What also much impressed me in your letter was the feeling of sadness the spectacle of the great Exposition gave you. But I scarcely think it was due to any reminiscences of boyhood—not simply because of its being certainly a feeling infinitely too complex to have sprung out of a single relative experience in the past (your confession of inability to analyze it, and the statement of others who had the same feeling, would show that),—but also because, if you reflect on other experiences of a totally different kind, you will find they give the same sensation. The first sight of a colossal range of mountains; the awful beauty of a peak like Chimborazo or Fuji; the majesty of an enormous river; the vision of the sea in speaking motion; and, among human spectacles, a military sight, such as the passing-by of a corps of fifty thousand men, will give also a feeling of sadness. You will feel something like it standing in the choir of the Cathedral of Cologne; and you will feel something like it while watching in the night, from some mighty railroad centre, the rushing of glimmering trains,—bearing away human lives to unknown destinies beyond the darkness.
Probably, as Schopenhauer said, the vision of mountains has the effect of producing sadness, because the sense of their antiquity awakens sudden recognition of the shortness of human life. But I do not think it is a mere individual feeling. It is a feeling we share with countless dead who live in us, and who saw the same mountains,—perhaps felt the same way. Besides, there should be a religious ancestral feeling there—since mountains have ever been the abode of gods, and the earliest places of worship and of burial. And I think there is. You do not laugh when you look at mountains—nor when you look at the sea.
What effect does the sudden sight of an extraordinarily beautiful person have upon you? I mean the very first. Is it not an effect of sadness? Analyze it; and perhaps you will find yourself involuntarily thinking of death.
What has the effect of any great beauty—of art, or poetry or utterance—no matter what the subject? Is it cheerful? No, it is very sad. But why? Perhaps partly because of the consciousness of the exceptional character of that beauty,—therefore the sudden contrast between the tender dream-world of art and goodness, and the hideous goblin realities of the world we know. At all events the sadness is certainly the ancient sadness,—the sadness of life, which must, for reasons we cannot learn, begin and end with an agony.
Now at the Exposition you had all the elements for what Clifford would call a “cosmic emotion” of sadness. Vastness, which forced the knowledge of individual weakness; beauty, compelling the memory of impermanency; force, suggesting weakness also; and prodigious effort,—calling for the largest possible exertion of human sympathy, and love, and pity, and sorrow. That you should feel like crying then, does you honour: that is the tribute of all that is noblest in you to the eternal Religion of Human Suffering.
Dear H., I have not slept last night: I am going to rest a little;—good-bye for a short time, with love to you.
Lafcadio Hearn.