Part 9

As a rule we recognize faces by the modes of expression habitually worn,--by the usually prevalent character-tones of them,--rather than by any steady memory of lines. But no face at all moments remains exactly the same; and in cases of exceptional variability the expression does not suffice for recognition: we have to look for some fixed peculiarity, some minute superficial detail independent of physiognomy. All expression has but a relative permanency: even in faces the most strongly marked, its variations may defy estimate. Perhaps the mobility is, within certain limits, in direct ratio to irregularity of feature;--any approach to ideal beauty being also an approach to relative fixity. At all events, the more familiar we become with any common face, the more astonishing the multitude of the transformations we observe in it,--the more indescribable and bewildering its fugitive subtleties of expression. And what are these but the ebb and flow of life ancestral,--under-ripplings in that well-spring unfathomable of personality whose flood is Soul. Perpetually beneath the fluid tissues of flesh the dead are moulding and moving--not singly (for in no phenomenon is there any singleness), but in currents and by surgings. Sometimes there is an eddying of ghosts of love; and the face dawns as if a sunrise lighted it. Sometimes there is a billowing up of ghosts of hate; and the face darkens and distorts like an evil dream,--and we say to the mind behind it, “You are not now _your better self_.” But that which we call the self, whether the better or the worse, is a complexity forever shifting the order of its combinations. According to stimulus of hope or fear, of joy or pain, there must vibrate within every being, at differing rhythms, with varying oscillation, incalculable tremulosities of ancestral life. In the calmest normal existence slumber all the psychical tones of the past,--from the lurid red of primal sense-impulse to the violet of spiritual aspiration,--even as all known colours sleep in white light. And over the sensitive living mask, at each strong alternation of the psychical currents, flit shadowy resurrections of dead expression.

Seeing faces and their changes, we learn intuitively the relation to our own selves of the selves that confront us. In very few cases could we even try to explain how this knowledge comes,--how we reach those conclusions called, in common parlance, “first impressions.” Faces are not _read_. The impressions they give are only _felt_, and have much of the same vague character as impressions of sound,--making within us mental states either pleasant or unpleasant or somewhat of both,--evoking now a sense of danger, now a melting sympathy, occasionally a gentle sadness. And these impressions, though seldom at fault, cannot be very well explained in words. The reasons of their accuracy are likewise the reasons of their mystery,--reasons not to be discovered in the narrow range of our personal experience,--reasons very, very much older than we. Could we remember our former lives, we should know more exactly the meaning of our likes and our dislikes. For the truth is that they are superindividual. It is not the individual eye that perceives everything perceived in a face. The dead are the real seers. But as they remain unable to guide us otherwise than by touching the chords of mental pleasure or pain, we can feel the relative meaning of faces only in a dim, though powerful way.

Instinctively, at least, superindividuality is commonly recognized. Hence such phrases as “force of character,” “moral force,” “personal fascination,” “personal magnetism,” and others showing that the influence exerted by man upon man is known to be independent of mere physical conditions. Very insignificant bodies have that within them by which formidable bodies are mastered and directed. The flesh-and-blood man is only the visible end of an invisible column of force reaching out of the infinite past into the momentary present,--only the material Symbol of an immaterial host. A contest between even two wills is a contest of phantom armies. The domination of many personalities by the simple will of one,--hinting the perception by the compelled of superior viewless powers behind the compeller,--is never to be interpreted by the old hypothesis of soul-equality. Only by scientific psychology can the mystery of certain formidable characters be even partly explained; but any explanation must rest upon the acceptance, in some form or other, of the immense evolutional fact of psychical inheritance. And psychical inheritance signifies the super-individual,--pre-existence revived in compound personality.

Yet, from our ethical standpoint, that super-individuality which we thus unconsciously allow in the very language used to express psychical domination, is a lower manifestation. Though working often for good, the power in itself is of evil; and the recognition of it by the subjugated is not a recognition of higher moral energy, but of a higher _mental_ energy signifying larger evolutional experience of wrong, deeper reserves of aggressive ingenuity, heavier capacities for the giving of pain. Called by no matter what euphemistic name, such power is brutal in its origin, and still allied to those malignities and ferocities shared by man with lower predatory creatures. But the beauty of the superindividual is revealed in that rarer power which the dead lend the living to win trust, to inspire ideals, to create love, to brighten whole circles of existence with the charm and wonder of a personality never to be described save in the language of light and music.

III

Now if we could photographically _decompose_ a composite photograph so as to separate in order inverse all the impressions interblended to make it, such process would clumsily represent what really happens when the image of a strange face is telegraphed back--like a police-photograph--from the living retina to the mysterious offices of inherited memory. There, with the quickness of an electric flash, the shadow-face is decomposed into all the ancestral types combined in it; and the resulting verdict of the dead, though rendered only by indefinable sensation, is more trustworthy than any written certificate of character could ever be. But its trustworthiness is limited to the _potential_ relation of the individual seen to the individual seeing. Upon different minds, according to the delicate balance of personality,--according to the qualitative sum of inherited experience in the psychical composition of the observer,--the same features will make very different impressions. A face that strongly repels one person may not less strongly attract another, and will produce nearly similar impressions only on groups of emotionally homogeneous natures. Certainly the fact of this ability to discern in the composition of faces that indefinable something which welcomes or which warns, does suggest the possibility of deciding some laws of ethical physiognomy; but such laws would necessarily be of a very general and simple kind, and their relative value could never equal that of the uneducated personal intuition.

How, indeed, should it be otherwise? What science could ever hope to measure the infinite possibilities of psychical combination? And the present in every countenance is a recombination of the past;--the living is always a resurrection of the dead. The sympathies and the fears, the hopes and the repulsions that faces inspire, are but revivals and reiterations,--echoes of sentiency created in millions of minds by immeasurable experience operating through immeasurable time. My friend of this hour, though no more identical with his forefathers than any single ripple of a current is identical with all the ripples that ever preceded it, is nevertheless by soul-composition one with myriads known and loved in other lands and in other lives,--in times recorded and in times forgotten,--in cities that still remain and in cities that have ceased to be,--by thousands of my vanished selves.

Beauty is Memory

I

When you first saw her your heart leaped, and a tingling shocked through all your blood like a gush of electricity. Simultaneously your senses were changed, and long so remained.

That sudden throb was the awakening of your dead;--and that thrill was made by the swarming and the crowding of them;--and that change of sense was wrought only by their multitudinous desire,--for which reason it seemed _an intensification_. They remembered having loved a number of young persons somewhat resembling her. But where, or when, they did not recollect. They--(and They, of course, are You)--had drunk of Lethe many times since then.

The true name of the River of Forgetfulness is the River of Death--though you may not find authority for the statement in classical dictionaries. But the Greek story, that the waters of Lethe bring to weary souls oblivion of the past, is not quite true. One draught will indeed numb and becloud some forms of memory,--will efface the remembrance of dates and names and of other trifling details;--but a million draughts will not produce total oblivion. Even the destruction of the world would not have that result. _Nothing is absolutely forgotten except the non-essential._ The essential can, at most, only be dimmed by the drinking of Lethe.

It was because of billions of billions of memories amassed through trillions of lives, and blended within you into some one vague delicious image, that you came to believe a certain being more beautiful than the sun. The delusion signified that she happened to resemble this composite,--mnemonic shadowing of all the dead women related to the loves of your innumerable lives. And this first part of your experience, when you could not understand,--when you fancied the beloved a witch, and never even dreamed that the witchery might be the work of ghosts, was--the Period of Wonder.

II

Wonder at what? At the power and mystery of beauty. (For whether only within yourself, or partly within and partly outside of yourself, it was beauty that you saw, and that made you wonder.) But you will now remember that the beloved seemed lovelier than mortal woman really could be;--and the how and the why of that seeming are questions of interest.

* * * * *

With the power to see beauty we are born--somewhat, though not altogether, as we are born with the power to perceive color. Most human beings are able to discern something of beauty, or at least of approach to beauty--though the volume of the faculty varies in different individuals more than the volume of a mountain varies from that of a grain of sand. There are men born blind; but the normal being inherits some ideal of beauty. It may be vivid or it may be vague; but in every case it represents an accumulation of countless impressions received by the race,--countless fragments, of prenatal remembrance crystallized into one composite image within organic memory, where, like the viewless image on a photographic plate awaiting development, it remains awhile in darkness absolute. And just because it is a composite of numberless race-memories of individual attraction, this ideal necessarily represents, in the superior mind, a something above the existing possible,--something never to be realized, much less surpassed, in the present state of humanity.

And what is the relation of this composite, fairer than human possibility, to the illusion of love? If it be permissible to speak one’s imagining of the unimaginable, I can dare a theory. When, in the hour of the ripeness of youth, there is perceived some objective comeliness faintly corresponding to certain outlines of the inherited ideal, at once a wave of emotion ancestral bathes the long-darkened image, defines it, illuminates it,--and so deludes the senses;--for the sense-reflection of the living objective becomes temporarily blended with the subjective phantasm,--with the beautiful luminous ghost made of centillions of memories. Thus to the lover the common suddenly becomes the impossible, because he really perceives blended with it the superindividual and superhuman. He is much too deeply bewitched by that supernatural to be persuaded of his illusion, by any reasoning. What conquers his will is not the magic of anything living or tangible, but a charm sinuous and fugitive and light as fire,--a spectral snare prepared for him by myriads unthinkable of generations of dead.

* * * * *

So much and no more of theory I venture as to the _how_ of the riddle. But what of the _why_,--the reason of the emotion made by this ghostly beauty revived out of the measureless past? What should beauty have to do with a superindividual ecstasy older than all æsthetic feeling? What is the evolutional secret of the fascination of beauty?

I think that an answer can be given. But it will involve the fullest acceptance of this truth:--_There is no such thing as beauty-in-itself._

All the riddles and contradictions of our æsthetic systems are natural consequences of the delusion that beauty is a something absolute, a transcendental reality, an eternal fact. It is true that the appearance we call beauty is the symbol of a fact,--is the visible manifestation of a development beyond the ordinary,--a bodily evolution more advanced than the existing average. In like manner what we call grace is a real manifestation of the economy of force. But since there can be no cosmic limit to evolutional possibilities, there never can be any standards of grace or of beauty that are not relative and essentially transitory; and there can be no physical ideals,--not even Greek ideals,--that might not in the course of human evolution or of superhuman evolution be so much more than realized as to become vulgarities of form. An ultimate of beauty is inconceivable and impossible; no term of æsthetics can ever represent more than the idea of a phase of the perpetual becoming, a temporary relation in comparative evolution. Beauty-in-itself is only the name of a sensation, or complex of sensation, mistaken for objectivity--much as sound and light and color were once imagined to be realities.

Yet what is it that attracts?--what is the meaning of the resistless emotion which we call the Sense of Beauty?

Like the sensing of light or color or perfume, the recognition of beauty is a recognition of fact. But that fact bears to the feeling evoked no more likeness than the reality of five hundred billions of ether-shiverings per second bears to the sensation of orange. Still in either case the fact is a manifestation of force. Representing higher evolution, the phenomenon termed beauty also represents a relatively superior fitness for life, a higher ability to fulfil the conditions of existence; and it is the non-conscious perception of this representation that makes the fascination. The longing aroused is not for any mere abstraction, but for greater completeness of faculty as means to the natural end. To the dead within each man, beauty signifies the presence of what they need most,--Power. They know, in despite of Lethe, that when they lived in comely bodies life was usually made easy and happy for them, and that when prisoned in feeble or in ugly bodies, they found life miserable or difficult. They want to live many times again in sound young bodies,--in shapes that assure force, health, joy, quickness to win and energy to keep the best prizes of life’s contest. They want, if possible, conditions better than any of the past, but in no event conditions worse.

III

And so the Riddle resolves itself as Memory,--immeasurable Memory of all bodily fitness for the ends of life: a Composite glorified, doubtless, by some equally measureless inherited sense of all the vanished joys ever associated with such fitness.

Infinite, may we not term it--this Composite? Aye, but not merely because the multitudes of dead memories that make it are unspeakable. Equally unspeakable the width and the depth of the range of them throughout the enormity of Time.... O lover, how slender the beautiful witch,--the ghost within the ghost of you! Yet the depth of that ghost is the depth of the Nebulous Zone bespanning Night,--the luminous Shadow that Egypt figured of old as Mother of the Sun and the Gods, curving her long white woman’s-body over the world. As a vapor of phosphorus, or wake of a ship in the night,--only so with naked eye can we behold it. But pierced by vision telescopic, it is revealed as the further side of the Ring of the Cosmos,--dim belt of millions of suns seemingly massed together like the cells of a living body, yet so seeming only by reason of their frightful remoteness. Even thus really separated each from each in the awfulness of the Night of Time,--by silent profundities of centuries,--by interspaces of thousands and of myriads of years,--though collectively shaping to love’s desire but one dim soft sweet phantom,--are those million-swarming memories that make for youth its luminous dream of beauty.

Sadness in Beauty

The poet who sang that beautiful things bring sadness, named as beautiful things music and sunset and night, clear skies and transparent waters. Their sadness he sought to explain by vague soul-memories of Paradise. Very old-fashioned this explanation; but it contains a shadowing of truth. For the mysterious sadness associated with the sense of beauty is certainly not of this existence, but of countless anterior lives,--and therefore indeed a sadness of reminiscence.

Elsewhere I try to explain why certain qualities of music, and certain aspects of sunset produce sadness, and even more than sadness. As for impressions of night, however, I doubt if the emotion that night evokes in this nineteenth century can be classed with the sadness that beauty brings. A wonderful night,--a tropical night, for instance, lucent and lukewarm, with a new moon in it, curved and yellow like a ripe banana,--may inspire, among other minor feelings something of tenderness; but the great dominant emotion evoked by the splendor of the vision is not sadness. Breaking open the heavens to their highest, night widens modern thought over the bounds of life and death by the spectacle of that Infinite whose veil is day. Night also forces remembrance of the mystery of our tether,--the viewless force that holds us down to this wretched little ball of a world. And the result is cosmic emotion--vaster than any sense of the sublime,--drowning all other emotion,--but nowise akin to the sadness that beauty causes. Anciently the emotion of night must have been incomparably less voluminous. Men who believed the sky to be a solid vault, never could have felt, as we feel it, the stupendous pomp of darkness. And our ever-growing admiration of those awful astral questions in the Book of Job, is mainly due to the fact that, with the progress of science, they continue to make larger and larger appeal to forms of thought and feeling which never could have entered into the mind of Job.

But the sadness excited by the beauty of a perfect day, or by the charm of nature in her brightest moods, is a fact of another kind, and needs a different explanation. Inherited the feeling must be,--but through what cumulation of ancestral pain? Why should the tenderness of an unclouded sky, the soft green sleep of summered valleys, the murmurous peace of sun-flecked shadows, inspire us with sadness? Why should any inherited emotion following an æsthetic perception be melancholy rather than joyous?... Of course I do not refer to the sense of vastness or permanence or power aroused by the sight of the sea, or by any vision of sea-like space, or by the majesty of colossal ranges. That is the feeling of the sublime,--always related to fear. Æsthetic sadness is related rather to desire.

* * * * *

“All beautiful things bring sadness,” is a statement as near to truth as most general statements; but the sadness and its evolutional history must vary according to circumstances. The melancholy awakened by the sight of a beautiful face cannot be identical with that awakened by the sight of a landscape, by the hearing of music, or by the reading of a poem. Yet there should be some one emotional element common to æsthetic sadness,--one general kind of feeling which would help us to solve the riddle of the melancholy inspired by the sight of beauty in Nature. Such a common element, I believe, is inherited longing,--inherited dim sense of loss, shadowed and qualified variously by interrelated feelings. Different forms of this inheritance would be awakened by different impressions of the beautiful. In the case of human beauty, the æsthetic recognition might be toned or shadowed by immemorial inheritance of pain--pain of longing, and pain of separation from numberless forgotten beloved. In the case of a color, a melody, an effect of sunshine or of moonlight, the sense-impressions appealing to æsthetic feeling might equally appeal to various ancestral memories of pain. The melancholy given by the sight of a beautiful landscape is certainly a melancholy of longing,--a sadness massive as vague, because made by the experience of millions of our dead.

“The æsthetic feeling for nature in its purity,” declares Sully, “is a modern growth ... the feeling for nature’s wild solitudes is hardly older than Rousseau.” Perhaps to many this will seem rather a strong statement in regard to the races of the West;--it is not true of the races of the Far East, whose art and poetry yield ancient proof to the contrary. But no evolutionist would deny that the æsthetic love of nature has been developed through civilization, and that many abstract sentiments now involved with it are of very recent origin. Much of the sadness made in us by the sight of a beautiful landscape would therefore be of comparatively modern growth, though less modern than some of the higher qualities of æsthetic pleasure which accompany the emotion. I surmise it to be mainly the inherited pain of that separation from Nature which began with the building of walled cities. Possibly there is blended with it something of incomparably older sorrow--such as the immemorial mourning of man for the death of summer; but this, and other feelings inherited from ages of wandering, would revive more especially in the great vague melancholy that autumn brings into what we still call our souls.

* * * * *

Ever as the world increasing its wisdom increases its sorrow, our dwellers in cities built up to heaven more and more regret the joys of humanity’s childhood,--the ancient freedom of forest and peak and plain, the brightness of mountain water, the cool keen sweetness of the sea’s breath and the thunder-roll of its eternal epic. And all this regret of civilization for Nature irretrievably forsaken, may somehow revive in that great soft dim sadness which the beauty of a landscape makes us feel.