Musing on this experience led me afterwards to think about the meaning of that fear which we call “the fear of darkness,” and yet is not really fear of darkness. Darkness, as a simple condition, never could have originated the feeling,—a feeling that must have preceded any definite idea of ghosts by thousands of ages. The inherited, instinctive fear, as exhibited by children, is not a fear of darkness in itself, but of indefinable danger associated with darkness. Evolutionally explained, this dim but voluminous terror would have for its primal element the impressions created by real experience—experience of something acting in darkness;—and the fear of the supernatural would mingle in it only as a much later emotional development. The primeval cavern-gloom lighted by nocturnal eyes;—the blackness of forest-gaps by river-marges, where destruction lay in wait to seize the thirsty;—the umbrages of tangled shores concealing horror;—the dusk of the python’s lair;—the place of hasty refuge echoing the fury of famished brute and desperate man;—the place of burial, and the fancied frightful kinship of the buried to the cave-haunters:—all these, and countless other impressions of the relation of darkness to death, must have made that ancestral fear of the dark which haunts the imagination of the child, and still betimes seizes the adult as he sleeps in the security of civilization.
Not all the fear of dreams can be the fear of the immemorial. But that strange nightmare-sensation of being held by invisible power exerted from a distance—is it quite sufficiently explained by the simple suspension of will-power during sleep? Or could it be a composite inheritance of numberless memories of having been caught? Perhaps the true explanation would suggest no prenatal experience of monstrous mesmerisms nor of monstrous webs,—nothing more startling than the evolutional certainty that man, in the course of his development, has left behind him conditions of terror incomparably worse than any now existing. Yet enough of the psychological riddle of nightmare remains to tempt the question whether human organic memory holds no record of extinct forms of pain,—pain related to strange powers once exerted by some ghastly vanished life.
The Eternal Haunter
This year the Tōkyō color-prints—Nishiki-è—seem to me of unusual interest. They reproduce, or almost reproduce, the color-charm of the early broadsides; and they show a marked improvement in line-drawing. Certainly one could not wish for anything prettier than the best prints of the present season.
My latest purchase has been a set of weird studies,—spectres of all kinds known to the Far East, including many varieties not yet discovered in the West. Some are extremely unpleasant; but a few are really charming. Here, for example, is a delicious thing by “Chikanobu,” just published, and for sale at the remarkable price of three sen!