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._
All the riddles and contradictions of our æsthetic systems are natural
consequences of the delusion that beauty is a something absolute, a
transcendental reality, an eternal fact. It is true that the appearance
we call beauty is the symbol of a fact,--is the visible manifestation of
a development beyond the ordinary,--a bodily evolution more advanced
than the existing average. In like manner what we call grace is a real
manifestation of the economy of force. But since there can be no cosmic
limit to evolutional possibilities, there never can be any standards of
grace or of beauty that are not relative and essentially transitory; and
there can be no physical ideals,--not even Greek ideals,--that might
not in the course of human evolution or of superhuman evolution be so
much more than realized as to become vulgarities of form. An ultimate
of beauty is inconceivable and impossible; no term of æsthetics can
ever represent more than the idea of a phase of the perpetual becoming,
a temporary relation in comparative evolution. Beauty-in-itself is
only the name of a sensation, or complex of sensation, mistaken for
objectivity--much as sound and light and color were once imagined to be
realities.
Yet what is it that attracts?--what is the meaning of the resistless
emotion which we call the Sense of Beauty?
Like the sensing of light or color or perfume, the recognition of
beauty is a recognition of fact. But that fact bears to the feeling
evoked no more likeness than the reality of five hundred billions of
ether-shiverings per second bears to the sensation of orange. Still in
either case the fact is a manifestation of force. Representing higher
evolution, the phenomenon termed beauty also represents a relatively
superior fitness for life, a higher ability to fulfil the conditions of
existence; and it is the non-conscious perception of this representation
that makes the fascination. The longing aroused is not for any mere
abstraction, but for greater completeness of faculty as means to the
natural end. To the dead within each man, beauty signifies the presence
of what they need most,--Power. They know, in despite of Lethe, that
when they lived in comely bodies life was usually made easy and happy
for them, and that when prisoned in feeble or in ugly bodies, they found
life miserable or difficult. They want to live many times again in sound
young bodies,--in shapes that assure force, health, joy, quickness to
win and energy to keep the best prizes of life’s contest. They want,
if possible, conditions better than any of the past, but in no event
conditions worse.