"The face of the beloved and the face of the risen sun cannot be
looked at."--Japanese Proverb.
I
Modern science assures us that the passion of first love, so far
as the individual may be concerned, is "absolutely antecedent to
all relative experience whatever(1)." In other words, that which
might well seem to be the most strictly personal of all feelings,
is not an individual matter at all. Philosophy discovered the
same fact long ago, and never theorized more attractively than
when trying to explain the mystery of the passion. Science, so
far, has severely limited itself to a few suggestions on the
subject. This seems a pity, because the metaphysicians could at
no time give properly detailed explanations,--whether teaching
that the first sight of the beloved quickens in the soul of the
lover some dormant prenatal remembrance of divine truth, or that
the illusion is made by spirits unborn seeking incarnation. But
science and philosophy both agree as to one all-important fact,
that the lovers themselves have no choice, that they are merely
the subjects of an influence. Science is even the more positive
on this point: it states quite plainly that the dead, not the
living, are responsible. There would seem to be some sort of
ghostly remembrance in first loves. It is true that science,
unlike Buddhism, does not declare that under particular
conditions we may begin to recollect our former lives. That
psychology which is based upon physiology even denies the
possibility of memory-inheritance in this individual sense. But
it allows that something more powerful, though more indefinite,
is inherited,--the sum of ancestral memories incalculable,--the
sum of countless billions of trillions of experiences. Thus can
it interpret our most enigmatical sensations,--our conflicting
impulses,--our strangest intuitions; all those seemingly
irrational attractions or repulsions,--all those vague sadnesses
or joys, never to be accounted for by individual experience. But
it has not yet found leisure to discourse much to us about first
love,--although first love, in its relation to the world
invisible, is the very weirdest of all human feelings, and the
most mysterious.
In our Occident the riddle runs thus. To the growing youth, whose
life is normal and vigorous, there comes a sort of atavistic
period in which he begins to feel for the feebler sex that
primitive contempt created by mere consciousness of physical
superiority. But it is just at the time when the society of girls
has grown least interesting to him that he suddenly becomes
insane. There crosses his life-path a maiden never seen
before,--but little different from other daughters of men,--not
at all wonderful to common vision. At the same instant, with a
single surging shock, the blood rushes to his heart; and all his
senses are bewitched. Thereafter, till the madness ends, his life
belongs wholly to that new-found being, of whom he yet knows
nothing, except that the sun's light seems more beautiful when it
touches her. From that glamour no mortal science can disenthrall
him. But whose the witchcraft? Is it any power in the living
idol? No, psychology tells us that it is the power of the dead
within the idolater. The dead cast the spell. Theirs the shock in
the lover's heart; theirs the electric shiver that tingled
through his veins at the first touch of one girl's hand.
But why they should want her, rather than any other, is the
deeper part of the riddle. The solution offered by the great
German pessimist will not harmonize well with scientific
psychology. The choice of the dead, evolutionally considered,
would be a choice based upon remembrance rather than on
prescience. And the enigma is not cheerful.
There is, indeed, the romantic possibility that they want her
because there survives in her, as in some composite photograph,
the suggestion of each and all who loved them in the past. But
there is the possibility also that they want her because there
reappears in her something of the multitudinous charm of all the
women they loved in vain.
Assuming the more nightmarish theory, we should believe that
passion, though buried again and again, can neither die nor rest.
They who have vainly loved only seem to die; they really live on
in generations of hearts, that their desire may be fulfilled.
They wait, perhaps though centuries, for the reincarnation of
shapes beloved,--forever weaving into the dreams of youth their
vapory composite of memories. Hence the ideals unattainable,--the
haunting of troubled souls by the Woman-never-to-be-known.
In the Far East thoughts are otherwise; and what I am about to
write concerns the interpretation of the Lord Buddha.
(1) Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology: "The Feelings."