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Updated: June 5, 2025


There is but one danger in play of this kind, and that is, that deep down in the breast of every slippery, frothy, elfish Undine sleeps the germ of an unawakened soul, which suddenly, in the course of some such trafficking with the outward shows and seemings of affection, may wake up and make of the teasing, tricksy elf a sad and earnest woman a creature of loves and self-denials and faithfulness unto death in short, something altogether too good, too sacred to be trifled with; and when a man enters the game protected by a previous attachment which absorbs all his nature, and the woman awakes in all her depth and strength to feel the real meaning of love and life, she finds that she has played with one stronger than she, at a terrible disadvantage.

Gradually she became enlightened enough to distinguish in the man a known, if not common, type of the externally soft and polished, internally hard and relentless, who are equal to the trials of love only as long as favouring circumstances and seemings nurse the fair object of their courtship.

We move, like marionettes, pulled by the strings of our forgotten antenatal deeds, in a magic cage, or Net, of false and hypocritical momentary seemings: and bitter disappointment is the inevitable doom of every soul, that with passion for its guide in the gloom, thinks to find in the shadows that surround it any substance, any solid satisfaction; any permanent in the mutable; any rest in the ceaseless revolution; any peace which the world cannot give.

Who shall explain and disentangle those high and restless and interwoven emotions with which intellectual ambition, honourable and ardent, gazes upon that solemn thing with which, in which, for which it lives and labours, the Human Multitude? To that abstracted, solitary man, the illumination, the festivity, the curiosity, the holiday, were nothing, or but as fleeting phantoms and vain seemings.

The physical world-view is in terms of the convention of representation, but it is not, for all that, illusory. It can, ideally, be made as true as it is capable of being. There is no reason whatever for confusing the 'well-grounded seemings' of the apparent physical world with the fantastic seemings of dream and hallucination.

In this work I reproduced my mistress's beauty and my love's significance. Having learned the language of nature, I translated from her hieroglyphic pages in characters of flame. With rash hands I stripped false seemings from material beauty, and limned the naked divinity of Idea. Shorn by degrees in my strife of youth and strength and passion, I wound them in my work toiling like paltry larvæ.

"Alas!" returned the other, "it is not the higher but the lower Reason which leads you, and the Knowledge you covet is not that of realities, but of mere seemings. You do not know the real world. You are the dupes of a Phantasm which you take for Substance." With that he passed on, and the man of Science was left in the company of the traveler who had first accosted him.

It is the expensive advertising propaganda of cigarette manufacturers, and the "satisfaction" they are offering you is that brief and fleeting sensation of being doped, so that "stern realities are changed to pleasant seemings." It matters not to them that your health and morals and money and life pay the cost, just so they sell their product. They tell you cigarettes "satisfy."

And it was strange, in looking back, to remember how the time of colorless light and colorless shadow had seemed to divest them all of daily conventions and daily seemings. They might have been three disembodied souls met there in the moonlit woods and speaking the direct, unimpeded language of souls, for whom all concealments are useless.

For a general account of religious dances, see Major-General Forlong's Faiths of Man, art. "Dancing." Catlin, North American Indians, i. p. 36. Cited by Frazer, Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, p. 161. Turner's Samoa, p. 345-6. Brady, Clavis Calendaria, vol. i. p. 223. Cited by Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii. pp. 412-3. Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings, p. 277.

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