Chapter IV: Part 4

"O my dear mother," answered O-Kichi, "what is this that you ask
me to do? The closeness of the relation between Seiza and me is
the closeness of the relation of the ink to the paper that it
penetrates.[113] Therefore, whatever may happen, O mother of
mine, to separate from Seiza is more than I can bear."

_Yanrei!_

[113] Lit.:--"that affinity as-for, ink-and-paper-soaked-like
affinity."

Then, the father, having called Seiza to the innermost private
room, thus spoke to him:--"I called you here only to tell you
this: You have turned the mind of our daughter away from what is
right; and even to hear of such a matter is not to be borne.
Pack up your things at once, and go!--to-day is the utmost limit
of the time that you remain in this house."

_Yanrei!_

Now Seiza was a native of Osaka. Without saying more than
"Yes--yes," he obeyed and went away, returning to his home.
There he remained four or five days, thinking only of O-Kichi.
And because of his longing for her, he fell sick; and as there
was no cure and no hope for him, he died.

_Yanrei!_

Then one night O-Kichi, in a moment of sleep, saw the face of
Seiza close to her pillow,--so plainly that she could not tell
whether it was real, or only a dream. And rising up, she looked
about; but the form of Seiza had vanished.

_Yanrei!_

Because of this she made up her mind to go at once to the house
of Seiza. And, without being seen by any one, she fled from the
home of her parents.

_Yanrei!_

When she came to the ferry at the next village, she did not take
the boat, but went round by another road; and making all haste
she found her way to the city of Osaka. There she asked for the
house of Seiza; and she learned that it was in a certain street,
the third house from a certain bridge.

_Yanrei!_

Arriving at last before the home of Seiza, she took off her
travelling hat of straw; and seating herself on the threshold
of the entrance, she cried out:--"Pardon me kindly!--is not this
the house of Master Seiza?"

_Yanrei!_

Then--O the pity of it!--she saw the mother of Seiza, weeping
bitterly, and holding in her hand a Buddhist rosary. "O my good
young lady," the mother of Seiza asked, "whence have you come;
and whom do you want to see?"

_Yanrei!_

And O-Kichi said:--"I am the daughter of the thread-merchant
of Kyoto. And I have come all the way here only because of the
relation that has long existed between Master Seiza and myself.
Therefore, I pray you, kindly permit me to see him."

_Yanrei!_

"Alas!" made answer the mother, weeping, "Seiza, whom you have
come so far to see, is dead. To-day is the seventh day from the
day on which he died." ... Hearing these words, O-Kichi herself
could only shed tears.

_Yanrei!_

But after a little while she took her way to the cemetery. And
there she found the sotoba[114] erected above the grave of
Seiza; and leaning upon it, she wept aloud.

_Yanrei!_

[114] A wooden lath, bearing Buddhist texts, planted
above graves. For a full account of the sotoba see
_my Exotics and Retrospectives_: "The Literature
of the Dead."

Then--how fearful a thing is the longing of a person[115]--the
grave of Seiza split asunder; and the form of Seiza rose up
therefrom and spoke.

_Yanrei!_

[115] In the original:--_Hito no omoi wa osoroshi mono
yo!_--("how fearful a thing is the thinking of a
person!"). The word _omoi_, used here in the sense
of "longing," refers to the weird power of Seiza's
dying wish to see his sweetheart. Even after his
burial, this longing has the strength to burst
open the tomb.

--In the old English ballad of "William and
Marjorie" (see Child: vol. ii. p. 151) there is
also a remarkable fancy about the opening and
closing of a grave:--

She followed him high, she followed him low,
Till she came to yon churchyard green;
_And there the deep grave opened up_,
And young William he lay down.

"Ah! is not this O-Kichi that has come? Kind indeed it was to
have come to me from so far away! My O-Kichi, do not weep thus.
Never again--even though you weep--can we be united in this
world. But as you love me truly, I pray you to set some fragrant
flowers before my tomb, and to have a Buddhist service said for
me upon the anniversary of my death."

_Yanrei!_

And with these words the form of Seiza vanished. "O wait, wait
for me!" cried O-Kichi,--"wait one little moment![116] I cannot
let you return alone!--I shall go with you in a little time!"

_Yanrei!_

[116] With this episode compare the close of the English
ballad "Sweet William's Ghost" (Child: vol. ii.,
page 148):--

"O stay, my only true love, stay!"
The constant Margaret cried:
Wan grew her cheeks; she closed her een,
Stretched her soft limbs, and died.

Then quickly she went beyond the temple-gate to a moat some four
or five _cho_[117] distant; and having filled her sleeves with
small stones, into the deep water she cast her forlorn body.

_Yanrei!_

[117] A _cho_ is about one fifteenth of a mile.

And now I shall terminate this brief excursion into unfamiliar song-fields by the citation of two Buddhist pieces. The first is from the famous work _Gempei Seisuiki_ ("Account of the Prosperity and Decline of the Houses of Gen and Hei"), probably composed during the latter part of the twelfth, or at the beginning of the thirteenth century. It is written in the measure called _Imayo_,--that is to say, in short lines alternately of seven and of five syllables (7, 5; 7, 5; 7, 5, _ad libitum_). The other philosophical composition is from a collection of songs called _Ryutachi-bushi_ ("Ryutachi Airs"), belonging to the sixteenth century:--

I

(_Measure, Imayo_)

Sama mo kokoro mo
Kawaru kana!
Otsuru namida wa
Taki no mizu:
Myo-ho-renge no
Ike to nari;
Guze no fune ni
Sao sashite;
Shizumu waga mi wo
Nose-tamae!

Both form and mind--
Lo! how these change!
The falling of tears
Is like the water of a cataract.
Let them become the Pool
Of the Lotos of the Good Law!
Poling thereupon
The Boat of Salvation,
Vouchsafe that my sinking
Body may ride!

II

(_Period of Bunroku--1592-1596_)

Who twice shall live his youth?
What flower faded blooms again?
Fugitive as dew
Is the form regretted,
Seen only
In a moment of dream.

FANTASIES

[Decoration]

... Vainly does each, as he glides,
Fable and dream
Of the lands which the River of Time
Had left ere he woke on its breast,
Or shall reach when his eyes have
been closed.
MATTHEW ARNOLD

Noctilucae

[Decoration]

THE moon had not yet risen; but the vast of the night was all seething with stars, and bridged by a Milky Way of extraordinary brightness. There was no wind; but the sea, far as sight could reach, was running in ripples of fire,--a vision of infernal beauty. Only the ripplings were radiant (between them was blackness absolute);--and the luminosity was amazing. Most of the undulations were yellow like candle-flame; but there were crimson lampings also,--and azure, and orange, and emerald. And the sinuous flickering of all seemed, not a pulsing of many waters, but a laboring of many wills,--a fleeting conscious and monstrous,--a writhing and a swarming incalculable, as of dragon-life in some depth of Erebus.

And life indeed was making the sinister splendor of that spectacle--but life infinitesimal, and of ghostliest delicacy,--life illimitable, yet ephemeral, flaming and fading in ceaseless alternation over the whole round of waters even to the sky-line, above which, in the vaster abyss, other countless lights were throbbing with other spectral colors.

* * * * *

Watching, I wondered and I dreamed. I thought of the Ultimate Ghost revealed in that scintillation tremendous of Night and Sea;--quickening above me, in systems aglow with awful fusion of the past dissolved, with vapor of the life again to be;--quickening also beneath me, in meteor-gushings and constellations and nebulosities of colder fire,--till I found myself doubting whether the million ages of the sun-star could really signify, in the flux of perpetual dissolution, anything more than the momentary sparkle of one expiring noctiluca.

Even with the doubt, the vision changed. I saw no longer the sea of the ancient East, with its shudderings of fire, but that Flood whose width and depth and altitude are one with the Night of Eternity,--the shoreless and timeless Sea of Death and Birth. And the luminous haze of a hundred millions of suns,--the Arch of the Milky Way,--was a single smouldering surge in the flow of the Infinite Tides.

* * * * *

Yet again there came a change. I saw no more that vapory surge of suns; but the living darkness streamed and thrilled about me with infinite sparkling; and every sparkle was beating like a heart,--beating out colors like the tints of the sea-fires. And the lampings of all continually flowed away, as shivering threads of radiance, into illimitable Mystery....

Then I knew myself also a phosphor-point,--one fugitive floating sparkle of the measureless current;--and I saw that the light which was mine shifted tint with each changing of thought. Ruby it sometimes shone, and sometimes sapphire: now it was flame of topaz; again, it was fire of emerald. And the meaning of the changes I could not fully know. But thoughts of the earthly life seemed to make the light burn red; while thoughts of supernal being,--of ghostly beauty and of ghostly bliss,--seemed to kindle ineffable rhythms of azure and of violet.

* * * * *

But of white lights there were none in all the Visible. And I marvelled.

Then a Voice said to me:--

"The White are of the Altitudes. By the blending of the billions they are made. Thy part is to help to their kindling. Even as the color of thy burning, so is the worth of thee. For a moment only is thy quickening; yet the light of thy pulsing lives on: by thy thought, in that shining moment, thou becomest a Maker of Gods."

A Mystery of Crowds

[Decoration]

WHO has not at some time leaned over the parapet of a bridge to watch the wrinklings and dimplings of the current below,--to wonder at the trembling permanency of surface-shapes that never change, though the substance of them is never for two successive moments the same? The mystery of the spectacle fascinates; and it is worth thinking about. Symbols of the riddle of our own being are those shuddering forms. In ourselves likewise the substance perpetually changes with the flow of the Infinite Stream; but the shapes, though ever agitated by various inter-opposing forces, remain throughout the years.

And who has not been fascinated also by the sight of the human stream that pours and pulses through the streets of some great metropolis? This, too, has its currents and counter-currents and eddyings,--all strengthening or weakening according to the tide-rise or tide-ebb of the city's sea of toil. But the attraction of the greater spectacle for us is not really the mystery of motion: it is rather the mystery of man. As outside observers we are interested chiefly by the passing forms and faces,--by their intimations of personality, their suggestions of sympathy or repulsion. We soon cease to think about the general flow. For the atoms of the human current are visible to our gaze: we see them walk, and deem their movements sufficiently explained by our own experience of walking. And, nevertheless, the motions of the visible individual are more mysterious than those of the always invisible molecule of water.--I am not forgetting the truth that all forms of motion are ultimately incomprehensible: I am referring only to the fact that our common relative knowledge of motions, which are supposed to depend upon will, is even less than our possible relative knowledge of the behavior of the atoms of a water-current.

* * * * *

Every one who has lived in a great city is aware of certain laws of movement which regulate the flow of population through the more crowded thoroughfares. (We need not for present purposes concern ourselves about the complex middle-currents of the living river, with their thunder of hoofs and wheels: I shall speak of the side-currents only.) On either footpath the crowd naturally divides itself into an upward and a downward stream. All persons going in one direction take the right-hand side; all going in the other direction take the left-hand side. By moving with either one of these two streams you can proceed even quickly; but you cannot walk against it: only a drunken or insane person is likely to attempt such a thing. Between the two currents there is going on, by reason of the pressure, a continual self-displacement of individuals to left and right, alternately,--such a yielding and swerving as might be represented, in a drawing of the double-current, by zigzag medial lines ascending and descending. This constant yielding alone makes progress possible: without it the contrary streams would quickly bring each other to a standstill by lateral pressure. But it is especially where two crowd-streams intersect each other, as at street-angles, that this systematic self-displacement is worthy of study. Everybody observes the phenomenon; but few persons think about it. Whoever really thinks about it will discover that there is a mystery in it,--a mystery which no individual experience can fully explain.

* * * * *

In any thronged street of a great metropolis thousands of people are constantly turning aside to left or right in order to pass each other. Whenever two persons walking in contrary directions come face to face in such a press, one of three things is likely to happen:--Either there is a mutual yielding,--or one makes room for the other,--or else both, in their endeavor to be accommodating, step at once in the same direction, and as quickly repeat the blunder by trying to correct it, and so keep dancing to and fro in each other's way,--until the first to perceive the absurdity of the situation stands still, or until the more irritable actually pushes his _vis-a-vis_ to one side. But these blunders are relatively infrequent: all necessary yielding, as a rule, is done quickly and correctly.

Of course there must be some general law regulating all this self-displacement,--some law in accord with the universal law of motion in the direction of least resistance. You have only to watch any crowded street for half an hour to be convinced of this. But the law is not easily found or formulated: there are puzzles in the phenomenon.

* * * * *

If you study the crowd-movement closely, you will perceive that those encounters in which one person yields to make way for the other are much less common than those in which both parties give way. But a little reflection will convince you that, even in cases of mutual yielding, one person must of necessity yield sooner than the other,--though the difference in time of the impulse-manifestation should be--as it often is--altogether inappreciable. For the sum of character, physical and psychical, cannot be precisely the same in two human beings. No two persons can have exactly equal faculties of perception and will, nor exactly similar qualities of that experience which expresses itself in mental and physical activities. And therefore in every case of apparent mutual yielding, the yielding must really be successive, not simultaneous. Now although what we might here call the "personal equation" proves that in every case of mutual yielding one individual necessarily yields sooner than the other, it does not at all explain the mystery of the individual impulse in cases where the yielding is not mutual;--it does not explain why you feel at one time that you are about to make your _vis-a-vis_ give place, and feel at another time that you must yourself give place. What originates the feeling?

A friend once attempted to answer this question by the ingenious theory of a sort of eye-duel between every two persons coming face to face in a street-throng; but I feel sure that his theory could account for the psychological facts in scarcely half-a-dozen of a thousand such encounters. The greater number of people hurrying by each other in a dense press rarely observe faces: only the disinterested idler has time for that. Hundreds actually pass along the street with their eyes fixed upon the pavement. Certainly it is not the man in a hurry who can guide himself by ocular snap-shot views of physiognomy;--he is usually absorbed in his own thoughts.... I have studied my own case repeatedly. While in a crowd I seldom look at faces; but without any conscious observation I am always able to tell when I should give way, or when my _vis-a-vis_ is going to save me that trouble. My knowledge is certainly intuitive--a mere knowledge of feeling; and I know not with what to compare it except that blind faculty by which, in absolute darkness, one becomes aware of the proximity of bulky objects without touching them. And my intuition is almost infallible. If I hesitate to obey it, a collision is the invariable consequence.

Furthermore, I find that whenever automatic, or at least semi-conscious, action is replaced by reasoned action--in plainer words, whenever I begin to think about my movements--I always blunder. It is only while I am thinking of other matters,--only while I am acting almost automatically,--that I can thread a dense crowd with ease. Indeed, my personal experience has convinced me that what pilots one quickly and safely through a thick press is not conscious observation at all, but unreasoning, intuitive perception. Now intuitive action of any kind represents inherited knowledge, the experience of past lives,--in this case the experience of past lives incalculable.

Utterly incalculable.... Why do I think so? Well, simply because this faculty of intuitive self-direction in a crowd is shared by man with very inferior forms of animal being,--evolutional proof that it must be a faculty immensely older than man. Does not a herd of cattle, a herd of deer, a flock of sheep, offer us the same phenomenon of mutual yielding? Or a flock of birds--gregarious birds especially: crows, sparrows, wild pigeons? Or a shoal of fish? Even among insects--bees, ants, termites--we can study the same law of intuitive self-displacement. The yielding, in all these cases, must still represent an inherited experience unimaginably old. Could we endeavor to retrace the whole course of such inheritance, the attempt would probably lead us back, not only to the very beginnings of sentient life upon this planet, but further,--back into the history of non-sentient substance,--back even to the primal evolution of those mysterious tendencies which are stored up in the atoms of elements. Such atoms we know of only as points of multiple resistance,--incomprehensible knittings of incomprehensible forces. Even the tendencies of atoms doubtless represent accumulations of inheritance----but here thought checks with a shock at the eternal barrier of the Infinite Riddle.

Gothic Horror

[Decoration]

I

LONG before I had arrived at what catechisms call the age of reason, I was frequently taken, much against my will, to church. The church was very old; and I can see the interior of it at this moment just as plainly as I saw it forty years ago, when it appeared to me like an evil dream. There I first learned to know the peculiar horror that certain forms of Gothic architecture can inspire.... I am using the word "horror" in a classic sense,--in its antique meaning of ghostly fear.

On the very first day of this experience, my child-fancy could place the source of the horror. The wizened and pointed shapes of the windows immediately terrified me. In their outline I found the form of apparitions that tormented me in sleep;--and at once I began to imagine some dreadful affinity between goblins and Gothic churches. Presently, in the tall doorways, in the archings of the aisles, in the ribbings and groinings of the roof, I discovered other and wilder suggestions of fear. Even the facade of the organ,--peaking high into the shadow above its gallery,--seemed to me a frightful thing.... Had I been then suddenly obliged to answer the question, "What are you afraid of?" I should have whispered, "_Those points!_" I could not have otherwise explained the matter: I only knew that I was afraid of the "points."

Of course the real enigma of what I felt in that church could not present itself to my mind while I continued to believe in goblins. But long after the age of superstitious terrors, other Gothic experiences severally revived the childish emotion in so startling a way as to convince me that childish fancy could not account for the feeling. Then my curiosity was aroused; and I tried to discover some rational cause for the horror. I read many books, and asked many questions; but the mystery seemed only to deepen.

Books about architecture were very disappointing. I was much less impressed by what I could find in them than by references in pure fiction to the awfulness of Gothic art,--particularly by one writer's confession that the interior of a Gothic church, seen at night, gave him the idea of being inside the skeleton of some monstrous animal; and by a far-famed comparison of the windows of a cathedral to eyes, and of its door to a great mouth, "devouring the people." These imaginations explained little; they could not be developed beyond the phase of vague intimation: yet they stirred such emotional response that I felt sure they had touched some truth. Certainly the architecture of a Gothic cathedral offers strange resemblances to the architecture of bone; and the general impression that it makes upon the mind is an impression of life. But this impression or sense of life I found to be indefinable,--not a sense of any life organic, but of a life latent and daemonic. And the manifestation of that life I felt to be in the _pointing_ of the structure.

Attempts to interpret the emotion by effects of altitude and gloom and vastness appeared to me of no worth; for buildings loftier and larger and darker than any Gothic cathedral, but of a different order of architecture,--Egyptian, for instance,--could not produce a like impression. I felt certain that the horror was made by something altogether peculiar to Gothic construction, and that this something haunted the tops of the arches.

"Yes, Gothic architecture is awful," said a religious friend, "because it is the visible expression of Christian faith. No other religious architecture symbolizes spiritual longing; but the Gothic embodies it. Every part climbs or leaps; every supreme detail soars and points like fire...." "There may be considerable truth in what you say," I replied;--"but it does not relate to the riddle that baffles me. Why should shapes that symbolize spiritual longing create horror? Why should any expression of Christian ecstasy inspire alarm?..."

* * * * *

Other hypotheses in multitude I tested without avail; and I returned to the simple and savage conviction that the secret of the horror somehow belonged to the points of the archings. But for years I could not find it. At last, at last, in the early hours of a certain tropical morning, it revealed itself quite unexpectedly, while I was looking at a glorious group of palms.

Then I wondered at my stupidity in not having guessed the riddle before.

II

The characteristics of many kinds of palm have been made familiar by pictures and photographs. But the giant palms of the American tropics cannot be adequately represented by the modern methods of pictorial illustration: they must be seen. You cannot draw or photograph a palm two hundred feet high.

The first sight of a group of such forms, in their natural environment of tropical forest, is a magnificent surprise,--a surprise that strikes you dumb. Nothing seen in temperate zones,--not even the huger growths of the Californian slope,--could have prepared your imagination for the weird solemnity of that mighty colonnade. Each stone-grey trunk is a perfect pillar,--but a pillar of which the stupendous grace has no counterpart in the works of man. You must strain your head well back to follow the soaring of the prodigious column, up, up, up through abysses of green twilight, till at last--far beyond a break in that infinite interweaving of limbs and lianas which is the roof of the forest--you catch one dizzy glimpse of the capital: a parasol of emerald feathers outspread in a sky so blinding as to suggest the notion of azure electricity.

* * * * *

Now what is the emotion that such a vision excites,--an emotion too powerful to be called wonder, too weird to be called delight? Only when the first shock of it has passed,--when the several elements that were combined in it have begun to set in motion widely different groups of ideas,--can you comprehend how very complex it must have been. Many impressions belonging to personal experience were doubtless revived in it, but also with them a multitude of sensations more shadowy,--accumulations of organic memory; possibly even vague feelings older than man,--for the tropical shapes that aroused the emotion have a history more ancient than our race.

One of the first elements of the emotion to become clearly distinguishable is the aesthetic; and this, in its general mass, might be termed the sense of terrible beauty. Certainly the spectacle of that unfamiliar life,--silent, tremendous, springing to the sun in colossal aspiration, striving for light against Titans, and heedless of man in the gloom beneath as of a groping beetle,--thrills like the rhythm of some single marvellous verse that is learned in a glance and remembered forever. Yet the delight, even at its vividest, is shadowed by a queer disquiet. The aspect of that monstrous, pale, naked, smooth-stretching column suggests a life as conscious as the serpent's. You stare at the towering lines of the shape,--vaguely fearing to discern some sign of stealthy movement, some beginning of undulation. Then sight and reason combine to correct the suspicion. Yes, motion is there, and life enormous--but a life seeking only sun,--life, rushing like the jet of a geyser, straight to the giant day.

III

During my own experience I could perceive that certain feelings commingled in the wave of delight,--feelings related to ideas of power and splendor and triumph,--were accompanied by a faint sense of religious awe. Perhaps our modern aesthetic sentiments are so interwoven with various inherited elements of religious emotionalism that the recognition of beauty cannot arise independently of reverential feeling. Be this as it may, such a feeling defined itself while I gazed;--and at once the great grey trunks were changed to the pillars of a mighty aisle; and from altitudes of dream there suddenly descended upon me the old dark thrill of Gothic horror.

Even before it died away, I recognized that it must have been due to some old cathedral-memory revived by the vision of those giant trunks uprising into gloom. But neither the height nor the gloom could account for anything beyond the memory. Columns tall as those palms, but supporting a classic entablature, could evoke no sense of disquiet resembling the Gothic horror. I felt sure of this,--because I was able, without any difficulty, to shape immediately the imagination of such a facade. But presently the mental picture distorted. I saw the architrave elbow upward in each of the spaces between the pillars, and curve and point itself into a range of prodigious arches;--and again the sombre thrill descended upon me. Simultaneously there flashed to me the solution of the mystery. I understood that the Gothic horror was a _horror of monstrous motion_,--and that it had seemed to belong to the points of the arches because the idea of such motion was chiefly suggested by the extraordinary angle at which the curves of the arching touched.

* * * * *

To any experienced eye, the curves of Gothic arching offer a striking resemblance to certain curves of vegetal growth;--the curves of the palm-branch being, perhaps, especially suggested. But observe that the architectural form suggests more than any vegetal comparison could illustrate! The meeting of two palm-crests would indeed form a kind of Gothic arch; yet the effect of so short an arch would be insignificant. For nature to repeat the strange impression of the real Gothic arch, it were necessary that the branches of the touching crests should vastly exceed, both in length of curve and strength of spring, anything of their kind existing in the vegetable world. The effect of the Gothic arch depends altogether upon the intimation of energy. An arch formed by the intersection of two short sprouting lines could suggest only a feeble power of growth; but the lines of the tall mediaeval arch seem to express a crescent force immensely surpassing that of nature. And the horror of Gothic architecture is not in the mere suggestion of a growing life, but in the suggestion of an energy supernatural and tremendous.

* * * * *

Of course the child, oppressed by the strangeness of Gothic forms, is yet incapable of analyzing the impression received: he is frightened without comprehending. He cannot divine that the points and the curves are terrible to him because they represent the prodigious exaggeration of a real law of vegetal growth. He dreads the shapes because they seem alive; yet he does not know how to express this dread. Without suspecting why, he feels that this silent manifestation of power, everywhere pointing and piercing upward, is not natural. To his startled imagination, the building stretches itself like a phantasm of sleep,--makes itself tall and taller with intent to frighten. Even though built by hands of men, it has ceased to be a mass of dead stone: it is infused with Something that thinks and threatens;--it has become a shadowing malevolence, a multiple goblinry, a monstrous fetish!

Levitation

[Decoration]

OUT of some upper-story window I was looking into a street of yellow-tinted houses,--a colonial street, old-fashioned, narrow, with palm-heads showing above its roofs of tile. There were no shadows; there was no sun,--only a grey soft light, as of early gloaming.

Suddenly I found myself falling from the window; and my heart gave one sickening leap of terror. But the distance from window to pavement proved to be much greater than I supposed,--so great that, in spite of my fear, I began to wonder. Still I kept falling, falling,--and still the dreaded shock did not come. Then the fear ceased, and a queer pleasure took its place;--for I discovered that I was not falling quickly, but only _floating_ down. Moreover, I was floating feet foremost--must have turned in descending. At last I touched the stones--but very, very lightly, with only one foot; and instantly at that touch I went up again,--rose to the level of the eaves. People stopped to stare at me. I felt the exultation of power superhuman;--I felt for the moment as a god.

Then softly I began to sink; and the sight of faces, gathering below me, prompted a sudden resolve to fly down the street, over the heads of the gazers. Again like a bubble I rose, and, with the same impulse, I sailed in one grand curve to a distance that astounded me. I felt no wind;--I felt nothing but the joy of motion triumphant. Once more touching pavement, I soared at a bound for a thousand yards. Then, reaching the end of the street, I wheeled and came back by great swoops,--by long slow aerial leaps of surprising altitude. In the street there was dead silence: many people were looking; but nobody spoke. I wondered what they thought of my feat, and what they would say if they knew how easily the thing was done. By the merest chance I had found out how to do it; and the only reason why it seemed a feat was that no one else had ever attempted it. Instinctively I felt that to say anything about the accident, which had led to the discovery, would be imprudent. Then the real meaning of the strange hush in the street began to dawn upon me. I said to myself:--

"This silence is the Silence of Dreams;--I am quite well aware that this is a dream. I remember having dreamed the same dream before. But the discovery of this power is not a dream: _it is a revelation!_ ... Now that I have learned how to fly, I can no more forget it than a swimmer can forget how to swim. To-morrow morning I shall astonish the people, by sailing over the roofs of the town."

Morning came; and I woke with the fixed resolve to fly out of the window. But no sooner had I risen from bed than the knowledge of physical relations returned, like a sensation forgotten, and compelled me to recognize the unwelcome truth that I had not made any discovery at all.

* * * * *

This was neither the first nor the last of such dreams; but it was particularly vivid, and I therefore selected it for narration as a good example of its class. I still fly occasionally,--sometimes over fields and streams,--sometimes through familiar streets; and the dream is invariably accompanied by remembrance of like dreams in the past, as well as by the conviction that I have really found out a secret, really acquired a new faculty. "This time, at all events," I say to myself, "it is impossible that I can be mistaken;--I _know_ that I shall be able to fly after I awake. Many times before, in other dreams, I learned the secret only to forget it on awakening; but this time I am absolutely sure that I shall not forget." And the conviction actually stays with me until I rise from bed, when the physical effort at once reminds me of the formidable reality of gravitation.

* * * * *

The oddest part of this experience is the feeling of buoyancy. It is much like the feeling of floating,--of rising or sinking through tepid water, for example;--and there is no sense of real effort. It is a delight; yet it usually leaves something to be desired. I am a low flyer; I can proceed only like a pteromys or a flying-fish--and far less quickly: moreover, I must tread earth occasionally in order to obtain a fresh impulsion. I seldom rise to a height of more than twenty-five or thirty feet;--the greater part of the time I am merely skimming surfaces. Touching the ground only at intervals of several hundred yards is pleasant skimming; but I always feel, in a faint and watery way, the dead pull of the world beneath me.

* * * * *

Now the experience of most dream-flyers I find to be essentially like my own. I have met but one who claims superior powers: he says that he flies over mountains--goes sailing from peak to peak like a kite. All others whom I have questioned acknowledge that they fly low,--in long parabolic curves,--and this only by touching ground from time to time. Most of them also tell me that their flights usually begin with an imagined fall, or desperate leap; and no less than four say that the start is commonly taken from the top of a stairway.

[Decoration]

For myriads of years humanity has thus been flying by night. How did the fancied motion, having so little in common with any experience of active life, become a universal experience of the life of sleep?

It may be that memory-impressions of certain kinds of aerial motion,--exultant experiences of leaping or swinging, for example,--are in dream-revival so magnified and prolonged as to create the illusion of flight. We know that in actual time the duration of most dreams is very brief. But in the half-life of sleep--(nightmare offering some startling exceptions)--there is scarcely more than a faint smouldering of consciousness by comparison with the quick flash and vivid thrill of active cerebration;--and time, to the dreaming brain, would seem to be magnified, somewhat as it must be relatively magnified to the feeble consciousness of an insect. Supposing that any memory of the sensation of falling, together with the memory of the concomitant fear, should be accidentally revived in sleep, the dream-prolongation of the sensation and the emotion--unchecked by the natural sequence of shock--might suffice to revive other and even pleasurable memories of airy motion. And these, again, might quicken other combinations of interrelated memories able to furnish all the incident and scenery of the long phantasmagoria.

But this hypothesis will not fully explain certain feelings and ideas of a character different from any experience of waking-hours,--the exultation of voluntary motion without exertion,--the pleasure of the utterly impossible,--the ghostly delight of imponderability. Neither can it serve to explain other dream-experiences of levitation which do not begin with the sensation of leaping or falling, and are seldom of a pleasurable kind. For example, it sometimes happens during nightmare that the dreamer, deprived of all power to move or speak, actually feels his body lifted into the air and floated away by the force of the horror within him. Again, there are dreams in which the dreamer has no physical being. I have thus found myself without any body,--a viewless and voiceless phantom, hovering upon a mountain-road in twilight time, and trying to frighten lonely folk by making small moaning noises. The sensation was of moving through the air by mere act of will: there was no touching of surfaces; and I seemed to glide always about a foot above the road.

* * * * *

Could the feeling of dream-flight be partly interpreted by organic memory of conditions of life more ancient than man,--life weighty, and winged, and flying heavily, _a little above the ground?_

Or might we suppose that some all-permeating Over-Soul, dormant in other time, wakens within the brain at rare moments of our sleep-life? The limited human consciousness has been beautifully compared to the visible solar spectrum, above and below which whole zones of colors invisible await the evolution of superior senses; and mystics aver that something of the ultra-violet or infra-red rays of the vaster Mind may be momentarily glimpsed in dreams. Certainly the Cosmic Life in each of us has been all things in all forms of space and time. Perhaps you would like to believe that it may bestir, in slumber, some vague sense-memory of things more ancient than the sun,--memory of vanished planets with fainter powers of gravitation, where the normal modes of voluntary motion would have been like the realization of our flying dreams?...

Nightmare-Touch

[Decoration]

I

WHAT _is_ the fear of ghosts among those who believe in ghosts?

All fear is the result of experience,--experience of the individual or of the race,--experience either of the present life or of lives forgotten. Even the fear of the unknown can have no other origin. And the fear of ghosts must be a product of past pain.

Probably the fear of ghosts, as well as the belief in them, had its beginning in dreams. It is a peculiar fear. No other fear is so intense; yet none is so vague. Feelings thus voluminous and dim are super-individual mostly,--feelings inherited,--feelings made within us by the experience of the dead.

What experience?

Nowhere do I remember reading a plain statement of the reason why ghosts are feared. Ask any ten intelligent persons of your acquaintance, who remember having once been afraid of ghosts, to tell you exactly why they were afraid,--to define the fancy behind the fear;--and I doubt whether even one will be able to answer the question. The literature of folk-lore--oral and written--throws no clear light upon the subject. We find, indeed, various legends of men torn asunder by phantoms; but such gross imaginings could not explain the peculiar quality of ghostly fear. It is not a fear of bodily violence. It is not even a reasoning fear,--not a fear that can readily explain itself,--which would not be the case if it were founded upon definite ideas of physical danger. Furthermore, although primitive ghosts may have been imagined as capable of tearing and devouring, the common idea of a ghost is certainly that of a being intangible and imponderable.[118]

[118] I may remark here that in many old Japanese legends and
ballads, ghosts are represented as having power to _pull
off_ people's heads. But so far as the origin of the fear
of ghosts is concerned, such stories explain nothing,--since
the experiences that evolved the fear must have been real,
not imaginary, experiences.

Now I venture to state boldly that the common fear of ghosts is _the fear of being touched by ghosts_,--or, in other words, that the imagined Supernatural is dreaded mainly because of its imagined power to touch. Only to _touch_, remember!--not to wound or to kill.

But this dread of the touch would itself be the result of experience,--chiefly, I think, of prenatal experience stored up in the individual by inheritance, like the child's fear of darkness. And who can ever have had the sensation of being touched by ghosts? The answer is simple:--_Everybody who has been seized by phantoms in a dream._

Elements of primeval fears--fears older than humanity--doubtless enter into the child-terror of darkness. But the more definite fear of ghosts may very possibly be composed with inherited results of dream-pain,--ancestral experience of nightmare. And the intuitive terror of supernatural touch can thus be evolutionally explained.

Let me now try to illustrate my theory by relating some typical experiences.

II

When about five years old I was condemned to sleep by myself in a certain isolated room, thereafter always called the Child's Room. (At that time I was scarcely ever mentioned by name, but only referred to as "the Child.") The room was narrow, but very high, and, in spite of one tall window, very gloomy. It contained a fire-place wherein no fire was ever kindled; and the Child suspected that the chimney was haunted.

A law was made that no light should be left in the Child's Room at night,--simply because the Child was afraid of the dark. His fear of the dark was judged to be a mental disorder requiring severe treatment. But the treatment aggravated the disorder. Previously I had been accustomed to sleep in a well-lighted room, with a nurse to take care of me. I thought that I should die of fright when sentenced to lie alone in the dark, and--what seemed to me then abominably cruel--actually _locked_ into my room, the most dismal room of the house. Night after night when I had been warmly tucked into bed, the lamp was removed; the key clicked in the lock; the protecting light and the footsteps of my guardian receded together. Then an agony of fear would come upon me. Something in the black air would seem to gather and grow--(I thought that I could even _hear_ it grow)--till I had to scream. Screaming regularly brought punishment; but it also brought back the light, which more than consoled for the punishment. This fact being at last found out, orders were given to pay no further heed to the screams of the Child.

* * * * *

Why was I thus insanely afraid? Partly because the dark had always been peopled for me with shapes of terror. So far back as memory extended, I had suffered from ugly dreams; and when aroused from them I could always _see_ the forms dreamed of, lurking in the shadows of the room. They would soon fade out; but for several moments they would appear like tangible realities. And they were always the same figures.... Sometimes, without any preface of dreams, I used to see them at twilight-time,--following me about from room to room, or reaching long dim hands after me, from story to story, up through the interspaces of the deep stairways.

I had complained of these haunters only to be told that I must never speak of them, and that they did not exist. I had complained to everybody in the house; and everybody in the house had told me the very same thing. But there was the evidence of my eyes! The denial of that evidence I could explain only in two ways:--Either the shapes were afraid of big people, and showed themselves to me alone, because I was little and weak; or else the entire household had agreed, for some ghastly reason, to say what was not true. This latter theory seemed to me the more probable one, because I had several times perceived the shapes when I was not unattended;--and the consequent appearance of secrecy frightened me scarcely less than the visions did. Why was I forbidden to talk about what I saw, and even heard,--on creaking stairways,--behind wavering curtains?

"Nothing will hurt you,"--this was the merciless answer to all my pleadings not to be left alone at night. But the haunters _did_ hurt me. Only--they would wait until after I had fallen asleep, and so into their power,--for they possessed occult means of preventing me from rising or moving or crying out.

Needless to comment upon the policy of locking me up alone with these fears in a black room. Unutterably was I tormented in that room--for years! Therefore I felt relatively happy when sent away at last to a children's boarding-school, where the haunters very seldom ventured to show themselves.

* * * * *

They were not like any people that I had ever known. They were shadowy dark-robed figures, capable of atrocious self-distortion,--capable, for instance, of growing up to the ceiling, and then across it, and then lengthening themselves, head-downwards, along the opposite wall. Only their faces were distinct; and I tried not to look at their faces. I tried also in my dreams--or thought that I tried--to awaken myself from the sight of them by pulling at my eyelids with my fingers; but the eyelids would remain closed, as if sealed.... Many years afterwards, the frightful plates in Orfila's _Traite des Exhumes_, beheld for the first time, recalled to me with a sickening start the dream-terrors of childhood. But to understand the Child's experience, you must imagine Orfila's drawings intensely alive, and continually elongating or distorting, as in some monstrous anamorphosis.

Nevertheless the mere sight of those nightmare-faces was not the worst of the experiences in the Child's Room. The dreams always began with a suspicion, or sensation of something heavy in the air,--slowly quenching will,--slowly numbing my power to move. At such times I usually found myself alone in a large unlighted apartment; and, almost simultaneously with the first sensation of fear, the atmosphere of the room would become suffused, half-way to the ceiling, with a sombre-yellowish glow, making objects dimly visible,--though the ceiling itself remained pitch-black. This was not a true appearance of light: rather it seemed as if the black air were changing color from beneath.... Certain terrible aspects of sunset, on the eve of storm, offer like effects of sinister color.... Forthwith I would try to escape,--(feeling at every step a sensation _as of wading_),--and would sometimes succeed in struggling half-way across the room;--but there I would always find myself brought to a standstill,--paralyzed by some innominable opposition. Happy voices I could hear in the next room;--I could see light through the transom over the door that I had vainly endeavored to reach;--I knew that one loud cry would save me. But not even by the most frantic effort could I raise my voice above a whisper.... And all this signified only that the Nameless was coming,--was nearing,--was mounting the stairs. I could hear the step,--booming like the sound of a muffled drum,--and I wondered why nobody else heard it. A long, long time the haunter would take to come,--malevolently pausing after each ghastly footfall. Then, without a creak, the bolted door would open,--slowly, slowly,--and the thing would enter, gibbering soundlessly,--and put out hands,--and clutch me,--and toss me to the black ceiling,--and catch me descending to toss me up again, and again, and again.... In those moments the feeling was not fear: fear itself had been torpified by the first seizure. It was a sensation that has no name in the language of the living. For every touch brought a shock of something infinitely worse than pain,--something that thrilled into the innermost secret being of me,--a sort of abominable electricity, discovering unimagined capacities of suffering in totally unfamiliar regions of sentiency.... This was commonly the work of a single tormentor; but I can also remember having been caught by a group, and tossed from one to another,--seemingly for a time of many minutes.

III

Whence the fancy of those shapes? I do not know. Possibly from some impression of fear in earliest infancy; possibly from some experience of fear in other lives than mine. That mystery is forever insoluble. But the mystery of the shock of the touch admits of a definite hypothesis.

First, allow me to observe that the experience of the sensation itself cannot be dismissed as "mere imagination." Imagination means cerebral activity: its pains and its pleasures are alike inseparable from nervous operation, and their physical importance is sufficiently proved by their physiological effects. Dream-fear may kill as well as other fear; and no emotion thus powerful can be reasonably deemed undeserving of study.

One remarkable fact in the problem to be considered is that the sensation of seizure in dreams differs totally from all sensations familiar to ordinary waking life. Why this differentiation? How interpret the extraordinary massiveness and depth of the thrill?

I have already suggested that the dreamer's fear is most probably not a reflection of relative experience, but represents the incalculable total of ancestral experience of dream-fear. If the sum of the experience of active life be transmitted by inheritance, so must likewise be transmitted the summed experience of the life of sleep. And in normal heredity either class of transmissions would probably remain distinct.

Now, granting this hypothesis, the sensation of dream-seizure would have had its beginnings in the earliest phases of dream-consciousness,--long prior to the apparition of man. The first creatures capable of thought and fear must often have dreamed of being caught by their natural enemies. There could not have been much imagining of pain in these primal dreams. But higher nervous development in later forms of being would have been accompanied with larger susceptibility to dream-pain. Still later, with the growth of reasoning-power, ideas of the supernatural would have changed and intensified the character of dream-fear. Furthermore, through all the course of evolution, heredity would have been accumulating the experience of such feeling. Under those forms of imaginative pain evolved through reaction of religious beliefs, there would persist some dim survival of savage primitive fears, and again, under this, a dimmer but incomparably deeper substratum of ancient animal-terrors. In the dreams of the modern child all these latencies might quicken,--one below another,--unfathomably,--with the coming and the growing of nightmare.

It may be doubted whether the phantasms of any particular nightmare have a history older than the brain in which they move. But the shock of the touch would seem to indicate _some point of dream-contact with the total race-experience of shadowy seizure_. It may be that profundities of Self,--abysses never reached by any ray from the life of sun,--are strangely stirred in slumber, and that out of their blackness immediately responds a shuddering of memory, measureless even by millions of years.

Readings from a Dream-book

[Decoration]

OFTEN, in the blind dead of the night, I find myself reading a book,--a big broad book,--a dream-book. By "dream-book," I do not mean a book about dreams, but a book made of the stuff that dreams are made of.

I do not know the name of the book, nor the name of its author: I have not been able to see the title-page; and there is no running title. As for the back of the volume, it remains,--like the back of the Moon,--invisible forever.

At no time have I touched the book in any way,--not even to turn a leaf. Somebody, always viewless, holds it up and open before me in the dark; and I can read it only because it is lighted by a light that comes from nowhere. Above and beneath and on either side of the book there is darkness absolute; but the pages seem to retain the yellow glow of lamps that once illuminated them.

A queer fact is that I never see the entire text of a page at once, though I see the whole page itself plainly. The text rises, or seems to rise, to the surface of the paper as I gaze, and fades out almost immediately after having been read. By a simple effort of will, I can recall the vanished sentences to the page; but they do not come back in the same form as before: they seem to have been oddly revised during the interval. Never can I coax even one fugitive line to reproduce itself exactly as it read at first. But I can always force something to return; and this something remains sharply distinct during perusal. Then it turns faint grey, and appears to sink--as through thick milk--backward out of sight.

* * * * *