The moon, descending her staircase of clouds in one of the "Petits
Poèmes en Prose," enters the chamber of a newborn child, and whispers
into his dreams: "Thou shalt love all that loves me--the water that is
formless and multiform, the vast green sea, the place where thou shalt
never be, the woman thou shalt never know."
For those of us thus blessed or cursed at our birth, this is perhaps
the special season of such dreams--of nostalgia, vague as the
world-sickness, for the places where we shall never be; and fancies as
delicate as arabesques of smoke concerning the woman we shall never
know. There is a languor in the air; the winds sleep; the flowers
exhale their souls in incense; near sounds seem distant, as if the
sense of time and space were affected by hashish; the sunsets paint
in the west pictures of phantom-gold, as of those islands at the mere
aspect of whose beauty crews mutinied and burned their ships; plants
that droop and cling assume a more feminine grace; and the minstrel of
Southern woods mingles the sweet rippling of his mocking music with the
moonlight.
There have been sailors who, flung by some kind storm-wave on the
shore of a Pacific Eden, to be beloved for years by some woman dark
but beautiful, subsequently returned by stealth to the turmoil of
civilization and labor, and vainly regretted, in the dust and roar and
sunlessness of daily toil, the abandoned paradise they could never
see again. Is it not such a feeling as this that haunts the mind in
springtime;--a faint nostalgic longing for the place where we shall
never be;--a vision made even more fairylike by such a vague dream of
glory as enchanted those Spanish souls who sought, and never found El
Dorado?
Each time the vision returns, is it not more enchanting than before,
as a recurring dream of the night in which we behold places we can
never see except through dream-haze, gilded by a phantom sun? It is
sadder each time, this fancy; for it brings with it the memory of older
apparitions, as of places visited in childhood, in that sweet dim time
so long ago that its dreams and realities are mingled together in
strange confusion, as clouds with waters.
Each year it comes to haunt us, like the vision of the Adelantado of
the Seven Cities--the place where we shall never be--and each year
there will be a weirder sweetness and a more fantastic glory about
the vision. And perhaps in the hours of the last beating of the
heart, before sinking into that abyss of changeless deeps above whose
shadowless sleep no dreams move their impalpable wings, we shall see
it once more, wrapped in strange luminosity, submerged in the orange
radiance of a Pacific sunset--the place where we shall never be!
And the Woman that we shall never know!
She is the daughter of mist and light--a phantom bride who becomes
visible to us only during those magic hours when the moon enchants the
world; she is the most feminine of all sweetly feminine things, the
most complaisant, the least capricious. Hers is the fascination of the
succubus without the red thirst of the vampire. She always wears the
garb that most pleases us--when she wears any; always adopts the aspect
of beauty most charming to us--blonde or swarthy, Greek or Egyptian,
Nubian or Circassian. She fills the place of a thousand odalisques,
owns all the arts of the harem of Solomon: all the loveliness we love
retrospectively, all the charms we worship in the present, are combined
in her. She comes as the dead come, who never speak; yet without speech
she gratifies our voiceless caprice. Sometimes we foolishly fancy that
we discover in some real, warm womanly personality, a trait or feature
like unto hers; but time soon unmasks our error. We shall never see her
in the harsh world of realities; for she is the creation of our own
hearts, wrought Pygmalion-wise, but of material too unsubstantial for
even the power of a god to animate. Only the dreams of Brahma himself
take substantial form: these are worlds and men and all their works,
which shall pass away like smoke when the preserver ceases his slumber
of a myriad million years.
She becomes more beautiful as we grow older--this phantom love,
born of the mist of poor human dreams--so fair and faultless that
her invisible presence makes us less reconciled to the frailties and
foibles of real life. Perhaps she too has faults; but she has no faults
for us except that of unsubstantially. Involuntarily we acquire the
unjust habit of judging real women by her spectral standard; and the
real always suffer for the ideal. So that when the fancy of a home
and children--smiling faces, comfort, and a woman's friendship, the
idea of something real to love and be loved by--comes to the haunted
man in hours of disgust with the world and weariness of its hollow
mockeries--the Woman that he shall never know stands before him like a
ghost with sweet sad eyes of warning--and he dare not!