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Some there may be who have never felt the thrill of a human touch; but
surely these are few! Most of us in early childhood discover strange
differences in physical contact;--we find that some caresses soothe,
while others irritate; and we form in consequence various unreasoning
likes and antipathies. With the ripening of youth we seem to feel these
distinctions more and more keenly,--until the fateful day in which
we learn that a certain feminine touch communicates an unspeakable
shiver of delight,--exercises a witchcraft that we try to account for
by theories of the occult and the supernatural. Age may smile at these
magical fancies of youth; and nevertheless, in spite of much science,
the imagination of the lover is probably nearer to truth than is the
wisdom of the disillusioned.
We seldom permit ourselves in mature life to think very seriously about
such experiences. We do not deny them; but we incline to regard them as
nervous idiosyncrasies. We scarcely notice that even in the daily act
of shaking hands with persons of either sex, sensations may be received
which no physiology can explain.
I remember the touch of many hands,--the quality of each clasp, the
sense of physical sympathy or repulsion aroused. Thousands I have
indeed forgotten,--probably because their contact told me nothing in
particular; but the strong experiences I fully recollect. I found that
their agreeable or disagreeable character was often quite independent
of the moral relation: but in the most extraordinary case that I can
recall--(a strangely fascinating personality with the strangest of
careers as poet, soldier, and refugee)--the moral and the physical charm
were equally powerful and equally rare. “Whenever I shake hands with
that man,” said to me one of many who had yielded to his spell, “I feel
a warm shock go all through me, like a glow of summer.” Even at this
moment when I think of that dead hand, I can feel it reached out to me
over the space of twenty years and of many a thousand miles. Yet it was
a hand that had killed....
* * * * *
These, with other memories and reflections, came to me just after
reading a criticism on Mr. Bain’s evolutional interpretation of the
thrill of pleasure sometimes given by the touch of the human skin. The
critic asked why a satin cushion kept at a temperature of about 98°
would not give the same thrill; and the question seemed to me unfair
because, in the very passage criticised, Mr. Bain had sufficiently
suggested the reason. Taking him to have meant--as he must have
meant,--not that the thrill is given by any kind of warmth and softness,
but only by the _peculiar_ warmth and softness of the human skin, his
interpretation can scarcely be contested by a sarcasm. A satin cushion
at a temperature of about 98° could not give the same sensation as that
given by the touch of the human skin for reasons even much more simple
than Mr. Bain implied,--since it is totally different from the human
skin in substance, in texture, and in the all-important fact that it is
not alive, but dead. Of course warmth and softness in themselves are
not enough to produce the thrill of pleasure considered by Mr. Bain:
under easily imaginable circumstances they may produce something of
the reverse. Smoothness has quite as much to do with the pleasure of
touch as either softness or warmth can have; yet a moist or a very dry
smoothness may be disagreeable. Again, cool smoothness in the human
skin is perhaps even more agreeable than warm smoothness; yet there is
a cool smoothness common to many lower forms of life which causes a
shudder. Whatever be those qualities making pleasurable the touch of a
hand, for example, they are probably very many in combination, and they
are certainly peculiar to the _living_ touch. No possible artificial
combination of warmth and smoothness and softness combined could excite
the same quality of pleasure that certain human touches give,--although,
as other psychologists than Mr. Bain have observed, it may give rise to
a fainter kind of agreeable feeling.
A special sensation can be explained only by special conditions. Some
philosophers would explain the conditions producing this pleasurable
thrill, or _frisson_, as mainly subjective; others, as mainly
objective. Is it not most likely that either view contains truth;--that
the physical cause must be sought in some quality, definable or
indefinable, attaching to a particular touch; and that the cause of the
coincident emotional phenomena should be looked for in the experience,
not of the individual, but of the race?
* * * * *
Remembering that there can be no two tangible things exactly alike,--no
two blades of grass, or drops of water, or grains of sand,--it ought not
to seem incredible that the touch of one person should have power to
impart a sensation different from any sensation producible by the touch
of any other person. That such difference could neither be estimated nor
qualified would not necessarily imply unimportance or even feebleness.
Among the voices of the thousands of millions of human beings in this
world, there are no two precisely the same;--yet how much to the ear
and to the heart of wife or mother, child or lover, may signify the
unspeakably fine difference by which each of a billion voices varies
from every other! Not even in thought, much less in words, can such
distinction be specified; but who is unfamiliar with the fact and with
its immense relative importance?
That any two human skins should be absolutely alike is not possible.
There are individual variations perceptible even to the naked eye,--for
has not Mr. Galton taught us that the visible finger-marks of no two
persons are the same? But in addition to differences visible--whether
to the naked eye, or only under the microscope, there must be other
differences of quality depending upon constitutional vigor, upon nervous
and glandular activities, upon relative chemical composition of tissue.
Whether touch be a sense delicate enough to discern such differences,
would be, of course, a question for psycho-physics to decide,--and
a question not simply of magnitudes, but of qualities of sensation.
Perhaps it is not yet even legitimate to suppose that, just as by ear we
can distinguish the qualitative differences of a million voices, so by
touch we might be able to distinguish qualitative differences of surface
scarcely less delicate. Yet it is worth while here to remark that the
tingle or shiver of pleasure excited in us by certain qualities of
voice, very much resembles the thrill given sometimes by the touch of a
hand. Is it not possible that there may be recognized, in the particular
quality of a living skin, something not less uniquely attractive than
the indeterminable charm of what we call a bewitching voice?
Perhaps it is not impossible. But in the character of the _frisson_
itself there is a hint that the charm of the touch provoking it may be
due to something much more deeply vital than any physical combination
of smoothness, warmth and softness,--to something, as Mr. Bain has
suggested, electric or magnetic. Human electricity is no fiction:
every living body,--even a plant,--is to some degree electrical; and
the electric conditions of no two organisms would be exactly the same.
Can the thrill be partly accounted for by some individual peculiarity
of these conditions? May there not be electrical differences of touch
appreciable by delicate nervous systems,--differences subtle as those
infinitesimal variations of timbre by which every voice of a million
voices is known from every other?
Such a theory might be offered in explanation of the fact that the
slightest touch of a particular woman, for example, will cause a shock
of pleasure to men whom the caresses of other and fairer women would
leave indifferent. But it could not serve to explain why the same
contact should produce no effect upon some persons, while causing
ecstasy in others. No purely physical theory can interpret all the
mystery of the _frisson_. A deeper explanation is needed;--and I imagine
that one is suggested by the phenomenon of “love _at first sight_.”
The power of a woman to inspire love at first sight does not depend
upon some attraction visible to the common eye. It depends partly upon
something objective which only certain eyes can see; and it depends
partly upon some thing which no mortal can see,--_the psychical
composition of the subject of the passion_. Nobody can pretend to
explain in detail the whole enigma of first love. But a general
explanation is suggested by evolutional philosophy,--namely, that the
attraction depends upon an inherited individual susceptibility to
special qualities of feminine influence, and subjectively represents
a kind of superindividual recognition,--a sudden wakening of that
inherited composite memory which is more commonly called “passional
affinity.” Certainly if first love be evolutionally explicable, it means
the perception by the lover of some thing differentiating the beloved
from all other women,--something corresponding to an inherited ideal
within himself, previously latent, but suddenly lighted and defined by
result of that visual impression.
And like sight, though perhaps less deeply, do other of our senses
reach into the buried past. A single strain of melody, the sweetness
of a single voice--what thrill immeasurable will either make in the
fathomless sleep of ancestral memory! Again, who does not know that
speechless delight bestirred in us on rare bright days by something
odorous in the atmosphere,--enchanting, but indefinable? The first
breath of spring, the blowing of a mountain breeze, a south wind from
the sea may bring this emotion,--emotion overwhelming, yet nameless as
its cause,--an ecstasy formless and transparent as the air. Whatever
be the odor, diluted to very ghostliness, that arouses this delight,
the delight itself is too weirdly voluminous to be explained by any
memory-revival of merely individual experience. More probably it is
older even than human life,--reaches deeper into the infinite blind
depth of dead pleasure and pain.
Out of that ghostly abyss also must come the thrill responding within
us to a living touch,--touch electrical of man, questioning the
heart,--touch magical of woman, invoking memory of caresses given by
countless delicate and loving hands long crumbled into dust. Doubt it
not!--the touch that makes a thrill within you is a touch that you have
felt before,--sense-echo of forgotten intimacies in many unremembered
lives!