doubt about his attitude in this matter.
It was not Victorian. He lived in an age when his environment did not compel him to veil or to suppress interest in sex—quite the contrary. One of the commonplaces of history is to refer to the eighteenth century, especially the first three quarters of it, as "one of the most licentious, etc.," of the world's record for licence in sexual matters. Casanova need hardly be mentioned. Now Swedenborg was no Casanova, although he himself said that women had been his chief passion all his life.2 That admission, made to himself only in a supersensitive state of his conscience, need not be taken too literally—there was hardly time in his life for this sort of thing
