Of Moon-Desire

“With hands resting upon the floor, reverentially you repeat your poem, O frog!”Ancient Poem.

“With hands resting upon the floor, reverentially you repeat your poem, O frog!”

Ancient Poem.

Few of the simpler sense-impressions of travel remain more intimately and vividly associated with the memory of a strange land than sounds,—sounds of the open country. Only the traveller knows how Nature’s voices—voices of forest and river and plain—vary according to zone; and it is nearly always some local peculiarity of their tone or character that appeals to feeling and penetrates into memory,—giving us the sensation of the foreign and the far-away. In Japan this sensation is especially aroused by the music of insects,—hemiptera uttering a sound-language wonderfully different from that of their Western congeners. To a lesser degree the exotic accent is noticeable also in the chanting of Japanese frogs,—though the sound impresses itself upon remembrance ratherby reason of its ubiquity. Rice being cultivated all over the country,—not only upon mountain-slopes and hill-tops, but even within the limits of the cities,—there are flushed levels everywhere, and everywhere frogs. No one who has travelled in Japan will forget the clamor of the ricefields.

Hushed only during the later autumn and brief winter, with the first wakening of spring waken all the voices of the marsh-lands,—the infinite bubbling chorus that might be taken for the speech of the quickening soil itself. And the universal mystery of life seems to thrill with a peculiar melancholy in that vast utterance—heard through forgotten thousands of years by forgotten generations of toilers, but doubtless older by myriad ages than the race of man.

Now this song of solitude has been for centuries a favorite theme with Japanese poets; but the Western reader may be surprised to learn that it has appealed to them rather as a pleasant sound than as a nature-manifestation.

Innumerable poems have been written about the singing of frogs; but a large proportion of them would prove unintelligible if understood as referring to common frogs. When the generalchorus of the ricefield finds praise in Japanese verse, the poet expresses his pleasure only in the great volume of sound produced by the blending of millions of little croakings,—a blending which really has a pleasant effect, well compared to the lulling sound of the falling of rain. But when the poet pronounces an individual frog-call melodious, he is not speaking of the common frog of the ricefields. Although most kinds of Japanese frogs are croakers, there is one remarkable exception—(not to mention tree-frogs),—thekajika, or true singing-frog of Japan. To say that it croaks would be an injustice to its note, which is sweet as the chirrup of a song-bird. It used to be calledkawazu; but as this ancient appellation latterly became confounded in common parlance withkaeru, the general name for ordinary frogs, it is now called onlykajika. Thekajikais kept as a domestic pet, and is sold in Tōkyō by several insect-merchants. It is housed in a peculiar cage, the lower part of which is a basin containing sand and pebbles, fresh water and small plants; the upper part being a framework of fine wire-gauze. Sometimes the basin is fitted up as ako-niwa, or model landscape-garden. In these times the kajika is considered as one of the singers of springand summer; but formerly it was classed with the melodists of autumn; and people used to make autumn-trips to the country for the mere pleasure of hearing it sing. And just as various places used to be famous for the music of particular varieties of night-crickets, so there were places celebrated only as haunts of the kajika. The following were especially noted:—

Tamagawa and Ōsawa-no-Iké,—a river and a lake in the province of Yamashiro.

Miwagawa, Asukagawa, Sawogawa, Furu-no-Yamada, and Yoshinogawa,—all in the province of Yamato.

Koya-no-Iké,—in Settsu.

Ukinu-no-Iké,—in Iwami.

Ikawa-no-Numa,—in Kōzuké.

Now it is the melodious cry of the kajika, or kawazu, which is so often praised in far-Eastern verse; and, like the music of insects, it is mentioned in the oldest extant collections of Japanese poems. In the preface to the famous anthology calledKokinshū, compiled by Imperial Decree during the fifth year of the period of Engi (A. D.905), the poet Ki-no-Tsurayuki, chief editor of the work, makes these interesting observations:—

—“The poetry of Japan has its roots in the human heart, and thence has grown into a multi-form utterance. Man in this world, having a thousand millions of things to undertake and to complete, has been moved to express his thoughts and his feelings concerning all that he sees and hears. When we hear theuguisu[73]singing among flowers, and the voice of the kawazu which inhabits the waters, what mortal [lit.: ‘who among the living that lives’] does not compose poems?”

The kawazu thus referred to by Tsurayuki is of course the same creature as the modern kajika: no common frog could have been mentioned as a songster in the same breath with that wonderful bird, the uguisu. And no common frog could have inspired any classical poet with so pretty a fancy as this:—

Té wo tsuité,Uta moshi-aguru,Kawazu kana!

“With hands resting on the ground, reverentially you repeat your poem, O frog!” The charm of this little verse can best be understood by those familiar with the far-Eastern etiquette of posturewhile addressing a superior,—kneeling, with the body respectfully inclined, and hands resting upon the floor, with the fingers pointing outwards.[74]

It is scarcely possible to determine the antiquity of the custom of writing poems about frogs; but in theManyōshū, dating back to the middle of the eighth century, there is a poem which suggests that even at that time the river Asuka had long been famous for the singing of its frogs:—

Ima mo ka moAsuka no kawa noYū sarazuKawazu naku sé noKiyoku aruran.

“Still clear in our day remains the stream of Asuka, where the kawazu nightly sing.” We find also in the same anthology the following curious reference to the singing of frogs:—

OmoboyezuKimaseru kimi wo,Sasagawa noKawazu kikasezuKayeshi tsuru kamo!

“Unexpectedly I received the august visit of my lord.... Alas, that he should have returned without hearing the frogs of the river Sawa!” And in theRokujōshū, another ancient compilation, are preserved these pleasing verses on the same theme:—

Tamagawa noHito wo mo yogizuNaku kawazu,Kono yū kikébaOshiku ya wa aranu?

“Hearing to-night the frogs of the Jewel River [or Tamagawa], that sing without fear of man, how can I help loving the passing moment?”

Thus it appears that for more than eleven hundred years the Japanese have been making poems about frogs; and it is at least possible that verses on this subject, which have been preserved in theManyōshū, were composed even earlier than the eighth century. From the oldest classical period to the present day, the theme has never ceased to be a favorite one with poets of allranks. A fact noteworthy in this relation is that the first poem written in the measure calledhokku, by the famous Bashō, was about frogs. The triumph of this extremely brief form of verse—(three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively)—is to create one complete sensation-picture; and Bashō’s original accomplishes the feat,—difficult, if not impossible, to repeat in English:—

Furu iké ya,Kawazu tobikomu,Midzu no oto.

(“Old pond—frogs jumping in—sound of water.”) An immense number of poems about frogs were subsequently written in this measure. Even at the present time professional men of letters amuse themselves by making short poems on frogs. Distinguished among these is a young poet known to the Japanese literary world by the pseudonym of “Roséki,” who lives in Ōsaka and keeps in the pond of his garden hundreds of singing frogs. At fixed intervals he invites all his poet-friends to a feast, with the proviso that each must compose, during the entertainment, one poem about the inhabitants of the pond. A collection of the verses thus obtained was privately printedin the spring of 1897, with funny pictures of frogs decorating the covers and illustrating the text.

But unfortunately it is not possible through English translation to give any fair idea of the range and character of the literature of frogs. The reason is that the greater number of compositions about frogs depend chiefly for their literary value upon the untranslatable,—upon local allusions, for example, incomprehensible outside of Japan; upon puns; and upon the use of words with double or even triple meanings. Scarcely two or three in every one hundred poems can bear translation. So I can attempt little more than a few general observations.

That love-poems should form a considerable proportion of this curious literature will not seem strange to the reader when he is reminded that the lovers’ trysting-hour is also the hour when the frog-chorus is in full cry, and that, in Japan at least, the memory of the sound would be associated with the memory of a secret meeting in almost any solitary place. The frog referred to in such poems is not usually the kajika. But frogs are introduced into love-poetry in countlessclever ways. I can give two examples of modern popular compositions of this kind. The first contains an allusion to the famous proverb,—I no naka no kawazu daikai wo shirazu: “The frog in the well knows not the great sea.” A person quite innocent of the ways of the world is compared to a frog in a well; and we may suppose the speaker of the following lines to be some sweet-hearted country-girl, answering an ungenerous remark with very pretty tact:—

Laugh me to scorn if you please;—call me your “frog-in-the-well”:Flowers fall into my well; and its water mirrors the moon!

The second poem is supposed to be the utterance of a woman having good reason to be jealous:—

Dull as a stagnant pond you deemed the mind of your mistress;But the stagnant pond can speak: you shall hear the cry of the frog!

Outside of love-poems there are hundreds of verses about the common frogs of ponds or ricefields. Some refer chiefly to the volume of the sound that the frogs make:—

Hearing the frogs of the ricefields, methinks that the water sings.

As we flush the ricefields of spring, the frog-song flows with the water.

From ricefield to ricefield they call: unceasing the challenge and answer.

Ever as deepens the night, louder the chorus of pond-frogs.

So many the voices of frogs that I cannot but wonder if the pond be not wider at night than by day!

Even the rowing boats can scarce proceed, so thick the clamor of the frogs of Horié!

The exaggeration of the last verse is of course intentional, and in the original not uneffective. In some parts of the world—in the marshes of Florida and of southern Louisiana, for example,—the clamor of the frogs at certain seasons resembles the roaring of a furious sea; and whoever has heard it can appreciate the fancy of sound as obstacle.

Other poems compare or associate the sound made by frogs with the sound of rain:—

The song of the earliest frogs,—fainter than falling of rain.

What I took for the falling of rain is only the singing of frogs.

Now I shall dream, lulled by the patter of rain and the song of the frogs.

Other poems, again, are intended only as tiny pictures,—thumb-nail sketches,—such as thishokku,—

Path between ricefields; frogs jumping away to right and left;—

—or this, which is a thousand years old:—

Where the flowers of the yamabuki are imaged in the still marsh-water, the voice of the kawazu is heard;—

—or the following pretty fancy:—

Now sings the frog, and the voice of the frog is perfumed;—for into the shining stream the cherry-petals fall.

The last two pieces refer, of course, to the true singing frog.

Many short poems are addressed directly to the frog itself,—whether kaeru or kajika. There are poems of melancholy, of affection, of humor, of religion, and even of philosophy among these. Sometimes the frog is likened to a spirit resting on a lotos-leaf; sometimes, to a priest repeating sûtras for the sake of the dying flowers; sometimes to a pining lover; sometimes to a host receiving travellers; sometimes to a blasphemer, “always beginning” to say something against the gods, but always afraid to finish it. Most of the following examples are taken from the recent book of frog-poems published by Roséki;—each paragraph of my prose rendering, it should be remembered, represents a distinct poem:—

Now all the guests being gone, why still thus respectfully sitting, O frog?

So resting your hands on the ground, do you welcome the Rain, O frog?

You disturb in the ancient well the light of the stars, O frog!

Sleepy the sound of the rain; but your voice makes me dream, O frog!

Always beginning to say something against the great Heaven, O frog!

You have learned that the world is void: you never look at it as you float, O frog!

Having lived in clear-rushing mountain-streams, never can your voice become stagnant, O frog!

The last pleasing conceit shows the esteem in which the superior vocal powers of the kajika are held.

I thought it strange that out of hundreds of frog-poems collected for me I could not discover a single mention of the coldness and clamminess of the frog. Except a few jesting lines about the queer attitudes sometimes assumed by the creature, the only reference to its uninviting qualities that I could find was the mild remark,

Seen in the daytime, how uninteresting you are, O frog!

While wondering at this reticence concerning the chilly, slimy, flaccid nature of frogs, it all at once occurred to me that in other thousands of Japanese poems which I had read there was a total absence of allusions to tactual sensations. Sensations of colors, sounds, and odors were rendered with exquisite and surprising delicacy; but sensations of taste were seldom mentioned, and sensations of touch were absolutely ignored. I asked myself whether the reason for this reticence or indifference should be sought in the particular temperament or mental habit of the race; but I have not yet been able to decide the question. Remembering that the race has been living for ages upon food which seems tasteless to the Western palate, and that impulses to such action as hand-clasping, embracing, kissing, or other physical display of affectionate feeling, are really foreign to far-Eastern character, one is tempted to the theory that gustatory and tactual sensations, pleasurable and otherwise, have been less highly evolved with the Japanese than with us. But there is much evidence against such a theory; and the triumphs of Japanese handicraft assure us of an almost incomparable delicacy of touch developed in special directions. Whatever be thephysiological meaning of the phenomenon, its moral meaning is of most importance. So far as I have been able to judge, Japanese poetry usually ignores the inferior qualities of sensation, while making the subtlest of appeals to those superior qualities which we call æsthetic. Even if representing nothing else, this fact represents the healthiest and happiest attitude toward Nature. Do not we Occidentals shrink from many purely natural impressions by reason of repulsion developed through a morbid tactual sensibility? The question is at least worth considering. Ignoring or mastering such repulsion,—accepting naked Nature as she is, always lovable when understood,—the Japanese discover beauty where we blindly imagine ugliness or formlessness or loathsomeness,—beauty in insects, beauty in stones, beauty in frogs. Is the fact without significance that they alone have been able to make artistic use of the form of the centipede?... You should see my Kyōtō tobacco-pouch, with centipedes of gold running over its figured leather like ripplings of fire!

He was two years old when—as ordained in the law of perpetual recurrence—he asked me for the Moon.

Unwisely I protested,—

“The Moon I cannot give you because it is too high up. I cannot reach it.”

He answered:—

“By taking a very long bamboo, you probably could reach it, and knock it down.”

I said,—

“There is no bamboo long enough.”

He suggested:—

“By standing on the ridge of the roof of the house, you probably could poke it with the bamboo.”

—Whereat I found myself constrained to make some approximately truthful statements concerning the nature and position of the Moon.

This set me thinking. I thought about the strange fascination that brightness exerts upon living creatures in general,—upon insects and fishes and birds and mammals,—and tried to account for it by some inherited memory of brightness as related to food, to water, and to freedom. I thought of the countless generations of children who have asked for the Moon, and of the generations of parents who have laughed at the asking. And then I entered into the following meditation:—

Have we any right to laugh at the child’s wish for the Moon? No wish could be more natural; and as for its incongruity,—do not we, children of a larger growth, mostly nourish wishes quite as innocent,—longings that if realized could only work us woe,—such as desire for the continuance after death of that very sense-life, or individuality, which once deluded us all into wanting to play with the Moon, and often subsequently deluded us in far less pleasant ways?

Now foolish as may seem, to merely empirical reasoning, the wish of the child for the Moon, I have an idea that the highest wisdom commands us to wish for very much more than the Moon,—even for more than the Sun and the Morning-Star and all the Host of Heaven.

I remember when a boy lying on my back in the grass, gazing into the summer blue above me, and wishing that I could melt into it,—become a part of it. For these fancies I believe that a religious tutor was innocently responsible: he had tried to explain to me, because of certain dreamy questions, what he termed “the folly and the wickedness of pantheism,”—with the result that I immediately became a pantheist, at the tender age of fifteen. And my imaginings presently led me not only to want the sky for a playground, but also to become the sky!

Now I think that in those days I was really close to a great truth,—touching it, in fact, without the faintest suspicion of its existence. I mean the truth that the wishto becomeis reasonable in direct ratio to its largeness,—or, in other words, that the more you wish to be, the wiser you are; while the wishto haveis apt to be foolish in proportion to its largeness. Cosmic law permitsus very few of the countless things that we wish to have, but will help us to become all that we can possibly wish to be. Finite, and in so much feeble, is the wish to have: but infinite in puissance is the wish to become; and every mortal wish to become must eventually find satisfaction. By wanting to be, the monad makes itself the elephant, the eagle, or the man. By wanting to be, the man should become a god. Perhaps on this tiny globe, lighted only by a tenth-rate yellow sun, he will not have time to become a god; but who dare assert that his wish cannot project itself to mightier systems illuminated by vaster suns, and there reshape and invest him with the forms and powers of divinity? Who dare even say that his wish may not expand him beyond the Limits of Form, and make him one with Omnipotence? And Omnipotence, without asking, can have much brighter and bigger play-things than the Moon.

Probably everything is a mere question of wishing,—providing that we wish, not to have, but to be. Most of the sorrow of life certainly exists because of the wrong kind of wishing and because of the contemptible pettiness of the wishes. Even to wish for the absolute lordship and possessionof the entire earth were a pitifully small and vulgar wish. We must learn to nourish very much bigger wishes than that! My faith is that we must wish to become the total universe with its thousands of millions of worlds,—and more than the universe, or a myriad universes,—and more even than Space and Time.

Possibly the power for such wishing must depend upon our comprehension of the ghostliness of substance. Once men endowed with spirit all forms and motions and utterances of Nature: stone and metal, herb and tree, cloud and wind,—the lights of heaven, the murmuring of leaves and waters, the echoes of the hills, the tumultuous speech of the sea. Then becoming wiser in their own conceit, they likewise became of little faith; and they talked about “the Inanimate” and “the Inert,”—which are nonexistent,—and discoursed of Force as distinct from Matter, and of Mind as distinct from both. Yet we now discover that the primitive fancies were, after all, closer to probable truth. We cannot indeed think of Nature to-day precisely as did our forefathers; but we find ourselves obliged to think of her in very much weirder ways; and the later revelations of our science have revitalized not a little of the primitive thought, and infused it with a new and awful beauty. And meantime those old savage sympathies with savage Nature that spring from the deepest sources of our being,—always growing with our growth, strengthening with our strength, more and more unfolding with the evolution of our higher sensibilities,—would seem destined to sublime at last into forms of cosmical emotion expanding and responding to infinitude.

Have you never thought about those immemorial feelings?... Have you never, when looking at some great burning, found yourself exulting without remorse in the triumph and glory of fire?—never unconsciously coveted the crumbling, splitting, iron-wrenching, granite-cracking force of its imponderable touch?—never delighted in the furious and terrible splendor of its phantasmagories,—the ravening and bickering of its dragons,—the monstrosity of its archings,—the ghostly soaring and flapping of its spires?Have you never, with a hill-wind pealing in your ears, longed to ride that wind like a ghost,—to scream round the peaks with it,—to sweep the face of the world with it? Or, watching the lifting, the gathering, the muttering rush and thunder-burst of breakers, have you felt no impulse kindred to that giant motion,—no longing to leap with that wild white tossing, and to join in that mighty shout?... And all such ancient emotional sympathies with Nature’s familiar forces—do they not prelude, with their modern æsthetic developments, the future growth of rarer sympathies with incomparably subtler forces, and of longings to be limited only by our power to know? Know ether—shivering from star to star;—comprehend its sensitivities, its penetrancies, its transmutations;—and sympathies ethereal will evolve. Know the forces that spin the suns;—and already the way has been reached of becoming one with them.

And furthermore, is there no suggestion of such evolvement in the steady widening through all the centuries of the thoughts of their world-priests and poets?—in the later sense of Life-as-Unity absorbing or transforming the ancient childish sense of life-personal?—in the tone of the newrapture in world-beauty, dominating the elder worship of beauty-human?—in the larger modern joy evoked by the blossoming of dawns, the blossoming of stars,—by all quiverings of color, all shudderings of light? And is not the thing-in-itself, the detail, the appearance, being ever less and less studied for its mere power to charm, and ever more and more studied as a single character in that Infinite Riddle of which all phenomena are but ideographs?

Nay!—surely the time must come when we shall desire to be all that is, all that ever has been known,—the past and the present and the future in one,—all feeling, striving, thinking, joying, sorrowing,—and everywhere the Part,—and everywhere the Whole. And before us, with the waxing of the wish, perpetually the Infinities shall widen.

And I—even I!—by virtue of that wish, shall become all forms, all forces, all conditions: Ether, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth,—all motion visible or viewless,—all vibration named of light, of color, of sonority, of torrefaction,—all thrillings piercing substance,—all oscillations picturing in blackness, like the goblin-vision of the X-rays.By virtue of that wish I shall become the Source of all becoming and of all ceasing,—the Power that shapes, the Power that dissolves,—creating, with the shadows of my sleep, the life that shall vanish with my wakening. And even as phosphor-lampings in currents of midnight sea, so shall shimmer and pulse and pass, in mine Ocean of Death and Birth, the burning of billions of suns, the whirling of trillions of worlds....

—“Well,” said the friend to whom I read this revery, “there is some Buddhism in your fancies—though you seem to have purposely avoided several important points of doctrine. For instance, you must know that Nirvana is never to be reached by wishing, but bynotwishing. What you call the ‘wish-to-become’ can only help us, like a lantern, along the darker portions of the Way. As for wanting the Moon—I think that you must have seen many old Japanese pictures of apes clutching at the reflection of the Moon in water. The subject is a Buddhist parable: the water is the phantom-flux of sensations and ideas;the Moon—not its distorted image—is the sole Truth. And your Western philosopher was really teaching a Buddhist parable when he proclaimed man but a higher kind of ape. For in this world of illusion, man is truly still the ape, trying to seize on water the shadow of the Moon.”

—“Ape indeed,” I made answer,—“but an ape of gods,—even that divine Ape of the Ramayana who may clutch the Sun!”

“Murmurs and scents of the Infinite Sea.”—Matthew Arnold.

“Murmurs and scents of the Infinite Sea.”

I wonder why the emblematical significance of the Composite Photograph has been so little considered by the philosophers of evolution. In the blending and coalescing of the shadows that make it, is there no suggestion of that bioplasmic chemistry which, out of the intermingling of innumerable lives, crystallizes the composite of personality? Has the superimposition of images upon the sensitized plate no likeness to those endless superimpositions of heredity out of which every individuality must shape itself?... Surely it is a very weird thing, this Composite Photograph,—and hints of things weirder.

Every human face is a living composite of countless faces,—generations and generations of faces superimposed upon the sensitive film of Lifefor the great cosmic developing process. And any living face, well watched by love or by hate, will reveal the fact. The face of friend or sweetheart has a hundred different aspects; and you know that you want, when his or her “likeness” is taken, to insist upon the reflection of the dearest of these. The face of your enemy,—no matter what antipathy it may excite,—is not invariably hateful in itself: you must acknowledge, to yourself at least, having observed in it moments of an expression the reverse of unworthy.

Probably the ancestral types that try to reproduce themselves in the modulations of facial expression, are nearly always the more recent;—the very ancient having become metamorphosed, under weight of superimposition, into a blank underlying vagueness,—a mere protoplasmic background out of which, except in rare and monstrous cases, no outline can detach itself. But in every normal face whole generations of types do certainly, by turns of mood, make flitting apparition. Any mother knows this. Studying day by day the features of her child, she finds in them variations not to be explained by simple growth. Sometimes there is a likeness to one parent or grandparent; sometimes a likenessto another, or to remoter kindred; and at rarer intervals may appear peculiarities of expression that no member of the family can account for. (Thus, in darker centuries, the ghastly superstition of the “changeling,” was not only possible, but in a certain sense quite natural.) Through youth and manhood and far into old age these mutations continue,—though always more slowly and faintly,—even while the general characteristics steadily accentuate; and death itself may bring into the countenance some strange expression never noticed during life.

As a rule we recognize faces by the modes of expression habitually worn,—by the usually prevalent character-tones of them,—rather than by any steady memory of lines. But no face at all moments remains exactly the same; and in cases of exceptional variability the expression does not suffice for recognition: we have to look for some fixed peculiarity, some minute superficial detail independent of physiognomy. All expression has but a relative permanency: even in faces themost strongly marked, its variations may defy estimate. Perhaps the mobility is, within certain limits, in direct ratio to irregularity of feature;—any approach to ideal beauty being also an approach to relative fixity. At all events, the more familiar we become with any common face, the more astonishing the multitude of the transformations we observe in it,—the more indescribable and bewildering its fugitive subtleties of expression. And what are these but the ebb and flow of life ancestral,—under-ripplings in that well-spring unfathomable of personality whose flood is Soul. Perpetually beneath the fluid tissues of flesh the dead are moulding and moving—not singly (for in no phenomenon is there any singleness), but in currents and by surgings. Sometimes there is an eddying of ghosts of love; and the face dawns as if a sunrise lighted it. Sometimes there is a billowing up of ghosts of hate; and the face darkens and distorts like an evil dream,—and we say to the mind behind it, “You are not nowyour better self.” But that which we call the self, whether the better or the worse, is a complexity forever shifting the order of its combinations. According to stimulus of hope or fear, of joy or pain, there must vibratewithin every being, at differing rhythms, with varying oscillation, incalculable tremulosities of ancestral life. In the calmest normal existence slumber all the psychical tones of the past,—from the lurid red of primal sense-impulse to the violet of spiritual aspiration,—even as all known colours sleep in white light. And over the sensitive living mask, at each strong alternation of the psychical currents, flit shadowy resurrections of dead expression.

Seeing faces and their changes, we learn intuitively the relation to our own selves of the selves that confront us. In very few cases could we even try to explain how this knowledge comes,—how we reach those conclusions called, in common parlance, “first impressions.” Faces are notread. The impressions they give are onlyfelt, and have much of the same vague character as impressions of sound,—making within us mental states either pleasant or unpleasant or somewhat of both,—evoking now a sense of danger, now a melting sympathy, occasionally a gentle sadness. And these impressions, though seldom at fault, cannot be very well explained in words. The reasons of their accuracy are likewise the reasons of their mystery,—reasons not to be discovered in the narrow range of our personal experience,—reasons very, very much older than we. Could we remember our former lives, we should know more exactly the meaning of our likes and our dislikes. For the truth is that they are superindividual. It is not the individual eye that perceives everything perceived in a face. The dead are the real seers. But as they remain unable to guide us otherwise than by touching the chords of mental pleasure or pain, we can feel the relative meaning of faces only in a dim, though powerful way.

Instinctively, at least, superindividuality is commonly recognized. Hence such phrases as “force of character,” “moral force,” “personal fascination,” “personal magnetism,” and others showing that the influence exerted by man upon man is known to be independent of mere physical conditions. Very insignificant bodies have that within them by which formidable bodies are mastered and directed. The flesh-and-blood man is only the visible end of an invisible column of force reaching out of the infinite past into the momentary present,—only the material Symbol of an immaterial host. A contest between even twowills is a contest of phantom armies. The domination of many personalities by the simple will of one,—hinting the perception by the compelled of superior viewless powers behind the compeller,—is never to be interpreted by the old hypothesis of soul-equality. Only by scientific psychology can the mystery of certain formidable characters be even partly explained; but any explanation must rest upon the acceptance, in some form or other, of the immense evolutional fact of psychical inheritance. And psychical inheritance signifies the super-individual,—pre-existence revived in compound personality.

Yet, from our ethical standpoint, that super-individuality which we thus unconsciously allow in the very language used to express psychical domination, is a lower manifestation. Though working often for good, the power in itself is of evil; and the recognition of it by the subjugated is not a recognition of higher moral energy, but of a highermentalenergy signifying larger evolutional experience of wrong, deeper reserves of aggressive ingenuity, heavier capacities for the giving of pain. Called by no matter what euphemistic name, such power is brutal in its origin, and still allied to those malignities and ferocitiesshared by man with lower predatory creatures. But the beauty of the superindividual is revealed in that rarer power which the dead lend the living to win trust, to inspire ideals, to create love, to brighten whole circles of existence with the charm and wonder of a personality never to be described save in the language of light and music.

Now if we could photographicallydecomposea composite photograph so as to separate in order inverse all the impressions interblended to make it, such process would clumsily represent what really happens when the image of a strange face is telegraphed back—like a police-photograph—from the living retina to the mysterious offices of inherited memory. There, with the quickness of an electric flash, the shadow-face is decomposed into all the ancestral types combined in it; and the resulting verdict of the dead, though rendered only by indefinable sensation, is more trustworthy than any written certificate of character could ever be. But its trustworthiness is limited to thepotentialrelation of the individual seen to theindividual seeing. Upon different minds, according to the delicate balance of personality,—according to the qualitative sum of inherited experience in the psychical composition of the observer,—the same features will make very different impressions. A face that strongly repels one person may not less strongly attract another, and will produce nearly similar impressions only on groups of emotionally homogeneous natures. Certainly the fact of this ability to discern in the composition of faces that indefinable something which welcomes or which warns, does suggest the possibility of deciding some laws of ethical physiognomy; but such laws would necessarily be of a very general and simple kind, and their relative value could never equal that of the uneducated personal intuition.

How, indeed, should it be otherwise? What science could ever hope to measure the infinite possibilities of psychical combination? And the present in every countenance is a recombination of the past;—the living is always a resurrection of the dead. The sympathies and the fears, the hopes and the repulsions that faces inspire, are but revivals and reiterations,—echoes of sentiency created in millions of minds by immeasurable experience operating through immeasurable time. My friend of this hour, though no more identical with his forefathers than any single ripple of a current is identical with all the ripples that ever preceded it, is nevertheless by soul-composition one with myriads known and loved in other lands and in other lives,—in times recorded and in times forgotten,—in cities that still remain and in cities that have ceased to be,—by thousands of my vanished selves.

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