This elusive quality it is,which causes the thought of whiteness,when divorced from more kindly associations,and coupled with any object terrible in itself,to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds.Witness the white bear of the poles,and the white shark of the tropics;what but their smooth,flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are?That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness,even more loathsome than terrific,to the dumb gloating of their aspect.So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.*
*With reference to the Polar bear,it may possibly be urged by him who would fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only rises from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have that intensified terror.
As for the white shark,the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that creature,when beheld in his ordinary moods,strangely tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped.This peculiarity is most vividly hit by the French in the name they bestow upon that fish. The Romish mass for the dead begins with “Requiem eternam” (eternal rest), whence _Requiem_ denominating the mass itself, and any other funeral music. Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness of death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him _Requin_.
Bethink thee of the albatross,whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread,in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations?Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God’s great,unflattering laureate, Nature.*
*I remember the first albatross I ever saw.It was during a prolonged gale,in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas.From my forenoon watch below,I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there,dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal,feathery thing of unspotted whiteness,and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals,it arched forth its vast archangel wings,as if to embrace some holy ark.Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it.Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries,as some king’s ghost in supernatural distress.Through its inexpressible, strange eyes,methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God.As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself;the white thing was so white, its wings so wide,and in those for ever exiled waters,I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns.Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell,can only hint, the things that darted through me then.But at last I awoke; and turning,asked a sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney!never had heard that name before;is it conceivable that this glorious thing is utterly unknown to men ashore!never!But some time after,I learned that goney was some seaman’s name for albatross.So that by no possibility could Coleridge’s wild Rhyme have had aught to do with those mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird upon our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.
I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl.
But how had the mystic thing been caught?Whisper it not, and I will tell;with a treacherous hook and line,as the fowl floated on the sea.At last the Captain made a postman of it;tying a lettered, leathern tally round its neck,with the ship’s time and place;and then letting it escape. But I doubt not,that leathern tally, meant for man,was taken off in Heaven,when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding,the invoking, and adoring cherubim!
Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. At their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star which every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god, bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching amid his aides and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that endlessly streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the bravest Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe. Nor can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of this noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror.
But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and Albatross.
What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye,as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin!It is that whiteness which invests him,a thing expressed by the name he bears.The Albino is as well made as other men—has no substantive deformity—and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?
Nor, in quite other aspects,does Nature in her least palpable but not the less malicious agencies,fail to enlist among her forces this crowning attribute of the terrible.From its snowy aspect,the gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has been denominated the White Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of human malice omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the market-place!