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.