Chapter I: First Impressions 187 (5)

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, _is_ spiritual, 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[75] Blue jewels, blue eyes, blue flowers delight us; but in these the color accompanies either transparency or visible softness. It is perhaps because of the incongruity between hard opacity and blue that the sight of a book in sky-blue binding is unendurable. I can imagine nothing more atrocious.

[76] This essay was written several years ago. During 1897 I noticed for the first time since my arrival in Japan a sprinkling of dark greens and light-yellows in the fashions of the season; but the general tone of costume was little affected by these exceptions to older taste. The light-yellow appeared only in some girdles of children.

A Serenade

I

“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 were still; 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 a motive so simple,--one low long cooing motive, over and over again repeated, like a dove’s cry,--had a _strangeness_ of 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.

II

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.

III

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 uniquely _feminine_.

--“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...!

A Red Sunset

I

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 weirdness of 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?

II

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 the race, 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 and drums 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 he _feels_ it to be unpleasant,--independently of the question whether it tires his eyes.

III

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 following the 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 vast _crimson_ sunset 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 of _crimson 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 has been 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,--

... “_A’ the blude that’s shed on earth
Rins through the springs o’ that Countrie._”

But those very associations that make burning red unbearable to modern nerves must have already been enormously old when it first became the color of pomp and luxury. How then should such associations affect us unpleasantly now?

I would answer that the emotional suggestions of the color continued to be pleasurable for the adult, as they still are for the child, only while they remained more vague and much less voluminous than at present. Becoming intensified in the modern brain, they gradually ceased to yield pleasure,--somewhat as warmth increased to the degree of heat ceases to be pleasurable. Still later they became painful; and their actual painfulness exposes the fundamentally savage nature of those sensations of splendor and power which the color once called into play. And the intensification of the feeling evoked by red has not been due merely to later accumulation of inherited impressions, but also to the growth and development of emotions essentially antithetical to ideas of violence and pain, and yet inseparable from them. The moral sensibility of an era that has condemned not a few of the amusements of our forebears to the limbo of old barbarities,--the humanity of an age that refuses to believe in a hell of literal fire, that prohibits every brutal sport, that compels kindness to animals,--is offended by the cruel suggestiveness of the color. But within the slowly-unfolding brain of the child, this modern sensibility is not evolved;--and until it has been evolved, with the aid of experience and of education, the feeling aroused by such a color as vivid scarlet will naturally continue to be pleasurable rather than painful.

IV

While thus trying to explain why a color dignified as imperial in other centuries should have become offensive in our own, I found myself wondering whether most of our actual refinements might not in like manner become the vulgarities of a future age. Our standards of taste and our ideals of beauty can have only a value relative to conditions which are constantly changing. Real and ideal alike are transitory,--mere apparitional undulations in the flux of the perpetual Becoming. Perhaps the finest ethical or æsthetical sentiment of to-day will manifest itself in another era only as some extraordinary psychological atavism,--some rare individual reversion to the conditions of a barbarous past.

What in the meantime would be the fate of sensations that are even now becoming intolerable? Any faculty, mental or physical, however previously developed by evolutional necessities, would have a tendency to dwindle and disappear from the moment that it ceased to be either useful or pleasurable. Continuance of the power to perceive red would depend upon the possible future usefulness of that power to the race. Not without suggestiveness in this connection may be the fact that it represents the lowest rate of those ether-oscillations which produce color. Perhaps our increasing dislike to it indicates that power to distinguish it will eventually pass away--pass away in a sort of Daltonism at the inferior end of the color-scale. Such visual loss would probably be more than compensated by superior coincident specializations of retinal sensibility. A more highly organized generation might enjoy wonders of color now unimaginable, and yet never be able to perceive red,--not, at least, that red whose sensation is the spectral smouldering of the agonies and the furies of our evolutional past, the haunting of a horror innominable, immeasurable,--enormous phantom-menace of expired human pain.

Frisson

Some there may be who have never felt the thrill of a human touch; but surely these are few! Most of us in early childhood discover strange differences in physical contact;--we find that some caresses soothe, while others irritate; and we form in consequence various unreasoning likes and antipathies. With the ripening of youth we seem to feel these distinctions more and more keenly,--until the fateful day in which we learn that a certain feminine touch communicates an unspeakable shiver of delight,--exercises a witchcraft that we try to account for by theories of the occult and the supernatural. Age may smile at these magical fancies of youth; and nevertheless, in spite of much science, the imagination of the lover is probably nearer to truth than is the wisdom of the disillusioned.

We seldom permit ourselves in mature life to think very seriously about such experiences. We do not deny them; but we incline to regard them as nervous idiosyncrasies. We scarcely notice that even in the daily act of shaking hands with persons of either sex, sensations may be received which no physiology can explain.

I remember the touch of many hands,--the quality of each clasp, the sense of physical sympathy or repulsion aroused. Thousands I have indeed forgotten,--probably because their contact told me nothing in particular; but the strong experiences I fully recollect. I found that their agreeable or disagreeable character was often quite independent of the moral relation: but in the most extraordinary case that I can recall--(a strangely fascinating personality with the strangest of careers as poet, soldier, and refugee)--the moral and the physical charm were equally powerful and equally rare. “Whenever I shake hands with that man,” said to me one of many who had yielded to his spell, “I feel a warm shock go all through me, like a glow of summer.” Even at this moment when I think of that dead hand, I can feel it reached out to me over the space of twenty years and of many a thousand miles. Yet it was a hand that had killed....

* * * * *

These, with other memories and reflections, came to me just after reading a criticism on Mr. Bain’s evolutional interpretation of the thrill of pleasure sometimes given by the touch of the human skin. The critic asked why a satin cushion kept at a temperature of about 98° would not give the same thrill; and the question seemed to me unfair because, in the very passage criticised, Mr. Bain had sufficiently suggested the reason. Taking him to have meant--as he must have meant,--not that the thrill is given by any kind of warmth and softness, but only by the _peculiar_ warmth and softness of the human skin, his interpretation can scarcely be contested by a sarcasm. A satin cushion at a temperature of about 98° could not give the same sensation as that given by the touch of the human skin for reasons even much more simple than Mr. Bain implied,--since it is totally different from the human skin in substance, in texture, and in the all-important fact that it is not alive, but dead. Of course warmth and softness in themselves are not enough to produce the thrill of pleasure considered by Mr. Bain: under easily imaginable circumstances they may produce something of the reverse. Smoothness has quite as much to do with the pleasure of touch as either softness or warmth can have; yet a moist or a very dry smoothness may be disagreeable. Again, cool smoothness in the human skin is perhaps even more agreeable than warm smoothness; yet there is a cool smoothness common to many lower forms of life which causes a shudder. Whatever be those qualities making pleasurable the touch of a hand, for example, they are probably very many in combination, and they are certainly peculiar to the _living_ touch. No possible artificial combination of warmth and smoothness and softness combined could excite the same quality of pleasure that certain human touches give,--although, as other psychologists than Mr. Bain have observed, it may give rise to a fainter kind of agreeable feeling.

A special sensation can be explained only by special conditions. Some philosophers would explain the conditions producing this pleasurable thrill, or _frisson_, as mainly subjective; others, as mainly objective. Is it not most likely that either view contains truth;--that the physical cause must be sought in some quality, definable or indefinable, attaching to a particular touch; and that the cause of the coincident emotional phenomena should be looked for in the experience, not of the individual, but of the race?

* * * * *

Remembering that there can be no two tangible things exactly alike,--no two blades of grass, or drops of water, or grains of sand,--it ought not to seem incredible that the touch of one person should have power to impart a sensation different from any sensation producible by the touch of any other person. That such difference could neither be estimated nor qualified would not necessarily imply unimportance or even feebleness. Among the voices of the thousands of millions of human beings in this world, there are no two precisely the same;--yet how much to the ear and to the heart of wife or mother, child or lover, may signify the unspeakably fine difference by which each of a billion voices varies from every other! Not even in thought, much less in words, can such distinction be specified; but who is unfamiliar with the fact and with its immense relative importance?

That any two human skins should be absolutely alike is not possible. There are individual variations perceptible even to the naked eye,--for has not Mr. Galton taught us that the visible finger-marks of no two persons are the same? But in addition to differences visible--whether to the naked eye, or only under the microscope, there must be other differences of quality depending upon constitutional vigor, upon nervous and glandular activities, upon relative chemical composition of tissue. Whether touch be a sense delicate enough to discern such differences, would be, of course, a question for psycho-physics to decide,--and a question not simply of magnitudes, but of qualities of sensation. Perhaps it is not yet even legitimate to suppose that, just as by ear we can distinguish the qualitative differences of a million voices, so by touch we might be able to distinguish qualitative differences of surface scarcely less delicate. Yet it is worth while here to remark that the tingle or shiver of pleasure excited in us by certain qualities of voice, very much resembles the thrill given sometimes by the touch of a hand. Is it not possible that there may be recognized, in the particular quality of a living skin, something not less uniquely attractive than the indeterminable charm of what we call a bewitching voice?

Perhaps it is not impossible. But in the character of the _frisson_ itself there is a hint that the charm of the touch provoking it may be due to something much more deeply vital than any physical combination of smoothness, warmth and softness,--to something, as Mr. Bain has suggested, electric or magnetic. Human electricity is no fiction: every living body,--even a plant,--is to some degree electrical; and the electric conditions of no two organisms would be exactly the same. Can the thrill be partly accounted for by some individual peculiarity of these conditions? May there not be electrical differences of touch appreciable by delicate nervous systems,--differences subtle as those infinitesimal variations of timbre by which every voice of a million voices is known from every other?

Such a theory might be offered in explanation of the fact that the slightest touch of a particular woman, for example, will cause a shock of pleasure to men whom the caresses of other and fairer women would leave indifferent. But it could not serve to explain why the same contact should produce no effect upon some persons, while causing ecstasy in others. No purely physical theory can interpret all the mystery of the _frisson_. A deeper explanation is needed;--and I imagine that one is suggested by the phenomenon of “love _at first sight_.”

The power of a woman to inspire love at first sight does not depend upon some attraction visible to the common eye. It depends partly upon something objective which only certain eyes can see; and it depends partly upon some thing which no mortal can see,--_the psychical composition of the subject of the passion_. Nobody can pretend to explain in detail the whole enigma of first love. But a general explanation is suggested by evolutional philosophy,--namely, that the attraction depends upon an inherited individual susceptibility to special qualities of feminine influence, and subjectively represents a kind of superindividual recognition,--a sudden wakening of that inherited composite memory which is more commonly called “passional affinity.” Certainly if first love be evolutionally explicable, it means the perception by the lover of some thing differentiating the beloved from all other women,--something corresponding to an inherited ideal within himself, previously latent, but suddenly lighted and defined by result of that visual impression.

And like sight, though perhaps less deeply, do other of our senses reach into the buried past. A single strain of melody, the sweetness of a single voice--what thrill immeasurable will either make in the fathomless sleep of ancestral memory! Again, who does not know that speechless delight bestirred in us on rare bright days by something odorous in the atmosphere,--enchanting, but indefinable? The first breath of spring, the blowing of a mountain breeze, a south wind from the sea may bring this emotion,--emotion overwhelming, yet nameless as its cause,--an ecstasy formless and transparent as the air. Whatever be the odor, diluted to very ghostliness, that arouses this delight, the delight itself is too weirdly voluminous to be explained by any memory-revival of merely individual experience. More probably it is older even than human life,--reaches deeper into the infinite blind depth of dead pleasure and pain.

Out of that ghostly abyss also must come the thrill responding within us to a living touch,--touch electrical of man, questioning the heart,--touch magical of woman, invoking memory of caresses given by countless delicate and loving hands long crumbled into dust. Doubt it not!--the touch that makes a thrill within you is a touch that you have felt before,--sense-echo of forgotten intimacies in many unremembered lives!

Vespertina Cognitio

I

I doubt if there be any other form of terror that even approaches the fear of the supernatural, and more especially the fear of the supernatural in dreams. Children know this fear both by night and by day; but the adult is not likely to suffer from it except in slumber, or under the most abnormal conditions of mind produced by illness. Reason, in our healthy waking hours, keeps the play of ideas far above those deep-lying regions of inherited emotion where dwell the primitive forms of terror. But even as known to the adult in dreams only, there is no waking fear comparable to this fear,--none so deep and yet so vague,--none so unutterable. The indefiniteness of the horror renders verbal expression of it impossible; yet the suffering is so intense that, if prolonged beyond a certain term of seconds, it will kill. And the reason is that such fear is not of the individual life: it is infinitely more massive than any personal experience could account for;--it is prenatal, ancestral fear. Dim it necessarily is, because compounded of countless blurred millions of inherited fears. But for the same reason, its depth is abysmal.

The training of the mind under civilization has been directed toward the conquest of fear in general, and--excepting that ethical quality of the feeling which belongs to religion--of the supernatural in particular. Potentially in most of us this fear exists; but its sources are well-guarded; and outside of sleep it can scarcely perturb any vigorous mind except in the presence of facts so foreign to all relative experience that the imagination is clutched before the reason can grapple with the surprise.

Once only, after the period of childhood, I knew this emotion in a strong form. It was remarkable as representing the vivid projection of a dream-fear into waking consciousness; and the experience was peculiarly tropical. In tropical countries, owing to atmospheric conditions, the oppression of dreams is a more serious suffering than with us, and is perhaps most common during the siesta. All who can afford it pass their nights in the country; but for obvious reasons the majority of colonists must be content to take their siesta, and its consequences, in town.

The West-Indian siesta does not refresh like that dreamless midday nap which we enjoy in Northern summers. It is a stupefaction rather than a sleep,--beginning with a miserable feeling of weight at the base of the brain: it is a helpless surrender of the whole mental and physical being to the overpressure of light and heat. Often it is haunted by ugly visions, and often broken by violent leaps of the heart. Occasionally it is disturbed also by noises never noticed at other times. When the city lies all naked to the sun, stripped by noon of every shadow, and empty of wayfarers, the silence becomes amazing. In that silence the papery rustle of a palm-leaf, or the sudden sound of a lazy wavelet on the beach,--like the clack of a thirsty tongue,--comes immensely magnified to the ear. And this noon, with its monstrous silence, is for the black people the hour of ghosts. Everything alive is senseless with the intoxication of light;--even the woods drowse and droop in their wrapping of lianas, drunk with sun....

Out of the siesta I used to be most often startled, not by sounds, but by something which I can describe only as a sudden shock of thought. This would follow upon a peculiar internal commotion caused, I believe, by some abnormal effect of heat upon the lungs. A slow suffocating sensation would struggle up into the twilight-region between half-consciousness and real sleep, and there bestir the ghastliest imaginings,--fancies and fears of living burial. These would be accompanied by a voice, or rather the idea of a voice, mocking and reproaching:--“‘_Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun._’... Outside it is day,--tropical day,--primeval day! And you sleep!!... ‘_Though a man live many years and rejoice in them all, yet--_’ ... Sleep on!--all this splendor will be the same when your eyes are dust!... ‘_Yet let him remember the days of darkness_;--FOR THEY SHALL BE MANY!’”

* * * * *

How often, with that phantom crescendo in my ears, have I leaped in terror from the hot couch, to peer through the slatted shutters at the enormous light without--silencing, mesmerizing;--then dashed cold water over my head, and staggered back to the scorching mattress, again to drowse, again to be awakened by the same voice, or by the trickling of my own perspiration--a feeling not always to be distinguished from that caused by the running of a centipede! And how I used to long for the night, with its Cross of the South! Not because the night ever brought coolness to the city, but because it brought relief from the _weight_ of that merciless sunfire. For the feeling of such light is the feeling of a deluge of something ponderable,--something that drowns and dazzles and burns and numbs all at the same time, and suggests the idea of liquified electricity.

* * * * *

There are times, however, when the tropical heat seems only to thicken after sunset. On the mountains the nights are, as a rule, delightful the whole year round. They are even more delightful on the coast facing the trade-winds; and you may sleep there in a seaward chamber, caressed by a warm, strong breeze,--a breeze that plays upon you not by gusts or whiffs, but with a steady ceaseless blowing,--the great fanning wind-current of the world’s whirling. But in the towns of the other coast--nearly all situated at the base of wooded ranges cutting off the trade-breeze,--the humid atmosphere occasionally becomes at night something nameless,--something worse than the air of an overheated conservatory. Sleep in such a medium is apt to be visited by nightmare of the most atrocious kind.

My personal experience was as follows:--

II

I was making a tour of the island with a half-breed guide; and we had to stop for one night in a small leeward-coast settlement, where we found accommodation at a sort of lodging-house kept by an aged widow. There were seven persons only in the house that night,--the old lady, her two daughters, two colored female-servants, myself and my guide. We were given a single-windowed room upstairs, rather small,--otherwise a typical, Creole bedroom, with bare clean floor, some heavy furniture of antique pattern, and a few rocking-chairs. There was in one corner a bracket supporting a sort of household shrine--what the Creoles call a _chapelle_. The shrine contained a white image of the Virgin before which a tiny light was floating in a cup of oil. By colonial custom your servant, while travelling with you, sleeps either in the same room, or before the threshold; and my man simply lay down on a mat beside the huge four-pillared couch assigned to me, and almost immediately began to snore. Before getting into bed, I satisfied myself that the door was securely fastened.

* * * * *

The night stifled;--the air seemed to be coagulating. The single large window, overlooking a garden, had been left open,--but there was no movement in that atmosphere. Bats--very large bats,--flew soundlessly in and out;--one actually fanning my face with its wings as it circled over the bed. Heavy scents of ripe fruit--nauseously sweet--rose from the garden, where palms and plantains stood still as if made of metal. From the woods above the town stormed the usual night-chorus of tree-frogs, insects, and nocturnal birds,--a tumult not to be accurately described by any simile, but suggesting, through numberless sharp tinkling tones, the fancy of a wide slow cataract of broken glass. I tossed and turned on the hot hard bed, vainly trying to find one spot a little cooler than the rest. Then I rose, drew a rocking-chair to the window and lighted a cigar. The smoke hung motionless; after each puff, I had to blow it away. My man had ceased to snore. The bronze of his naked breast--shining with moisture under the faint light of the shrine-lamp,--showed no movement of respiration. He might have been a corpse. The heavy heat seemed always to become heavier. At last, utterly exhausted, I went back to bed, and slept.

* * * * *

It must have been well after midnight when I felt the first vague uneasiness,--_the suspicion_,--that precedes a nightmare. I was half-conscious, dream-conscious of the actual,--knew myself in that very room,--wanted to get up. Immediately the uneasiness grew into terror, because I found that I could not move. Something unutterable in the air was mastering will. I tried to cry out, and my utmost effort resulted only in a whisper too low for any one to hear. Simultaneously I became aware of a Step ascending the stair,--a muffled heaviness; and the real nightmare began,--the horror of the ghastly magnetism that held voice and limb,--the hopeless will-struggle against dumbness and impotence. The stealthy Step approached, but with lentor malevolently measured,--slowly, slowly, as if the stairs were miles deep. It gained the threshold,--waited. Gradually then, and without sound, the locked door opened; and the Thing entered, bending as it came,--a thing robed,--feminine,--reaching to the roof,--not to be looked at! A floor-plank creaked as It neared the bed;--and then--with a frantic effort--I woke, bathed in sweat; my heart beating as if it were going to burst. The shrine-light had died: in the blackness I could see nothing; but I thought I heard that Step retreating. I certainly heard the plank creak again. With the panic still upon me, I was actually unable to stir. The wisdom of striking a match occurred to me, but I dared not yet rise. Presently, as I held my breath to listen, a new wave of black fear passed through me; for I heard moanings,--long nightmare moanings,--moanings that seemed to be answering each other from two different rooms below. And then, close to me, my guide began to moan,--hoarsely, hideously. I cried to him:--

“Louis!--Louis!”

We both sat up at once. I heard him panting, and I knew that he was fumbling for his cutlass in the dark. Then, in a voice husky with fear, he asked:--

“_Missié, ess ou tanne?_” [Monsieur, est-ce que vous entendez?]

The moaners continued to moan,--always in crescendo: then there were sudden screams,--“_Madame!_”--“_Manzell!_”--and running of bare feet, and sounds of lamps being lighted, and, at last, a general clamor of frightened voices. I rose, and groped for the matches. The moans and the clamor ceased.

“_Missié_,” my man asked again, “_ess ou tè oué y?_” [Monsieur, est-ce que vous l’avez vue?]

--“_Ça ou le di?_” [Qu’est-ce que vous voulez dire?] I responded in bewilderment, as my fingers closed on the match-box.

--“_Fenm-là?_” he answered.... THAT WOMAN?

The question shocked me into absolute immobility. Then I wondered if I could have understood. But he went on in his patois, as if talking to himself:--

--“Tall, tall--high like this room, that Zombi. When She came the floor cracked. I heard--I saw.”

After a moment, I succeeded in lighting a candle, and I went to the door. It was still locked,--double-locked. No human being could have entered through the high window.

--“Louis!” I said, without believing what I said,--“you have been only dreaming.”

--“Missié,” he answered, “it was no dream. _She has been in all the rooms, touching people!_”

I said,--

--“That is foolishness! See!--the door is double-locked.”

Louis did not even look at the door, but responded:--

--“Door locked, door not locked, Zombi comes and goes.... I do not like this house.... Missié, leave that candle burning!”

He uttered the last phrase imperatively, without using the respectful _souplé_--just as a guide speaks at an instant of common danger; and his tone conveyed to me the contagion of his fear. Despite the candle, I knew for one moment the sensation of nightmare outside of sleep! The coincidences stunned reason; and the hideous primitive fancy fitted itself, like a certitude, to the explanation of cause and effect. The similarity of my vision and the vision of Louis, the creaking of the floor heard by us both, the visit of the nightmare to every room in succession,--these formed a more than unpleasant combination of evidence. I tried the planking with my foot in the place where I thought I had seen the figure: it uttered the very same loud creak that I had heard before. “_Ça pa ka sam révé_,” said Louis. No!--that was not like dreaming. I left the candle burning, and went back to bed--not to sleep, but to think. Louis lay down again, with his hand on the hilt of his cutlass.

* * * * *

I thought for a long time. All was now silent below. The heat was at last lifting; and occasional whiffs of cooler air from the garden announced the wakening of a land-breeze. Louis, in spite of his recent terror, soon began to snore again. Then I was startled by hearing a plank creak--quite loudly,--the same plank that I had tried with my foot. This time Louis did not seem to hear it. There was nothing there. It creaked twice more,--and I understood. The intense heat first, and the change of temperature later, had been successively warping and unwarping the wood so as to produce those sounds. In the state of dreaming, which is the state of imperfect sleep, noises may be audible enough to affect imagination strongly,--and may startle into motion a long procession of distorted fancies. At the same time it occurred to me that the almost concomitant experiences of nightmare in the different rooms could be quite sufficiently explained by the sickening atmospheric oppression of the hour.

There still remained the ugly similitude of the two dreams to be accounted for; and a natural solution of this riddle also, I was able to find after some little reflection. The coincidence had certainly been startling; but the similitude was only partial. That which my guide had seen in his nightmare was a familiar creation of West-Indian superstition--probably of African origin. But the shape that I had dreamed about used to vex my sleep in childhood,--a phantom created for me by the impression of a certain horrible Celtic story which ought not to have been told to any child blessed, or cursed, with an imagination.

III

Musing on this experience led me afterwards to think about the meaning of that fear which we call “the fear of darkness,” and yet is not really fear of darkness. Darkness, as a simple condition, never could have originated the feeling,--a feeling that must have preceded any definite idea of ghosts by thousands of ages. The inherited, instinctive fear, as exhibited by children, is not a fear of darkness in itself, but of indefinable danger associated with darkness. Evolutionally explained, this dim but voluminous terror would have for its primal element the impressions created by real experience--experience of something acting in darkness;--and the fear of the supernatural would mingle in it only as a much later emotional development. The primeval cavern-gloom lighted by nocturnal eyes;--the blackness of forest-gaps by river-marges, where destruction lay in wait to seize the thirsty;--the umbrages of tangled shores concealing horror;--the dusk of the python’s lair;--the place of hasty refuge echoing the fury of famished brute and desperate man;--the place of burial, and the fancied frightful kinship of the buried to the cave-haunters:--all these, and countless other impressions of the relation of darkness to death, must have made that ancestral fear of the dark which haunts the imagination of the child, and still betimes seizes the adult as he sleeps in the security of civilization.

Not all the fear of dreams can be the fear of the immemorial. But that strange nightmare-sensation of being held by invisible power exerted from a distance--is it quite sufficiently explained by the simple suspension of will-power during sleep? Or could it be a composite inheritance of numberless memories of _having been caught_? Perhaps the true explanation would suggest no prenatal experience of monstrous mesmerisms nor of monstrous webs,--nothing more startling than the evolutional certainty that man, in the course of his development, has left behind him conditions of terror incomparably worse than any now existing. Yet enough of the psychological riddle of nightmare remains to tempt the question whether human organic memory holds no record of extinct forms of pain,--pain related to strange powers once exerted by some ghastly vanished life.

The Eternal Haunter

This year the Tōkyō color-prints--_Nishiki-è_--seem to me of unusual interest. They reproduce, or almost reproduce, the color-charm of the early broadsides; and they show a marked improvement in line-drawing. Certainly one could not wish for anything prettier than the best prints of the present season.

My latest purchase has been a set of weird studies,--spectres of all kinds known to the Far East, including many varieties not yet discovered in the West. Some are extremely unpleasant; but a few are really charming. Here, for example, is a delicious thing by “Chikanobu,” just published, and for sale at the remarkable price of three _sen_!

Can you guess what it represents?... Yes, a girl,--but what kind of a girl? Study it a little.... Very lovely, is she not, with that shy sweetness in her downcast gaze,--that light and dainty grace, as of a resting butterfly?... No, she is not some Psyche of the most Eastern East, in the sense that you mean--but she is a soul. Observe that the cherry-flowers falling from the branch above, are passing _through_ her form. See also the folds of her robe, below, melting into blue faint mist. How delicate and vapory the whole thing is! It gives you the feeling of spring; and all those fairy colors are the colors of a Japanese spring-morning.... No, she is not the personification of any season. Rather she is a dream--such a dream as might haunt the slumbers of Far-Eastern youth; but the artist did not intend her to represent a dream.... You cannot guess? Well, she is a tree-spirit,--the Spirit of the Cherry-tree. Only in the twilight of morning or of evening she appears, gliding about her tree;--and whoever sees her must love her. But, if approached, she vanishes back into the trunk, like a vapor absorbed. There is a legend of one tree-spirit who loved a man, and even gave him a son; but such conduct was quite at variance with the shy habits of her race....

You ask what is the use of drawing the Impossible? Your asking proves that you do not feel the charm of this vision of youth,--this dream of spring. _I_ hold that the Impossible bears a much closer relation to fact than does most of what we call the real and the commonplace. The Impossible may not be naked truth; but I think that it is usually truth,--masked and veiled, perhaps, but eternal. Now to me this Japanese dream is true,--true, at least, as human love is. Considered even as a ghost it is true. Whoever pretends not to believe in ghosts of any sort, lies to his own heart. Every man is haunted by ghosts. And this color-print reminds me of a ghost whom we all know,--though most of us (poets excepted) are unwilling to confess the acquaintance.

* * * * *

Perhaps--for it happens to some of us--you may have seen this haunter, in dreams of the night, even during childhood. Then, of course, you could not know the beautiful shape bending above your rest: possibly you thought her to be an angel, or the soul of a dead sister. But in waking life we first become aware of her presence about the time when boyhood begins to ripen into youth.

This first of her apparitions is a shock of ecstasy, a breathless delight; but the wonder and the pleasure are quickly followed by a sense of sadness inexpressible,--totally unlike any sadness ever felt before,--though in her gaze there is only caress, and on her lips the most exquisite of smiles. And you cannot imagine the reason of that feeling until you have learned who she is,--which is not an easy thing to learn.

Only a moment she remains; but during that luminous moment all the tides of your being set and surge to her with a longing for which there is not any word. And then--suddenly!--she is not; and you find that the sun has gloomed, the colors of the world turned grey.

Thereafter enchantment remains between you and all that you loved before,--persons or things or places. None of them will ever seem again so near and dear as in other days.

Often she will return. Once that you have seen her she will never cease to visit you. And this haunting,--ineffably sweet, inexplicably sad,--may fill you with rash desire to wander over the world in search of somebody like her. But however long and far you wander, never will you find that somebody.

Later you may learn to fear her visits because of the pain they bring,--the strange pain that you cannot understand. But the breadth of zones and seas cannot divide you from her; walls of iron cannot exclude her. Soundless and subtle as a shudder of ether is the motion of her.

Ancient her beauty as the heart of man,--yet ever waxing fairer, forever remaining young. Mortals wither in Time as leaves in the frost of autumn; but Time only brightens the glow and the bloom of her endless youth.

All men have loved her;--all must continue to love her. But none shall touch with his lips even the hem of her garment.

All men adore her; yet all she deceives, and many are the ways of her deception. Most often she lures her lover into the presence of some earthly maid, and blends herself incomprehensibly with the body of that maid, and works such sudden glamour that the human gaze becomes divine,--that the human limbs shine through their raiment. But presently the luminous haunter detaches herself from the mortal, and leaves her dupe to wonder at the mockery of sense.

No man can describe her, though nearly all men have some time tried to do so. Pictured she cannot be,--since her beauty itself is a ceaseless becoming, multiple to infinitude, and tremulous with perpetual quickening, as with flowing of light.

There is a story, indeed, that thousands of years ago some marvellous sculptor was able to fix in stone a single remembrance of her. But this doing became for many the cause of sorrow supreme; and the Gods decreed, out of compassion, that to no other mortal should ever be given power to work the like wonder. In these years we can worship only;--we cannot portray.

But who is she?--what is she?... Ah! that is what I wanted you to ask. Well, she has never had a name; but I shall call her a tree-spirit.

The Japanese say that you can exorcise a tree-spirit,--if you are cruel enough to do it,--simply by cutting down her tree.

But you cannot exorcise the Spirit of whom I speak,--nor ever cut down her tree.

For her tree is the measureless, timeless, billion-branching Tree of Life,--even the World-Tree, Yggdrasil, whose roots are in Night and Death, whose head is above the Gods.

Seek to woo her--she is Echo. Seek to clasp her--she is Shadow. But her smile will haunt you into the hour of dissolution and beyond,--through numberless lives to come.

And never will you return her smile,--never, because of that which it awakens within you,--the pain that you cannot understand.

And never, never shall you win to her,--because she is the phantom light of long-expired suns,--because she was shaped by the beating of infinite millions of hearts that are dust,--because her witchery was made in the endless ebb and flow of the visions and hopes of youth, through countless forgotten cycles of your own incalculable past.

* * * * *

Transcriber’s note

A half-title page at the front of the book, and duplicate title headings which were printed before all except the first essay in each section, have been removed.

Illustrations have been moved next to the text which they illustrate, and so may not match the order in the List of Illustrations.