Sonst werf ich dich in Graben,
Fressen dich die Raben.”
“Snail, snail, put out your horn,
Or I’ll kill your father and mother the morn.”[147]
As a final example, I will mention the gruesome custom which, according to Papasliotis, obtains in modern Greece, and especially in Crete, of attaching a small lighted taper to a beetle and releasing it amid the acclamations of excited children. A passage in Aristophanes gives the impression that the children of ancient Greece also indulged in this cruel sport.[148]
The eye of the adult, too, delights in movement; absolute immobility is as disturbing as absolute stillness. Here, as elsewhere, in considering the playful indulgence of sensuous perceptions, we must distinguish between pleasure in movement as such and pleasure in sensuously agreeable movement. Even children seem to exhibit this difference. Some weeks after the experiments in form described above I drew irregular zigzags and some even, wavy lines in the air before Marie G——, then five years old, and asked which she liked better. She chose the latter, though the others were calculated to produce a much more exciting impression, giving as her reason that the wavy lines were “straighter”; evidently meaning, as in the case of the figures, that these were more regular. In adults susceptibility to sensuously agreeable movement is doubtless still stronger, yet with them, too, there is a wide margin of pleasure in movement as such. From the multiplicity of available examples of this I select first the observation of street scenes, which I have already noticed in the case of animals,[149] especially the dog. The pleasure which we find in gazing out of our own windows or from behind the plate glass of a café at the bustle and swarm of a city’s traffic detaches itself from all intellectual or even imaginative associations, and is gradually merged into a dreamy consciousness of a sensation of movement, mingled with mild enjoyment of its contrast with our own repose. With similar sensations we observe the stir of an ant-hill, the swarming of gnats in the evening glow, the confusion of snowflakes, and the whirling of leaves in a wind. A special interest attaches to the witnessing of skilful acrobatics where the feeling of inner imitation is strongly excited, and well does the juggler know how to turn this interest to account. The dexterous leaps which Amaranthus records at the beginning of the eighteenth century furnishes us an historical example: “Many are the leaps by which the jugglers cause the money of the spectators to jump into their own purses, and they have names as strange as they are ridiculous. There is the monkey jump, which throws one backward, landing him on both feet; the trout leap, which does the same thing twice in quick succession and with the legs crossed; twenty-two monkey jumps without stopping; a great variety of table and board jumps; the goat and hare leaps; the leap through eight rings, one from floor to ceiling, over chairs, etc.”[150]
The enjoyment is of course strengthened when the already interesting motion becomes sensuously agreeable; a low degree of such pleasure is experienced in witnessing regular motion in a single direction, such as that of a rushing stream or of clouds sailing across the heavens. In one of his verses Gottfried Keller calls these latter the “friendly companions of the dwellers on earth.” “As they wander on they attract and distract the burdened soul of him who observes them with wonder, and keep him amused all through the weary hours.” Gurgling springs add to their upward gushing motion the soft underground murmur of their waters, while the beauty of circling motion is perhaps never more effectively shown than in the majestic floating of birds of prey. Darwin says in his Voyage of the Beagle round the World: “When the condors are wheeling in a flock round and round any spot their flight is beautiful. Except when rising from the ground, I do not recollect ever having seen one of these birds flap its wings. Near Lima I watched several for nearly half an hour, without once taking off my eyes. They moved in large curves, sweeping in circles, descending and ascending, without giving a single flap.” Perhaps our pleasure is even greater in wave motions, as they roll over the ocean or are produced by the wind on a field of grain, or surge in the current of a rapid stream. These noble verses of Mörike’s on the Rhine falls bear witness to the power of the æsthetic feeling so aroused:
“Halte dein Herz, o Wanderer, fest in gewaltigen Händen!
Mir entstürzte vor Lust zitternd das meinige fast.