Part 11

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.