Part 10

In one sense we are certainly wrong when we say that the loveliness of a scene brings tears to the eyes. It cannot be the loveliness of the scene;--it is the longing of generations quickening in the hearts of us. The beauty we speak of has no real existence: the emotion of the dead alone makes it seem to be,--the emotion of those long-buried millions of men and women who loved Nature for reasons very much simpler and older than any æsthetic emotion is. To the windows of the house of life their phantoms crowd,--like prisoners toward some vision of bright skies and flying birds, free hills and glimmering streams, beyond the iron of their bars. They behold their desire of other time,--the vast light and space of the world, the wind-swept clearness of azure, the hundred greens of wold and plain, the spectral promise of summits far away. They hear the shrilling and the whirr of happy winged things, the chorus of cicada and bird, the lisping and laughing of water, the under-tone of leafage astir. They know the smell of the season--all sharp sweet odors of sap, scents of flower and fruitage. They feel the quickening of the living air,--the thrilling of the great Blue Ghost.

But all this comes to them, filtered through the bars and veils of their rebirth, only as dreams of home to hopeless exile,--of child-bliss to desolate age,--of remembered vision to the blind!

Parfum de Jeunesse

“I remember,”--said an old friend, telling me the romance of his youth,--“that I could always find her cloak in the cloak-room without a light, when it was time to take her home. I used to know it in the dark, because it had the smell of sweet new milk....”

Which set me somehow to thinking of English dawns, the scent of hayfields, the fragrance of hawthorn days;--and cluster after cluster of memories lighted up in succession through a great arc of remembrance that flashed over half a lifetime even before my friend’s last words had ceased to sound in my ears. And then recollection smouldered into revery,--a revery about the riddle of the odor of youth.

* * * * *

That quality of the _parfum de jeunesse_ which my friend described is not uncommon,--though I fancy that it belongs to Northern rather than to Southern races. It signifies perfect health and splendid vigor. But there are other and more delicate varieties of the attraction. Sometimes it may cause you to think of precious gums or spices from the uttermost tropics; sometimes it is a thin, thin sweetness,--like a ghost of musk. It is not personal (though physical personality certainly has an odor): it is the fragrance of a season,--of the springtime of life. But even as the fragrance of spring, though everywhere a passing delight, varies with country and climate, so varies the fragrance of youth.

Whether it be of one sex more than of another were difficult to say. We notice it chiefly in girls and in children with long hair, probably because it dwells especially in the hair. But it is always independent of artifice as the sweetness of the wild violet is. It belongs to the youth of the savage not less than to the youth of the civilized,--to the adolescence of the peasant not less than to that of the prince. It is not found in the sickly and the feeble, but only in perfect joyous health. Perhaps, like beauty, it may have some vague general relation to conditions ethical. Individual odors assuredly have,--as the discrimination of the dog gives witness.

Evolutionists have suggested that the pleasure we find in the perfume of a flower may be an emotional reflection from æons enormously remote, when such odor announced, to forms of ancestral life far lower than human, the presence of savory food. To what organic memory of association might be due, upon the same hypothesis, our pleasure in the perfume of youth?

Perhaps there were ages in which that perfume had significances more definite and special than any which we can now attach to it. Like the pleasure yielded by the fragrance of flowers, the pleasure given by the healthy fragrance of a young body may be, partly at least, a survival from some era in which odorous impressions made direct appeal to the simplest of life-serving impulses. Long dissociated from such possible primitive relation, odor of blossom and odor of youth alike have now become for us excitants of the higher emotional life,--of vague but voluminous and supremely delicate æsthetic feeling.

Like the feeling awakened by beauty, the pleasure of odor is a pleasure of remembrance,--is the magical appeal of a sensation to countless memories of countless lives. And even as the scent of a blossom evokes the ghosts of feelings experienced in millions of millions of unrecorded springs,--so the fragrance of youth bestirs within us the spectral survival of sensations associated with every vernal cycle of all the human existence that has vanished behind us.

And this fragrance of fresh being likewise makes invocation to ideal sentiment,--to parental scarcely less than to amorous tenderness,--because conjoined through immeasurable time with the charm and the beauty of childhood. Out of night and death is summoned by its necromancy more than a shadowy thrill from the rapture of perished passion,--more than a phantom-reflex from the delight of countless bridals;--even something also of the ecstasy of pressing lips of caress to the silky head of the first-born,--faint refluence from the forgotten joy of myriad millions of buried mothers.

Azure Psychology

I

Least common of the colors given by nature to bird, insect, and blossom is bright pure blue. Blue flowers are believed to proclaim for the plant that bears them a longer history of unchecked development than flowers of any other primary color suggest; and the high cost of the tint is perhaps hinted by the inability of the horticulturist to produce blue roses or blue chrysanthemums. Vivid blue appears in the plumage of some wonderful birds, and on the wings of certain amazing butterflies--especially tropical butterflies;--but usually under conditions that intimate a prodigious period of evolutional specialization. Altogether it would seem that blue was the latest pure color developed in the evolution of flower and scale and feather; and there is reason to believe that the power of perceiving blue was not acquired until after the power of distinguishing red and green and yellow had already been gained.

Whether the hypothesis be true or false, it is certainly noteworthy that, of the primary colors, blue alone has remained, up to the present time, a color pleasurable in its purest intensity to the vision of highly civilized races. Bright red, bright green, bright orange, yellow, or violet, can be used but sparingly in our nineteenth-century attire and decoration. They have become offensive in their spectral purity because of the violence of the sensations that they give;--they remain grateful only to the rudimentary æsthetic feeling of children, of the totally uncultivated, or of savages. What modern beauty clothes herself in scarlet, or robes herself in fairy green? We cannot paint our chambers violet or saffron--the mere idea jars upon our nerves. But the color of heaven has not ceased to delight us. Sky-blue can still be worn by our fairest; and the luminous charm of azure ceilings and azure wall-surfaces--under certain conditions of lighting and dimension--is still recognized.

“Nevertheless,” some one may say, “we do not paint the _outside_ of a building skyblue; and a skyblue façade would be even more disagreeable than an orange or a crimson façade.” This is true,--but not because the effect of the color upon large surfaces is necessarily displeasing. It is true only because vivid blue, unlike other bright colors, is never associated in our experience of nature with large and opaque _solidity_. When mountains become blue for us, they also become ghostly and semi-transparent. Upon a housefront the color must appear monstrous, because giving the notion of the unnatural,--of a huge blue dead solidity tangibly proximate. But a blue ceiling, a blue vault, blue walls of corridors, may suggest the true relation of the color to depth and transparency, and make for us a grateful illusion of space and summer-light. Yellow, on the other hand, is a color well adapted to façades, because associated in memory with the beautiful effect of dying sunlight over pale broad surfaces.

But although yellow remains, after blue, the most agreeable of the primary colors, it cannot often be used for artistic purposes, like blue, in all its luminous strength. Pale tones of yellow,--especially creamy tones,--are capable of an immense variety of artistic employment; but this is not true of the brilliant and burning yellow. Only blue is always agreeable in its most vivid purity--providing that it be not used in massive displays so as to suggest the anomaly of blue hardness and blue opacity.[75]

In Japan, which may still be called the land of perfect good taste in chromatics--notwithstanding the temporary apparition of some discords due to Western influence,--almost any ordinary street-vista tells the story of the race-experience with color. The general tone of the vista is given by bluish greys above and dark blues below, sharply relieved by numerous small details of white and cool yellow. In this perspective the bluish-greys represent the tiling of roofs and awnings; the dark blues, shop-draperies; the bright whites, narrow strips of plastered surface; the pale yellows, mostly smooth naked wood, and glimpses of rush-mattings. The broader stretches of color are furthermore relieved and softened by the sprinkling of countless ideographs over draperies and shop-signs--black, (and sometimes red) against white; white or gold on blue. Strong yellows, greens, oranges, purples are invisible. In dress also greys and cool blues rule: when you do happen to see robes or _hakama_ all of one brilliant color,--worn by children or young girls,--that color is either a sky-blue, or a violet with only just enough red in it to kindle the azure,--a rainbow-violet of exquisite luminosity.[76]

II

But I wish to speak neither of the æsthetic value of blue in relation to arts and industries, nor of the optical significance of blue as the product of six hundred and fifty billion oscillations of the luminous ether per second. I only want to say something about the psychology of the color,--about its subjective evolutional history.

Certainly the same apparition of blue will bestir in different minds different degrees of feeling, and will set in motion, through memory-revival of unlike experiences, totally dissimilar operations of fancy. But independently of such psychological variation--mainly personal and superficial,--there can be no doubt that the color evokes in the _general_ mind one common quality of pleasurable feeling,--a vivacious thrill,--a tone of emotional activity unmistakably related to the higher zones of sentiency and of imagination.

* * * * *

In my own case the sight of vivid blue has always been accompanied by an emotion of vague delight--more or less strong according to the luminous intensity of the color. And in one experience of travel,--sailing to the American tropics,--this feeling rose into ecstasy. It was when I beheld for the first time the grandest vision of blue in this world,--the glory of the Gulf-Stream: a magical splendor that made me doubt my senses,--a flaming azure that looked as if a million summer skies had been condensed into pure fluid color for the making of it. The captain of the ship leaned over the rail with me; and we both watched the marvellous sea for a long time in silence. Then he said:--

* * * * *

“Fifteen years ago I took my wife with me on this trip--just after we were married, it was;--and she wondered at the water. She asked me to get her a silk dress of the very same color. I tried in ever so many places; but I never could get just what she wanted till a chance took me to Canton. I went round the Chinese silk-shops day after day, looking for that color. It wasn’t easy to find; but I did get it at last. Wasn’t she glad, though, when I brought it home to her!... She’s got it yet....”

* * * * *

Still, at times, in sleep, I sail southward again over the wonder of that dazzling surging azure;--then the dream shifts suddenly across the world, and I am wandering with the Captain through close dim queer Chinese streets,--vainly seeking a silk of the Blue of the Gulf-Stream. And it was this memory of tropic days that first impelled me to think about the reason of the delight inspired by the color.

III

Possibly the wave of pleasurable emotion excited by a glorious vision of blue is not more complex than the feeling aroused by any massive display of any other pure color;--but it is higher in the quality of its complexity. For the ideational elements that blend in the volume of it include not a few of the noblest,--not a few of those which also enter into the making of Cosmic Emotion.

Being the seeming color of the ghost of our planet,--of the breath of the life of the world,--blue is likewise the color apparent of the enormity of day and the abyss of the night. So the sensation of it makes appeal to the ideas of Altitude, of Vastness, and of Profundity;--

Also to the idea of Space in Time; for blue is the tint of distance and of vagueness;--

Also to the idea of Motion; for blue is the color of Vanishing and of Apparition. Peak and vale, bay and promontory, turn blue as we leave them; and out of blue they grow and define again as we glide homeward.

And therefore in the volume of feeling awakened in us by the sensation of blue, there should be something of the emotion associated with experience of change,--with countless ancestral sorrows of parting. But if there indeed be any such dim survival, it is utterly whelmed and lost in that all-radiant emotional inheritance related to Summer and Warmth,--to the joy of past humanity in the light of cloudless days.

Still more significant is the fact that although blue is a sacred color, the dominant tones of the feeling it evokes are gladness and tenderness. Blue speaks to us of the dead and of the gods, but never of their awfulness.

* * * * *

Now when we reflect that blue is the color of the idea of the divine, the color pantheistic, the color ethical,--thrilling most deeply into those structures of thought to which belong our sentiments of reverence and justice, of duty and of aspiration,--we may wonder why the emotion it calls up should be supremely gladsome. Is it because that sensuous race-experience of blue skies,--that measureless joy of the dead in light and warmth, which has been transmitted to each of us in organic memory,--is vastly older than the religious idea, and therefore voluminous enough to drown any ethical feeling indirectly related to the color-sensation? Partly so, no doubt;--but I will venture another, and a very simple explanation:--

* * * * *

_All moral pulsations in the wave of inherited feeling which responds to the impression of blue, belong only to the beautiful and tender aspects of faith._

* * * * *

And thus much having been ventured, I may presume a little further.

I imagine that for many of us one of the most powerful elements in this billow of pleasurable feeling evoked by the vision of blue, _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.

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