It has often been remarked that to one in love the beloved person appears as a mystery, enveloped, as it were, in a sort of purple cloud. This is doubtless because the lover is undergoing strange alteration in his own mind; fresh vague passions are rising into consciousness out of the dark storehouse of hereditary instinct; he is cast loose from his old anchorage and does not know whither he is driven. The consequent feeling of a power and a strangeness upon him he associates, of course, with the person—commonplace enough, perhaps, to others—who is the symbol and occasion of the experience. Goethe seems to mean something of this sort when he uses the expression das ewig Weibliche to suggest the general mystery and allurement of new life.
And it is much the same no matter what sort of ascendency is exercised over us; there is always excitement and a feeling of newness and uncertainty, imagination is awakened and busies itself with the fascinating personality; his slightest word or action is eagerly interpreted and works upon us. In short, mystery and idealism are so inseparable that a sense of power in others seems to involve a sense of their inscrutability; and, on the other hand, so soon as a person becomes plain, he ceases to stimulate the imagination; we have seen all around him, so that he no longer appears an open door to new life, but has begun to be commonplace and stale.
It is even true that inscrutability in itself, having perhaps nothing important back of it, plays a considerable part in personal ascendency. The hero is always a product of constructive imagination; and just as some imaginative painters find that the too detailed observation of sensible objects cumbers the inner vision and impedes production, so the hero-worshipper is likely at times to reject altogether the persons he knows in favor of some sort of mask or lay figure, whose very blankness or inertness insures to it the great advantage that it cannot actively repudiate the qualities attributed to it: it offers carte blanche to the imagination. As already suggested, the vital question in ascendency is not, primarily, What are you? but, What do you enable me to be? What self-developing ideas do you enable me to form? and the power of mere inscrutability arises from the fact that it gives a vague stimulus to thought and then leaves it to work out the details to suit itself. To recur to the matter of falling in love: the young girl who, like Gwendolen in “Daniel Deronda,” or Isabel in the “Portrait of a Lady,” fixes her passion upon some self-contained and to her inscrutable person, in preference to others who are worthier but less mysterious, is a common character in life as well as in fiction.
Many other illustrations of the same principle might be given. Thus the fact, instances of which are collected by Mr. Tylor in his work on “Primitive Culture,” that the insane, the idiotic, and the epileptic are reverenced by primitive peoples, may be interpreted in a similar manner.[[89]] Those who are mentally abnormal present in a striking form the inscrutable in personality; they seem to be men, but are not such men as we; our imaginations are alarmed and baffled, so that it is not unnatural that before science has shown us definite relations between these persons and ourselves, they should serve as one of the points about which crystallize our imaginations of unknown power. In the same way a strange and somewhat impassive physiognomy is often, perhaps, an advantage to an orator, or leader of any sort, because it helps to fix the eye and fascinate the mind. Such a countenance as that of Savonarola may have counted for much toward the effect he produced. Another instance of the prestige of the inscrutable is the fascination of silence, when power is imagined to lie behind it. The very name of William the Silent gives one a sort of thrill, whether he knows anything of that distinguished character or not. One seems to see a man darkly potent, mysteriously dispensing with the ordinary channel of self-assertion, and attaining his ends without evident means. It is the same with Von Moltke, “silent in seven languages,” whose genius humbled France and Austria in two brief campaigns. And General Grant’s taciturnity undoubtedly fascinated the imagination of the people—after his earlier successes had shown that there was really something in him—and helped to secure to him a trust and authority much beyond that of any other of the Federal generals. It is the same with personal reserve in every form: one who always appears to be his own master and does not too readily reveal his deeper feelings, is so much the more likely to create an impression of power. He is formidable because incalculable. And accordingly we see that many people deliberately assume, or try to assume, an appearance of inscrutability,
“And do a wilful stillness entertain,
With purpose to be dressed in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit;”
Disraeli, it is said, “was a mystery man by instinct and policy,” and we all know others in our own circle of acquaintances.
So with the expression of personality in literature. A book which is perfectly clear at the first cursory reading is by that fact condemned as commonplace. If there were anything vital in it, it would appear at least a little strange, and would not be fully understood until it had been for some time inwardly digested. At the end of that time it would have done its best service for us and its ascendency would have waned. It is always thus, I imagine, with writers who strongly move us; there is first mystery and a sense of unexplored life, then a period of assimilative excitement, and after that chastened affection, or perhaps revulsion or distrust. A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies. It was a maxim of Goethe that where there is no mystery there is no power; and something of the perennial vitality of his writings may be attributed to the fact that he did not trouble himself too much with the question whether people would understand him, but set down his inmost experiences as adequately as he could, and left the rest to time. The same may be said of Browning, and of many other great writers.
Something similar holds true of power in plastic art. The sort of mystery most proper and legitimate in art, however, is not an intellectual mystery—though some artists have had a great deal of that, like Leonardo, who “conquered by the magnetism of an incalculable personality”[[90]]—but rather a sensuous mystery, that is to say a vague and subtle appeal to recondite sources of sensuous impression, an awakening of hitherto unconscious capacity for harmonious sensuous life, like the feeling we get from the first mild weather in the spring. In this way, it seems to me, there is an effect of mystery, of congenial strangeness, in all powerful art. Probably everyone would recognize this as true of music, even if all do not feel its applicability to painting, sculpture and architecture.