When you first saw her your heart leaped, and a tingling shocked through all your blood like a gush of electricity. Simultaneously your senses were changed, and long so remained.
That sudden throb was the awakening of your dead;—and that thrill was made by the swarming and the crowding of them;—and that change of sense was wrought only by their multitudinous desire,—for which reason it seemedan intensification. They remembered having loved a number of young persons somewhat resembling her. But where, or when, they did not recollect. They—(and They, of course, are You)—had drunk of Lethe many times since then.
The true name of the River of Forgetfulness is the River of Death—though you may not find authority for the statement in classical dictionaries.But the Greek story, that the waters of Lethe bring to weary souls oblivion of the past, is not quite true. One draught will indeed numb and becloud some forms of memory,—will efface the remembrance of dates and names and of other trifling details;—but a million draughts will not produce total oblivion. Even the destruction of the world would not have that result.Nothing is absolutely forgotten except the non-essential.The essential can, at most, only be dimmed by the drinking of Lethe.
It was because of billions of billions of memories amassed through trillions of lives, and blended within you into some one vague delicious image, that you came to believe a certain being more beautiful than the sun. The delusion signified that she happened to resemble this composite,—mnemonic shadowing of all the dead women related to the loves of your innumerable lives. And this first part of your experience, when you could not understand,—when you fancied the beloved a witch, and never even dreamed that the witchery might be the work of ghosts, was—the Period of Wonder.
Wonder at what? At the power and mystery of beauty. (For whether only within yourself, or partly within and partly outside of yourself, it was beauty that you saw, and that made you wonder.) But you will now remember that the beloved seemed lovelier than mortal woman really could be;—and the how and the why of that seeming are questions of interest.
With the power to see beauty we are born—somewhat, though not altogether, as we are born with the power to perceive color. Most human beings are able to discern something of beauty, or at least of approach to beauty—though the volume of the faculty varies in different individuals more than the volume of a mountain varies from that of a grain of sand. There are men born blind; but the normal being inherits some ideal of beauty. It may be vivid or it may be vague; but in every case it represents an accumulation of countless impressions received by the race,—countless fragments, of prenatal remembrance crystallized into one composite imagewithin organic memory, where, like the viewless image on a photographic plate awaiting development, it remains awhile in darkness absolute. And just because it is a composite of numberless race-memories of individual attraction, this ideal necessarily represents, in the superior mind, a something above the existing possible,—something never to be realized, much less surpassed, in the present state of humanity.
And what is the relation of this composite, fairer than human possibility, to the illusion of love? If it be permissible to speak one’s imagining of the unimaginable, I can dare a theory. When, in the hour of the ripeness of youth, there is perceived some objective comeliness faintly corresponding to certain outlines of the inherited ideal, at once a wave of emotion ancestral bathes the long-darkened image, defines it, illuminates it,—and so deludes the senses;—for the sense-reflection of the living objective becomes temporarily blended with the subjective phantasm,—with the beautiful luminous ghost made of centillions of memories. Thus to the lover the common suddenly becomes the impossible, because he really perceives blended with it the superindividual and superhuman. He is muchtoo deeply bewitched by that supernatural to be persuaded of his illusion, by any reasoning. What conquers his will is not the magic of anything living or tangible, but a charm sinuous and fugitive and light as fire,—a spectral snare prepared for him by myriads unthinkable of generations of dead.
So much and no more of theory I venture as to thehowof the riddle. But what of thewhy,—the reason of the emotion made by this ghostly beauty revived out of the measureless past? What should beauty have to do with a superindividual ecstasy older than all æsthetic feeling? What is the evolutional secret of the fascination of beauty?
I think that an answer can be given. But it will involve the fullest acceptance of this truth:—There is no such thing as beauty-in-itself.
All the riddles and contradictions of our æsthetic systems are natural consequences of the delusion that beauty is a something absolute, a transcendental reality, an eternal fact. It is true that the appearance we call beauty is the symbol of a fact,—is the visible manifestation of a development beyond the ordinary,—a bodily evolutionmore advanced than the existing average. In like manner what we call grace is a real manifestation of the economy of force. But since there can be no cosmic limit to evolutional possibilities, there never can be any standards of grace or of beauty that are not relative and essentially transitory; and there can be no physical ideals,—not even Greek ideals,—that might not in the course of human evolution or of superhuman evolution be so much more than realized as to become vulgarities of form. An ultimate of beauty is inconceivable and impossible; no term of æsthetics can ever represent more than the idea of a phase of the perpetual becoming, a temporary relation in comparative evolution. Beauty-in-itself is only the name of a sensation, or complex of sensation, mistaken for objectivity—much as sound and light and color were once imagined to be realities.
Yet what is it that attracts?—what is the meaning of the resistless emotion which we call the Sense of Beauty?
Like the sensing of light or color or perfume, the recognition of beauty is a recognition of fact. But that fact bears to the feeling evoked no more likeness than the reality of five hundred billions of ether-shiverings per second bears to the sensationof orange. Still in either case the fact is a manifestation of force. Representing higher evolution, the phenomenon termed beauty also represents a relatively superior fitness for life, a higher ability to fulfil the conditions of existence; and it is the non-conscious perception of this representation that makes the fascination. The longing aroused is not for any mere abstraction, but for greater completeness of faculty as means to the natural end. To the dead within each man, beauty signifies the presence of what they need most,—Power. They know, in despite of Lethe, that when they lived in comely bodies life was usually made easy and happy for them, and that when prisoned in feeble or in ugly bodies, they found life miserable or difficult. They want to live many times again in sound young bodies,—in shapes that assure force, health, joy, quickness to win and energy to keep the best prizes of life’s contest. They want, if possible, conditions better than any of the past, but in no event conditions worse.
And so the Riddle resolves itself as Memory,—immeasurable Memory of all bodily fitness for the ends of life: a Composite glorified, doubtless, by some equally measureless inherited sense of all the vanished joys ever associated with such fitness.
Infinite, may we not term it—this Composite? Aye, but not merely because the multitudes of dead memories that make it are unspeakable. Equally unspeakable the width and the depth of the range of them throughout the enormity of Time.... O lover, how slender the beautiful witch,—the ghost within the ghost of you! Yet the depth of that ghost is the depth of the Nebulous Zone bespanning Night,—the luminous Shadow that Egypt figured of old as Mother of the Sun and the Gods, curving her long white woman’s-body over the world. As a vapor of phosphorus, or wake of a ship in the night,—only so with naked eye can we behold it. But pierced by vision telescopic, it is revealed as the further side of the Ring of the Cosmos,—dim belt of millions of suns seemingly massed together likethe cells of a living body, yet so seeming only by reason of their frightful remoteness. Even thus really separated each from each in the awfulness of the Night of Time,—by silent profundities of centuries,—by interspaces of thousands and of myriads of years,—though collectively shaping to love’s desire but one dim soft sweet phantom,—are those million-swarming memories that make for youth its luminous dream of beauty.
The poet who sang that beautiful things bring sadness, named as beautiful things music and sunset and night, clear skies and transparent waters. Their sadness he sought to explain by vague soul-memories of Paradise. Very old-fashioned this explanation; but it contains a shadowing of truth. For the mysterious sadness associated with the sense of beauty is certainly not of this existence, but of countless anterior lives,—and therefore indeed a sadness of reminiscence.
Elsewhere I try to explain why certain qualities of music, and certain aspects of sunset produce sadness, and even more than sadness. As for impressions of night, however, I doubt if the emotion that night evokes in this nineteenth century can be classed with the sadness that beauty brings. A wonderful night,—a tropical night, for instance, lucent and lukewarm, with a new moon in it, curved and yellow like a ripe banana,—may inspire, among other minor feelingssomething of tenderness; but the great dominant emotion evoked by the splendor of the vision is not sadness. Breaking open the heavens to their highest, night widens modern thought over the bounds of life and death by the spectacle of that Infinite whose veil is day. Night also forces remembrance of the mystery of our tether,—the viewless force that holds us down to this wretched little ball of a world. And the result is cosmic emotion—vaster than any sense of the sublime,—drowning all other emotion,—but nowise akin to the sadness that beauty causes. Anciently the emotion of night must have been incomparably less voluminous. Men who believed the sky to be a solid vault, never could have felt, as we feel it, the stupendous pomp of darkness. And our ever-growing admiration of those awful astral questions in the Book of Job, is mainly due to the fact that, with the progress of science, they continue to make larger and larger appeal to forms of thought and feeling which never could have entered into the mind of Job.
But the sadness excited by the beauty of a perfect day, or by the charm of nature in her brightest moods, is a fact of another kind, andneeds a different explanation. Inherited the feeling must be,—but through what cumulation of ancestral pain? Why should the tenderness of an unclouded sky, the soft green sleep of summered valleys, the murmurous peace of sun-flecked shadows, inspire us with sadness? Why should any inherited emotion following an æsthetic perception be melancholy rather than joyous?... Of course I do not refer to the sense of vastness or permanence or power aroused by the sight of the sea, or by any vision of sea-like space, or by the majesty of colossal ranges. That is the feeling of the sublime,—always related to fear. Æsthetic sadness is related rather to desire.
“All beautiful things bring sadness,” is a statement as near to truth as most general statements; but the sadness and its evolutional history must vary according to circumstances. The melancholy awakened by the sight of a beautiful face cannot be identical with that awakened by the sight of a landscape, by the hearing of music, or by the reading of a poem. Yet there should be some one emotional element common to æsthetic sadness,—one general kind of feelingwhich would help us to solve the riddle of the melancholy inspired by the sight of beauty in Nature. Such a common element, I believe, is inherited longing,—inherited dim sense of loss, shadowed and qualified variously by interrelated feelings. Different forms of this inheritance would be awakened by different impressions of the beautiful. In the case of human beauty, the æsthetic recognition might be toned or shadowed by immemorial inheritance of pain—pain of longing, and pain of separation from numberless forgotten beloved. In the case of a color, a melody, an effect of sunshine or of moonlight, the sense-impressions appealing to æsthetic feeling might equally appeal to various ancestral memories of pain. The melancholy given by the sight of a beautiful landscape is certainly a melancholy of longing,—a sadness massive as vague, because made by the experience of millions of our dead.
“The æsthetic feeling for nature in its purity,” declares Sully, “is a modern growth ... the feeling for nature’s wild solitudes is hardly older than Rousseau.” Perhaps to many this will seem rather a strong statement in regard to the races of the West;—it is not true of the races of the Far East, whose art and poetry yield ancient proof to thecontrary. But no evolutionist would deny that the æsthetic love of nature has been developed through civilization, and that many abstract sentiments now involved with it are of very recent origin. Much of the sadness made in us by the sight of a beautiful landscape would therefore be of comparatively modern growth, though less modern than some of the higher qualities of æsthetic pleasure which accompany the emotion. I surmise it to be mainly the inherited pain of that separation from Nature which began with the building of walled cities. Possibly there is blended with it something of incomparably older sorrow—such as the immemorial mourning of man for the death of summer; but this, and other feelings inherited from ages of wandering, would revive more especially in the great vague melancholy that autumn brings into what we still call our souls.
Ever as the world increasing its wisdom increases its sorrow, our dwellers in cities built up to heaven more and more regret the joys of humanity’s childhood,—the ancient freedom of forest and peak and plain, the brightness of mountain water, the cool keen sweetness of thesea’s breath and the thunder-roll of its eternal epic. And all this regret of civilization for Nature irretrievably forsaken, may somehow revive in that great soft dim sadness which the beauty of a landscape makes us feel.
In one sense we are certainly wrong when we say that the loveliness of a scene brings tears to the eyes. It cannot be the loveliness of the scene;—it is the longing of generations quickening in the hearts of us. The beauty we speak of has no real existence: the emotion of the dead alone makes it seem to be,—the emotion of those long-buried millions of men and women who loved Nature for reasons very much simpler and older than any æsthetic emotion is. To the windows of the house of life their phantoms crowd,—like prisoners toward some vision of bright skies and flying birds, free hills and glimmering streams, beyond the iron of their bars. They behold their desire of other time,—the vast light and space of the world, the wind-swept clearness of azure, the hundred greens of wold and plain, the spectral promise of summits far away. They hear the shrilling and the whirr of happy winged things, the chorus of cicada and bird, the lisping and laughing of water, the under-tone of leafage astir. They know the smell of the season—all sharp sweet odors of sap, scents of flower and fruitage. They feel the quickening of the living air,—the thrilling of the great Blue Ghost.
But all this comes to them, filtered through the bars and veils of their rebirth, only as dreams of home to hopeless exile,—of child-bliss to desolate age,—of remembered vision to the blind!
“I remember,”—said an old friend, telling me the romance of his youth,—“that I could always find her cloak in the cloak-room without a light, when it was time to take her home. I used to know it in the dark, because it had the smell of sweet new milk....”
Which set me somehow to thinking of English dawns, the scent of hayfields, the fragrance of hawthorn days;—and cluster after cluster of memories lighted up in succession through a great arc of remembrance that flashed over half a lifetime even before my friend’s last words had ceased to sound in my ears. And then recollection smouldered into revery,—a revery about the riddle of the odor of youth.
That quality of theparfum de jeunessewhich my friend described is not uncommon,—though I fancy that it belongs to Northern rather than toSouthern races. It signifies perfect health and splendid vigor. But there are other and more delicate varieties of the attraction. Sometimes it may cause you to think of precious gums or spices from the uttermost tropics; sometimes it is a thin, thin sweetness,—like a ghost of musk. It is not personal (though physical personality certainly has an odor): it is the fragrance of a season,—of the springtime of life. But even as the fragrance of spring, though everywhere a passing delight, varies with country and climate, so varies the fragrance of youth.
Whether it be of one sex more than of another were difficult to say. We notice it chiefly in girls and in children with long hair, probably because it dwells especially in the hair. But it is always independent of artifice as the sweetness of the wild violet is. It belongs to the youth of the savage not less than to the youth of the civilized,—to the adolescence of the peasant not less than to that of the prince. It is not found in the sickly and the feeble, but only in perfect joyous health. Perhaps, like beauty, it may have some vague general relation to conditions ethical. Individual odors assuredly have,—as the discrimination of the dog gives witness.
Evolutionists have suggested that the pleasure we find in the perfume of a flower may be an emotional reflection from æons enormously remote, when such odor announced, to forms of ancestral life far lower than human, the presence of savory food. To what organic memory of association might be due, upon the same hypothesis, our pleasure in the perfume of youth?
Perhaps there were ages in which that perfume had significances more definite and special than any which we can now attach to it. Like the pleasure yielded by the fragrance of flowers, the pleasure given by the healthy fragrance of a young body may be, partly at least, a survival from some era in which odorous impressions made direct appeal to the simplest of life-serving impulses. Long dissociated from such possible primitive relation, odor of blossom and odor of youth alike have now become for us excitants of the higher emotional life,—of vague but voluminous and supremely delicate æsthetic feeling.
Like the feeling awakened by beauty, the pleasure of odor is a pleasure of remembrance,—is the magical appeal of a sensation to countless memories of countless lives. And even as the scent of a blossom evokes the ghosts of feelingsexperienced in millions of millions of unrecorded springs,—so the fragrance of youth bestirs within us the spectral survival of sensations associated with every vernal cycle of all the human existence that has vanished behind us.
And this fragrance of fresh being likewise makes invocation to ideal sentiment,—to parental scarcely less than to amorous tenderness,—because conjoined through immeasurable time with the charm and the beauty of childhood. Out of night and death is summoned by its necromancy more than a shadowy thrill from the rapture of perished passion,—more than a phantom-reflex from the delight of countless bridals;—even something also of the ecstasy of pressing lips of caress to the silky head of the first-born,—faint refluence from the forgotten joy of myriad millions of buried mothers.
Least common of the colors given by nature to bird, insect, and blossom is bright pure blue. Blue flowers are believed to proclaim for the plant that bears them a longer history of unchecked development than flowers of any other primary color suggest; and the high cost of the tint is perhaps hinted by the inability of the horticulturist to produce blue roses or blue chrysanthemums. Vivid blue appears in the plumage of some wonderful birds, and on the wings of certain amazing butterflies—especially tropical butterflies;—but usually under conditions that intimate a prodigious period of evolutional specialization. Altogether it would seem that blue was the latest pure color developed in the evolution of flower and scale and feather; and there is reason to believe that the power of perceiving blue was not acquired until after the powerof distinguishing red and green and yellow had already been gained.
Whether the hypothesis be true or false, it is certainly noteworthy that, of the primary colors, blue alone has remained, up to the present time, a color pleasurable in its purest intensity to the vision of highly civilized races. Bright red, bright green, bright orange, yellow, or violet, can be used but sparingly in our nineteenth-century attire and decoration. They have become offensive in their spectral purity because of the violence of the sensations that they give;—they remain grateful only to the rudimentary æsthetic feeling of children, of the totally uncultivated, or of savages. What modern beauty clothes herself in scarlet, or robes herself in fairy green? We cannot paint our chambers violet or saffron—the mere idea jars upon our nerves. But the color of heaven has not ceased to delight us. Sky-blue can still be worn by our fairest; and the luminous charm of azure ceilings and azure wall-surfaces—under certain conditions of lighting and dimension—is still recognized.
“Nevertheless,” some one may say, “we do not paint theoutsideof a building skyblue; and a skyblue façade would be even more disagreeable than an orange or a crimson façade.” This is true,—but not because the effect of the color upon large surfaces is necessarily displeasing. It is true only because vivid blue, unlike other bright colors, is never associated in our experience of nature with large and opaquesolidity. When mountains become blue for us, they also become ghostly and semi-transparent. Upon a housefront the color must appear monstrous, because giving the notion of the unnatural,—of a huge blue dead solidity tangibly proximate. But a blue ceiling, a blue vault, blue walls of corridors, may suggest the true relation of the color to depth and transparency, and make for us a grateful illusion of space and summer-light. Yellow, on the other hand, is a color well adapted to façades, because associated in memory with the beautiful effect of dying sunlight over pale broad surfaces.
But although yellow remains, after blue, the most agreeable of the primary colors, it cannot often be used for artistic purposes, like blue, in all its luminous strength. Pale tones of yellow,—especially creamy tones,—are capable of an immense variety of artistic employment; but this is not true of the brilliant and burning yellow. Only blue is always agreeable in its most vividpurity—providing that it be not used in massive displays so as to suggest the anomaly of blue hardness and blue opacity.[75]
In Japan, which may still be called the land of perfect good taste in chromatics—notwithstanding the temporary apparition of some discords due to Western influence,—almost any ordinary street-vista tells the story of the race-experience with color. The general tone of the vista is given by bluish greys above and dark blues below, sharply relieved by numerous small details of white and cool yellow. In this perspective the bluish-greys represent the tiling of roofs and awnings; the dark blues, shop-draperies; the bright whites, narrow strips of plastered surface; the pale yellows, mostly smooth naked wood, and glimpses of rush-mattings. The broader stretches of color are furthermore relieved and softened by the sprinkling of countless ideographs over draperies and shop-signs—black, (and sometimes red) against white; white orgold on blue. Strong yellows, greens, oranges, purples are invisible. In dress also greys and cool blues rule: when you do happen to see robes orhakamaall of one brilliant color,—worn by children or young girls,—that color is either a sky-blue, or a violet with only just enough red in it to kindle the azure,—a rainbow-violet of exquisite luminosity.[76]
But I wish to speak neither of the æsthetic value of blue in relation to arts and industries, nor of the optical significance of blue as the product of six hundred and fifty billion oscillations of the luminous ether per second. I only want to say something about the psychology of the color,—about its subjective evolutional history.
Certainly the same apparition of blue will bestirin different minds different degrees of feeling, and will set in motion, through memory-revival of unlike experiences, totally dissimilar operations of fancy. But independently of such psychological variation—mainly personal and superficial,—there can be no doubt that the color evokes in thegeneralmind one common quality of pleasurable feeling,—a vivacious thrill,—a tone of emotional activity unmistakably related to the higher zones of sentiency and of imagination.
In my own case the sight of vivid blue has always been accompanied by an emotion of vague delight—more or less strong according to the luminous intensity of the color. And in one experience of travel,—sailing to the American tropics,—this feeling rose into ecstasy. It was when I beheld for the first time the grandest vision of blue in this world,—the glory of the Gulf-Stream: a magical splendor that made me doubt my senses,—a flaming azure that looked as if a million summer skies had been condensed into pure fluid color for the making of it. The captain of the ship leaned over the rail with me; and we both watched the marvellous sea for a long time in silence. Then he said:—
“Fifteen years ago I took my wife with me on this trip—just after we were married, it was;—and she wondered at the water. She asked me to get her a silk dress of the very same color. I tried in ever so many places; but I never could get just what she wanted till a chance took me to Canton. I went round the Chinese silk-shops day after day, looking for that color. It wasn’t easy to find; but I did get it at last. Wasn’t she glad, though, when I brought it home to her!... She’s got it yet....”
Still, at times, in sleep, I sail southward again over the wonder of that dazzling surging azure;—then the dream shifts suddenly across the world, and I am wandering with the Captain through close dim queer Chinese streets,—vainly seeking a silk of the Blue of the Gulf-Stream. And it was this memory of tropic days that first impelled me to think about the reason of the delight inspired by the color.
Possibly the wave of pleasurable emotion excited by a glorious vision of blue is not more complex than the feeling aroused by any massive display of any other pure color;—but it is higher in the quality of its complexity. For the ideational elements that blend in the volume of it include not a few of the noblest,—not a few of those which also enter into the making of Cosmic Emotion.
Being the seeming color of the ghost of our planet,—of the breath of the life of the world,—blue is likewise the color apparent of the enormity of day and the abyss of the night. So the sensation of it makes appeal to the ideas of Altitude, of Vastness, and of Profundity;—
Also to the idea of Space in Time; for blue is the tint of distance and of vagueness;—
Also to the idea of Motion; for blue is the color of Vanishing and of Apparition. Peak and vale, bay and promontory, turn blue as we leave them; and out of blue they grow and define again as we glide homeward.
And therefore in the volume of feeling awakened in us by the sensation of blue, there should be something of the emotion associated with experience of change,—with countless ancestral sorrows of parting. But if there indeed be any such dim survival, it is utterly whelmed and lost in that all-radiant emotional inheritance related to Summer and Warmth,—to the joy of past humanity in the light of cloudless days.
Still more significant is the fact that although blue is a sacred color, the dominant tones of the feeling it evokes are gladness and tenderness. Blue speaks to us of the dead and of the gods, but never of their awfulness.
Now when we reflect that blue is the color of the idea of the divine, the color pantheistic, the color ethical,—thrilling most deeply into those structures of thought to which belong our sentiments of reverence and justice, of duty and of aspiration,—we may wonder why the emotion it calls up should be supremely gladsome. Is it because that sensuous race-experience of blue skies,—that measureless joy of the dead in light and warmth, which has been transmitted to each of us in organic memory,—is vastly older than thereligious idea, and therefore voluminous enough to drown any ethical feeling indirectly related to the color-sensation? Partly so, no doubt;—but I will venture another, and a very simple explanation:—
All moral pulsations in the wave of inherited feeling which responds to the impression of blue, belong only to the beautiful and tender aspects of faith.
And thus much having been ventured, I may presume a little further.
I imagine that for many of us one of the most powerful elements in this billow of pleasurable feeling evoked by the vision of blue,isspiritual, in the fullest ethical meaning of the word;—that under the fleeting surface-plexus of personal emotion empirically associated with the color, pulses like a tide the transmitted religious emotion of unnumbered ages;—and that, quickening and vivifying all inherited sense of blue as beauty, is the inherited lucent rapture of blue as the splendor mystical,—as the color of the everlasting Peace. Something of all human longing for all the Paradises ever imagined,—of all pre-existent trust in the promise of reunion after death,—of all expired dreams of unending youth and bliss,—may be revived for us, more or less faintly, in this thrill of the delight of azure. Even as through the jewel-radiance of the Tropic Stream pass undulations from the vaster deep,—with their sobbings and whisperings, their fugitive drift and foam,—so, through the emotion evoked by the vision of luminous blue, there may somehow quiver back to us out of the Infinite—(multitudinous like the billion ether-shiverings that make the blue sensation of a moment)—something of all the aspirations of the ancient faiths, and the power of the vanished gods, and the passion and the beauty of all the prayer ever uttered by lips of man.
“Broken” were too abrupt a word. My sleep was not broken, but suddenly melted and swept away by a flow of music from the night without,—music that filled me with expectant ecstasy by the very first gush of its sweetness: a serenade,—a playing of flutes and mandolines.
The flutes had dove-tones; and they cooed and moaned and purled;—and the mandolines throbbed through the liquid plaint of them, like a beating of hearts. The players I could not see: they were standing in heavy shadows flung into the street by a tropical moon,—shadows of plantain and of tamarind.
Nothing in all the violet gloom moved but that music, and the fire-flies,—great bright slow sparks of orange and of emerald. The warm air held its breath; the plumes of the palms werestill; and the haunting circle of the sea, blue even beneath the moon, lay soundless as a circle of vapor.
Flutes and mandolines—a Spanish melody—nothing more. Yet it seemed as if the night itself were speaking, or, out of the night some passional life long since melted into Nature’s mystery, but continuing to haunt the tepid, odorous, sparkling darkness of that strange world, which sleeps under the sun, and wakens only to the stars. And its utterance was the ghostly reiteration of rapture that had been, and never again could be,—an utterance of infinite tenderness and of immeasurable regret.
Never before had I felt how the simplest of music could express what no other art is able even to suggest;—never before had I known the astonishing possibilities of melody without ornament, without artifice,—yet with a charm as bewildering, as inapprehensible, as the Greek perception of the grace supreme.
Now nothing in perfect art can be only voluptuous; and this music, in despite of its caress, was immeasurably, ineffably sad. And the exquisite blending of melancholy with passion in amotive so simple,—one low long cooing motive, over and over again repeated, like a dove’s cry,—had astrangenessof beauty like the musical thought of a vanished time,—one rare survival, out of an era more warmly human than our own, of some lost art of melody.
The music hushed, and left me dreaming, and vainly trying to explain the emotion that it had made. Of one thing only I felt assured,—that the mystery was of other existences than mine.
For the living present, I reflected, is the whole dead past. Our pleasures and our pains alike are but products of evolution,—vast complexities of sentiency created by experience of vanished beings more countless than the sands of a myriad seas. All personality is recombination; and all emotions are of the dead. Yet some seem to us more ghostly than others,—partly because of their greater relative mystery, partly because of the immense power of the phantom waves composing them. Among pleasurable forms, the ghostliest are the emotion of first love, the emotion following the perception of the sublime in nature—of terrible beauty,—and the emotion of music. Why should they so be? Probably because the influences that arouse them thrill furthest into our forgotten past. Frightful as the depth of the abyss of Space is the depth of one thinking life,—measureless even by millions of ages;—and who may divine how profoundly in certain personalities the mystery can be moved. We only know that the deeper the thrilling, the heavier the wave responding, and the weirder the result,—until those profundities are reached of which a single surge brings instant death, or makes perpetual ruin of the delicate structures of thought.
Now any music that makes powerful appeal to the emotion of love, awakening the passional latency of the past within us, must inevitably revive dead pain not less than dead delight. Pain of the conquest of will by a mystery resistless and pitiless, the torture of doubt, the pangs of rivalry, the terror of impermanency,—shadows of these and many another sorrow have had their part in the toning of that psychical inheritance which makes at once love’s joy and love’s anguish, and grows forever from birth to birth.
And thus it may happen that a child, innocent of passion or of real pain, is moved even to tears by music uttering either. Unknowingly he feels in that utterance a shadowing of the sorrow of numberless vanished lives.
But it seemed to me that the extraordinary emotion awakened by that tropical melody needed an explanation more qualitative than the explanation above attempted. I felt sure that the dead past to which the music had made appeal must have been a special past,—that some particular class or group of emotional memories had been touched. Yet what class?—what group? For the time being, I could not even venture a guess.
Long afterwards, however, some chance happening revived for me with surprising distinctness the memory of the serenade;—and simultaneously, like a revelation, came the certainty that the whole spell of the melody—all its sadness and all its sweetness—had been supremely and uniquelyfeminine.
—“Assuredly,” I reflected, as the new conviction grew upon me, “the primal source of all human tenderness has been the Eternal Feminine.... Yet how should melody uttering only the soul of woman have been composed by man, and bestir within man this innominable quickening of emotional reminiscence?”
The answer shaped itself at once,—
—“Every mortal man has been many millions of times a woman.”
Undoubtedly in either sex survives the sum of the feelings and of the memories of both. But some rare experience may appeal at times to the feminine element of personality alone,—to one half only of the phantom-world of Self,—leaving the other hemisphere dormant and unillumed. And such experience had found embodiment in the marvellous melody of the serenade which I had heard.
That tremulous sweetness was never masculine; that passional sadness never was of man:—unisexual both and inseparably blended into a single miracle of tone-beauty. Echoing far into the mystery of my own past, the enchantment of that tone had startled from their sleep of ages countless buried loves, and set the whole delicate swarm fluttering in some delicious filmy agony of revival,—set them streaming and palpitating through the Night of Time,—like those myriads eddying forever through the gloom of the vision of Dante.
They died with the music and the moon,—but not utterly. Whenever in dream the memory of that melody returns, again I feel the long soft shuddering of the dead,—again I feel the faint wings spread and thrill, responsive to the cooing of those spectral flutes, to the throbbing of those shadowy mandolines. And the elfish ecstasy of their thronging awakes me; but always with my wakening the delight passes, and in the dark the sadness only lingers,—unutterable,—infinite...!
The most stupendous apparition of red that I ever saw was a tropical sunset in a cloudless sky,—a sunset such as can be witnessed only during exceptional conditions of atmosphere. It began with a flaming of orange from horizon to zenith; and this quickly deepened to a fervid vermilion, through which the crimson disk glared like the cinder of a burnt-out star. Sea, peak, and palm caught the infernal glow; and I became conscious of a vague strange horror within myself,—a sense of distress like that which precedes a nightmare. I could not then explain the feeling;—I only knew that the color had aroused it.
But how aroused it?—I later asked myself. Common theories about the ugly sensation of bright red could not explain for me the weirdnessof that experience. As for the sanguine associations of the color, they could interpret little in my case; for the sight of blood had never affected my nerves in the least. I thought that the theory of psychical inheritance might furnish some explanation;—but how could it meet the fact that a color, which the adult finds insufferable, continues to delight the child?
All ruddy tones, however, are not unpleasant to refined sensibility: some are quite the reverse,—as, for example, the various tender colors called pink or rose. These appeal to very agreeable kinds of sensuous experience: they suggest delicacy and softness; they awaken qualities of feeling totally different from those excited by vermilion or scarlet. Pink, being the tint of the blossoming of flowers and the blossoming of youth,—of the ripeness of fruit and the ripeness of flesh, is ever associated with impressions of fragrance and sweetness, and with memories of beautiful lips and cheeks.
No: it is only the pure brilliant red, the fervid red, that arouses sinister feeling. Experience with this color seems to have been the same even in societies evolved under conditions utterly unlike those of our own history,—Japan being a significant example. The more refined and humane a civilization becomes, the less are displays of the color tolerated in its cultivated circles. But how are we to account for that pleasure which bright red still gives to the children of the people who detest it?
Many sensations which delighted us as children, prove to us either insipid or offensive in adult life. Why? Because there have grown up with our growth feelings which, though now related to them, were dormant during childhood; ideas now associated with them, but undeveloped during childhood; and experiences connected with them, never imagined in childhood.
For the mind, at our birth, is even less developed than the body; and its full ripening demands very much more time than is needed for the perfect bodily growth. Both by his faults and by his virtues the child resembles the savage, because the instincts and the emotions of the primitive man are the first to mature within him;—and they are the first to mature in the individual because they were the first evolved in the history of therace, being the most necessary to self-maintenance. That in later adult life they take a very inferior place is because the nobler mental and moral qualities—comparatively recent products of social discipline and civilized habit—have at last gained massiveness enough to dominate them under normal conditions;—have become like powerful new senses upon which the primitive emotional nature learns to depend for guidance.
All emotions are inheritances; but the higher, because in evolutional order the latest, develop only with the complete unfolding of the brain. Some, ethically considered the very loftiest, are said to develop only in old age,—to which they impart a particular charm. Other faculties also of a high order, chiefly æsthetic, would seem in the average of cases to mature in middle life. And to this period of personal evolution probably belongs the finer sense of beauty in color,—a much simpler faculty than the ethical sense, though possibly related to it in ways unsuspected.
Vivid colors appeal to the rudimentary æsthetic sense of our children, as they do to the æsthetic sense of savages; but the civilized adult dislikes most of the very vivid colors: they exasperate his nerves like an excessive crash of brass anddrums during a cheap orchestral performance. Cultured vision especially shrinks from a strong blaze of red. Only the child delights in vermilion and scarlet. Growing up he gradually learns to think of what we call “loud red” as vulgar, and to dislike it much more than did his less delicate ancestors of the preceding century. Education helps him to explain why he thinks it vulgar, but not to explain why hefeelsit to be unpleasant,—independently of the question whether it tires his eyes.
And now I come back to the subject of that tropical sunset.
Even in the common æsthetic emotion excited by the spectacle of any fine sunset, there are elements of feeling ancient as the race,—dim melancholy, dim fear, inherited from ages when the dying of the day was ever watched with sadness and foreboding. After that mighty glow, the hours of primeval horror,—the fear of blackness, the fear of nocturnal foes, the fear of ghosts. These, and other weird feelings,—independently of the physical depression followingthe withdrawal of sunlight,—would by inheritance become emotionally related to visions of sundown; and the primitive horror would at last be evolutionally transmuted to one elemental tone of the modern sublime. But the spectacle of a vastcrimsonsunset would awaken feelings less vague than the sense of the sublime,—feelings of a definitely sinister kind. The very color itself would make appeal to special kinds of inherited feelings, simply because of its relation to awful spectacles,—the glare of the volcano-summit, the furious vermilion of lava, the raging of forest-fires, the overglow of cities kindling in the track of war, the smouldering of ruin, the blazing of funeral-pyres. And in this lurid race-memory of fire as destroyer,—as the “ravening ghost” of Northern fancy,—there would mingle a vague distress evolved through ancestral experience ofcrimson heat in relation to pain,—an organic horror. And the like tremendous color in celestial phenomena would revive also inherited terror related of old to ideas of the portentous and of the wrath of gods.
Probably the largest element of the unpleasant feeling aroused in man by this angry color hasbeen made by the experience of the race with fire. But in even the most vivid red there is always some suggestion of passion, and of the tint of blood. Inherited emotion related to the sight of death must be counted among the elements of the sinister feeling that the hue excites. Doubtless for the man, as for the bull, the emotional wave called up by displays of violent red, is mostly the creation of impressions and of tendencies accumulated through all the immense life of the race; and, as in the old story of Thomas the Rhymer, we can say of our only real Fairy-land, our ghostly past,—