Nathaniel Hawthorne - "Fanshawe"

Gerald Stanley Lee - "The Voice of the Machines"

Charles Darwin - "More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II"

Alexis de Tocqueville - "American Institutions And Their Influence"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

The Bride of Dreams

F >> Frederik van Eeden >> The Bride of Dreams




"No!" said Elsje, "not quite, I believe. I don't know whether you think
it good to secede or not."

"That I shall explain to you. Humanity consists of two principal kinds
- of herd-men and seceders. Both, Christ has need of. The herd-men form
the mighty unity through which he lives; it in his great organic body,
whereof the individuals are the cells. The better they cohere, the
stronger, mightier, more beautiful becomes his unity, his judgment, far
exalted above our comprehension. Therefor the union of the groups in
holy and good and every disturbance is met with vigorous resistance.
But Christ is growing. Humanity has not yet attained its perfect growth
and the union is still incomplete, defective. The tree is constantly
developing new branches, bursting through the old bark, sending forth
new shoots. That is the function of the single cells that burst the old
union, forming the kernel of a new, better organization. Our body too
has two principal kinds of cells, the corporal cells that constitute
our organs, and the germinal cells from which new organisms are
developed. The germinal cells in the body of Christ are the seceders,
the original spirits who will no longer tolerate the union of the group
and are directly called and guided by the Genius of Humanity, by
Christ's own voice. But they must then also be men, with great strength
and patience, designed for stern endurance and constant struggle. The
world must hate them and persecute them and if possible annihilate
them. For only those who can withstand this process of persecution and
annihilation are the real, true seceders, elected by Christ and able to
create a new and better union. Therefore it is good to be a herd-man
and to respect the existing union - the existing order as it is called
- if one has the strength for that and nothing more. But it is good to
break this order if one feels oneself very distinctly impelled to it by
the inward light of Christ, by true knowledge, by the firm
consciousness of truth, and moreover knows, knows with absolute
certainty, that one has the power and the abilities for enduring and
struggling, for resisting the inevitable enmity of the world, for
surviving her hatred and persecution, for proving indeed one's good
right to secede and to be original. It is not just to denounce the
world and to glorify the martyrs. Christ does not want martyrs. He
wants conquering triumphant originals. The patience of the martyrs is a
virtue, which he bestows on the originals, his privileged servants, but
a virtue with which to conquer, not to yield. And a virtue which must
not be sought for its own sake, but for the sake of the victory. The
world punishes according to his deserts him, who breaking from the
union has overestimated his power to persevere and to triumph."

"Thus my dear husband will not be a martyr," said Elsje, as always
practical, and keeping to the point.

"Not if he can help it. If I came before Christ with only a crown of
thorns, might he not ask them: 'Where is your gospel? And what joy for
my world have you bought with your anguish?' We are dealing with his
goods, Elsje, with Christ's goods; our sorrow is his sorrow, our joy is
his joy and we may not squander anything for nothing. Even the Jesus of
the Bible-drama bought his gospel of joy too dearly. The just price for
his crown of thorns has never yet been paid; the gospel is there, but
the joy has yet to come. Though his kingdom is not of this world, the
joy of that kingdom would also brighten this world, as soon as we could
all believe in it. But no heavenly kingdom of joy shall be built of
material as poor as mortal life to-day still is. I did not want to
yield for nothing, nor do I want to sacrifice Elsje for nothing.
Therefore I wavered so long, for I know how weak I am and how little I
can achieve for Christ. Understand me well, Elsje, I do not want this
just account for myself, but for Christ in whom I live. I am quite
ready to pay with personal sorrow whatever is for the benefit of
Christ. For his good is also my good. But naught for nothing."

"But you are so strong and you know so much, and there is so much you
can do for the world," said Elsje, with her charming pride.

"I lack the very things that are most essential to make oneself prevail
as an Original. I have not the qualities of an orator, nor of a poet,
nor of an administrator, nor of an organizer, nor of a composer, nor of
a dramatist. The only things I have are patience, insight and
conviction."

"But then you can communicate this to others who help you."

"See, Elsje, before I tore myself away I doubted of this. But now I see
better how Christ works in me. As soon as you take one step in his
direction, though it be in the pitch dark, then he makes the two
following steps clear for you. The great relief in my heart and my
speaking much and freely with you, dear Elsje, has made so much clearer
to me. I believe that I can do something in the world after all. And I
feel that I must attempt it. And though it does not succeed, yet I am
sure that I shall gain something by it that shall be worth fighting and
bleeding for. Will you support me, will you join me, will you venture
what I venture?"

Then Elsje threw both her arms around me joyfully crying:

"Oh, my Husband! what would I not venture where you are beside me.
Whither leads our journey and when do we go? I am ready, though it were
to-morrow."

"It is not to-morrow, but the day after. And our journey leads us
across the great ocean, to the new country, where the new life is
stirring, and foaming, and seething most intensely."

"To America?"

"Yes, Elsje; are you willing? We shall escape the evil tongues in
Holland. Evade the painful proximity of my old sphere of life. We shall
not bury ourselves in some remote corner of the earth, but shall stand
in the very midst of the most fiercely burning life, in the most
intensively growing human world. There I can best become aware of what
is to be expected of mankind, best divine what Christ intends with us
and what he expects of me. If I can achieve anything indeed - it is
there. I know it, for I know the country and the people, though I am
not yet quite sure how I shall go about it."

Elsje looked grave and thoughtful: not appalled or frightened by the
prospect, but as though in a whirl of new overwhelming images. Then she
asked shyly:

"And in this battle will there still be room and time for a small,
peaceful home? And for a little, tender child?"

"Why not, Elsje? There too are peaceful dwellings and many tender
little children also are born there. The fighting does not go on
constantly."

"I shall see that I am ready," said Elsje. And she was, in good time.

XXVII

We stood upon the deck of the great trans-Atlantic steamer and our
color-thirsty eyes drank in the rich scene of the cliffs and hills of
Ireland, rising above a calm sea under a sky heavy with rain. Dark
grayish-purple, light gray and white rain clouds to one side, above us
a clear limpid blue, a short fragment of a rainbow rising out of the
light emerald-green sea, and stretching straight across the faded brown
and dull green land with the little white houses, on to the
blackish-gray cloud which flowed out into mist and against which the
bright colors shone dazzlingly. Thousands of white gulls round about
the ship, like a whirling, living snow flurry, glittering in the bright
sunlight and contrasting sharply with the dark background of clouds -
screaming and screeching wildly and ceaselessly.

"The sign of the covenant," said I, pointing to the rainbow.

"Do you really believe, Vico, that God gives such signs to men?"

"What do you mean by 'God,' Elsje?"

Elsje looked at me with pensive wonder.

"Do you then only believe in Christ and not in God?"

"When I employ a word I want it to mean something. After many years of
thought and observation I am beginning to mean something more or less
distinct when I say Christ. Why? Because I have obtained so many signs
of Christ, outward and inward, that I could form a fixed idea from them
- not a picture, not an image, but an idea, what the professors call a
hypothesis, and in which one may believe as every scholar may believe
in his hypothesis, without absolute certainty, but with an
ever-increasing degree of probability, so that one can make predictions
and see them confirmed by experience. This is the faith that poets and
scholars and originals and herd-men are all equally in need of."

"And does God not give such signs then?" asked Elsie.

"Patience, child! first come the signs and only then do the conclusions
follow. I behold here a glorious, beneficent and comforting spectacle.
That is a sign. But of what and of whom? Of a higher being than Christ?
Surely. For earth and sun, that made this sign, are more than humanity.
But our inward perceptibility experiences emotions which point to a
supreme Being, the Almighty, who created the sun and the earth and all
the stars, on whom all we know is dependent and to whom all is subject.
No matter what we think we must always arrive at such a Being. It is
impossible not to - whether we call it Nature or God or something else,
or better still give it no name."

"Yes," said Elsie; "but for me again God, just like Christ, is a
living, feeling, loving being. And Nature, sun, earth - all that is not
living and feeling, is it -?"

"Dear Elsie, only in the beginning of this century, before the
professors had yet thought out their impossible hypothesis of a dead
matter and a soulless Nature, there was a poet who in a few words set
forth the wisdom which the professors have forgotten and which they
will have to remember again, before we have gone half a century
further. This poet was named Shelley, and when he was not older than
twenty, he wrote:


'Of all this varied and eternal world

Soul is the only element...

'The moveless pillar of a mountain's weight

Is active, living spirit. Every grain

Is sentient both in unity and part,

And the minutest atom comprehends

A world of loves and hatreds.'


"Remember these words well, Elsie, I will repeat them once more and
translate them for you."

And I did so, for Elsie's knowledge of English consisted only in what
she had learned from me. Then I continued: "These words issued from the
strongest and most magnificent original spirit the world has brought
forth since the poet of the Jesus-Drama, and every child ought to learn
them, more necessarily than the multiplication table or the Lord's
prayer. The world has called their maker an Atheist, just as did
Spinoza. But all modern natural science can be brought back to God,
that is to the truth, only by these words."

"Then is this glorious spectacle a living sign of the earth and the
sun?" Elsje asked.

"Of course!" said I; "but it shall yet be long before we comprehend
such an outward sign. All we understand of it is: splendor, beauty,
sublimity. These are also the characteristics of all that is divine.
But their nearer relations to our inner emotions of love and joy -
these we do not comprehend."

"And God?" asked my wife.

"All the outward signs I have seen point to the operation of limited,
imperfect beings or deities - as humanity, the plants and animals, the
celestial bodies. But these all seem to work in a power that is fixed
and unchangeable. The signs thereof are what the scholars call 'Laws of
Nature,' as the force of gravitation and all chemical and physical
laws. These alone can be signs of life of the Almighty. And still we
are not sure that they issue from the supreme Power.

"Our inner consciousness tells us that the supreme Life cannot be
finite, temporal. But the sensible signs of the supreme Life according
to our faulty perception are temporal and point to an end. The Universe
that we perceive is not a perpetuum mobile. The laws of motion that we
know all come to a standstill. As the scholars put it: there is
increasing entropy and there are irreversible processes. This does not
satisfy our inward consciousness of the supreme Life. It must be a
local, temporally restricted condition. We know irrefutably that the
highest Life is more, and we shall also discover the perceptible signs
of it."

Beside us stood the second-class passengers of a large emigrant
steamer, gazing across the bulwark toward the last land of Europe, and
vainly trying to catch something of our conversation carried on in low
tones and in a language strange to them. Small, dark, Slavonic women,
with gaily-colored scarfs around their heads and children in their
arms; Poles in shabby coats and astrakhan caps; tall blond
Scandinavians, square-jawed, cool-blooded and patient; short, sturdy
Italians with felt hats and gay cravats; a handful of pale-brown
Siamese jugglers or gymnasts with flat gold-embroidered caps on, and
tired, listless faces, melancholy and pallid from cold and seasickness.
And amid this dirty chattering human assemblage, devouring nuts and
oranges, sometimes making music and gaming, all half dulled and
frightened by the usual fierce and anxious battle of life they had gone
through and with the vague expectation of future wealth and pleasure in
their eyes - amid these I saw my sweet, delicate wife with her eyes,
now dark-rimmed but shining with joyous fervor, and her pale, delicate
features - and amid the singing, eating, chattering and gaming our
subtle quiet conversation grew like a strange exotic plant amid rubbish.

But Elsje put to shame my false pride and gladly and helpfully busied
herself with this little troop of humanity blown together from all the
quarters of the globe, making herself understood and loved in all sorts
of ways in the overflowing joy of her new life.

I myself was not very cheerful, but more often profoundly grave and
sad, though with that rich and gentle melancholy that leads to sublime
thought. Above all the memory of my children could make me deeply
dejected and silent for hours. When I imagined that they would fall
ill, or that they cried because of my absence, it was as though my
inmost heart was torn, or strange hands were wringing the entrails of
my soul. I had heard nothing of them before my departure with the
exception of one brief, comforting word from my second daughter, the
third in age of my children, a shrinking, gentle girl of sixteen. She
wrote in Italian:


"My dear father, I don't know why you have gone away, and I dare not
ask mother or the others about it, for they don't quite understand and
take it amiss and won't speak of you. But I will think that it had to
be and say that I am not angry. You had better not answer, for that
would annoy mother.

Your loving little daughter,

Emilia."


This letter also made my grief vent itself in tears; they were not
tears of remorse, however, but of an unavoidable mournfulness. At such
moments Elsje respected my feelings with a sacred veneration for which
I was unutterably grateful to her. She felt that in this she could not
heal or comfort.

The first stormy days in the European waters were the wont. Then I was
painfully sensible of my poverty because it compelled me to let Elsje
live in the midst of these often unclean and unmannerly people, in the
close steamer atmosphere surrounded by sick people, in the sleeping
quarters separated only by curtains, with the primitive washing
accommodations and the lack of everything that I would so gladly have
given her - beauty, cleanliness, comfort. But Elsje did not complain
and adapted herself to the circumstances with bright inventiveness and
good humor.

At last came the warm, dark, transparent, deep violet-blue waters of
the Gulf Stream and the sun began to shine refreshingly and the
light-hearted folk made music and danced on the deck. Then for us too
it became more endurable and we sat for hours hand in hand gazing at
the glorious play of colors on the waves, blue-black, seething
light-blue, and foaming snowy-white. From time to time we spoke of the
great things that always occupied our thoughts. For we felt that in
these great things alone could lie our justification and our peace of
mind.

"Dear man, you have taught me much that is comforting and true," said
Elsje; "but yet it sometimes seems as though you had made God very
distant and inaccessible for me. This beautiful, wicked, awful sea - a
thinking, feeling being is already terrifying in its profound
incomprehensiveness. And then, moreover - the sun and the stars!"

"Still it is good, Elsje, not to wish to hide the truth, even though it
is oppressing. Inwardly God remains just as near. There is no further
or nearer there. And Christ I have really brought nearer to you,
haven't I?"

"Yes, but also robbed him of his perfection."

"True, and therefore made him dearer, more intimate and real. When we
are children we consider our father and mother perfect. Thereby we
wrong them. Later we see that they do indeed stand above us, but that
they have faults too. And then when we can love them, faults and all,
then they are most truly our beloved and trusted confidants. It is a
stupid, childish tendency always to expect and to demand perfection in
all that is above us. The Bible-Jesus spoke truly when he said that
there was but one perfect Goodness. I will add that there is but one I
and one Memory. And only then will man be able to follow Christ to the
pure blessedness, when he learns to feel that there may be
incomprehensible sublimity, loftiness and superiority without
perfection: that there may also be faults in the power that has created
him and in which he lives: that there are yet an infinite number of
higher beings, all above him, and powerful and wise and lofty far
beyond his comprehension, and yet all of them humble and faulty and
weak in the power of a Most-Sublime, who is equally near to all and
penetrates all with equal profoundness."

XXVIII

I do not propose to give you dramatic surprises, dear reader, and you
must not look for thrilling excitement in the story of my life. Elsje's
parentage has always remained unknown to me and the pretty motive for a
romance of the foundling is left unused. For that sort of thing you
have your well-stocked public libraries and Mr. Conan Doyle and his
colleagues.

So I will rather tell you directly that my trip to America resulted in
what everyone, and I myself too at first, considered a complete failure.

But I wish to make you distinctly realize that man may fare as the
soldier, who, ordered to maintain a position without knowing that the
position is untenable, faithfully perseveres in his charge, though
aware that the endeavor is a hopeless failure - later to learn that his
perseverance and his failure were foreseen in the great plan of the
general and have helped to bring about the victory and peace.

It is possible that, even though it seemed otherwise, my efforts were
after all beneficial and fruitful, that I sowed seeds that are still in
a state of germination and only long after I am gone will shoot up as
plants. I do not know this and I need not trouble about it. I have
carried out the order, as I understood it, to the best of my abilities.
But I do know what I have gained in new knowledge and understanding.
And this has made me so rich that I regret none of my sacrifices and
repent none of my actions. And this alone also lets me find peace and
contentment in this quiet lonely life, because here I can write down
what has enchanted and stirred me go strongly, and the assurance never
forsakes me that my words shall find their way and, like a mighty
ferment, work on in the heads of those who as you, dear reader, have
experienced the painful blessing of originality, and know what it is to
live in immediate contact with Christ, the Genitive Spirit of humanity.

Through all the dark confusion of my vain efforts and painful
experiences, through the continued terrible anguish of mankind, ever
increasing and void of beauty and sublimity, one light shone out with
an ever steadier and brighter glow the wonder of the true marriage.

This is so difficult to describe, because every one professes to know
it and to respect it, and insincere eloquence and insincere enthusiasm
have poured themselves out over it in riotous streams. So that one
scruples to employ any word wherewith to indicate the true wonder,
because all words have been polluted and defiled through a horrible
misuse.

The true wonder is so great that the man of original spirit who has
found it would, if he had the power, not hesitate for a moment to
destroy all domestic happiness and domestic peace among the great human
herd, as long as these rest only on a conventional imitation, a
miserable substitute, of the true glory. I have lived in what to all
the world seemed a happy union. I have endured the terrible anguish of
a violent rupture of firmly-knit bonds of attachment and affection -
but how insignificant is all this, how sorry this apparent happiness,
how slight the anguish compared to the mighty and transcendent things
that were gained - the perfect tenderness, the real intimacy of true
conjugal love, the complete melting into one of two cells in the great
body of humanity.

I have good reason to believe that most marriages - oh! by far the most
- are of inferior quality and falser than my own false union. And also
that in this matter with most men - oh! by far the most - the elemental
susceptibility to true conjugal happiness is still inborn, that even
the weakest conventionalist and herd-man would in this respect turn
back to this deep elemental instinct, if he were left free to do so -
that with the majority Christ herein still works directly and
immediately, because it is the most deep seated, most absorbing passion
with which he has equipped us.

And even with a clear vision of the ocean of grief, confusion and
disaster that would arise were the herd to apply itself to follow the
lead of the Originals and in fanatic zeal break all untrue bonds - even
with this appalling knowledge I would not hesitate to lead them on to
such a crusade against the matrimonial lie, since I know the glory and
the riches of the promised land to be regained. Many would perish on
the road and pine away, many would be trampled on and perhaps curse my
name and denounce what they had began; but the prize is worth the
sacrifice.

Marriage is without doubt one of the most sacred human institutions,
but only sacred through inward truth, and no civic formula or churchly
ritual can make it sacred if the inward truth is wanting in it. And
better a thousand dissolved and broken false marriages than one true
marriage prevented or one untrue one with the semblance of sincerity
and sacredness upheld.

But Christ is yet in distress and anguish. He is yet in the throes of
birth, in the pains of growth. Our world is as my brother Hebbel said:
a wound of God. But as I add: a healing wound; therefore not less
painful. And what distinguishes the true marriage from the untrue is
this very quality of pain. Never did I suffer through Lucia what I
suffered through Elsje. In the apparent happiness there is contentment
and complacency, in the real an everlasting gnawing and torturing
longing, a desire for more, more - the desire to express oneself more
fully, the desire to be more closely united, to be bound together more
firmly, more indissolubly, more everlastingly. Elsje and I were
constantly tormented by our powerlessness to express to one another the
depth of our emotion, by our anxiety for each other's welfare and
happiness, by our uncertainty in regard to what life and death would
bring us, by our wish never to be parted and to experience constantly
the blessing of each other's company.

Even when, in the serenest, most peaceful moments, I sat by her side
gazing at her with devout attention so that Moricke's words arose in me:


"Wenn ich von deinem Anschaun tief gestillt

Mich ganz mit deinem heil'gen Werth begnüge?"


even then there was a mysterious, tender quality of pain in my love,
independent of all the considerations and cares concerning present and
future - like a gentle, never wholly dying echo of the great world
sorrow. And through this I knew that our love-life was one with the
great love-life of Christ. By the tang of pain in our cup of life I
recognized the water from the world-stream.

I had worked out no definitely elaborated plan for my campaign in the
new land, amongst the new people. I had a few thousand guilders that
belonged to me and a few hundred from Elsje. We had selected the
cheapest travelling accommodations and would live very simply. I hoped
to have enough for us to live on until I should have found a means of
subsistence and a field for my labors. I had plenty of acquaintances in
the most distinguished circles, but I knew how little I could count on
them. Yet I had to try to find among them the few that were susceptive
to original thoughts and had the ability to turn them into deeds.

I argued thus: that all individuals live in an invincible group-union
of morals, customs, traditions and institutions, which originated
wholly beyond their reasonable will and which are mostly in conflict
with their own deeper convictions. That they live thus is the result of
their nature and character as group-creatures. They cannot do otherwise
and may not do otherwise. No individual can live apart, he must have a
group or grouplet, no matter how small, whose ideas, customs and morals
he shares. It is absolutely vain and useless to wish to draw him from
this union by logical, sensible arguments. Though logically he can find
nothing to say against such arguments, though the system in which he
lives conflicts wholly with his original disposition, he must continue
in it, because otherwise he would run wild, and he will sooner twist
and falsify his ideas and feelings completely than be disobedient to
the voice of the herd in which be finds his conditions of life.

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