The Bride of Dreams

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

Reader, do not imagine that I demand of you deep regard and veneration
for the great foolish boy who lay helplessly weeping because of that
strange difference between men and flowers that with the former carries
so much discord into their most important vital function.

I myself now softly laugh at my self of fifty years ago, not
scornfully, but with gentle irony - sympathetically. I pat the boy on
the shoulder and admonish him kindly: "Quiet, laddie, be not so
dismayed. We are a strange mingling of ape and angel. But try, as
quickly as possible, to reconcile yourself to this, then everything
becomes quite bearable. Do you think this same thing would have caused
like consternation to Emmy Tenders, if the knowledge but came to her in
the right way, that is to say the way of reverent love, and deep
devotion? She is indeed wiser. And had you learned it as a poet and
lover and not as a philistine then you too would not have found it so
appalling."

But all this, dear reader, does not alter the mysterious and
distressing truth, and one cannot make disharmony bearable by denying
it. So much is certain that my father's assertion, declaring my horror
wholly unreasonable, affected me like an attempt at lopping off my toes
to make the boot fit. I resisted passionately, maintaining an
inexorable separation between my noble and lofty sentiments for Emmy
and the low and vile things my father had disclosed to me, and thus
wandered hastily and eagerly on the dangerous path whose course
branches out but once - one road leading to fanaticism and the other to
dissolute cynicism.

This was my father's work. But I have never reproached him for it with
feelings of bitter resentment. Why not? Can we pronounce sentence,
reader, in a suit whereof the most important facts still lie in
impenetrable darkness?

From my unimpassioned tribunal here in the dreamy and forgotten little
town, I hold acquittal for all who have strayed and gone to ruin in
Cupid's flowery and thorny labyrinth. For assuredly it is not of human
designing.

That there is guilt I cannot deny. Every ill has a father and a mother,
and for once and all, we are accustomed to calling these parents sin
and guilt. But I follow the genealogical tree of these strange and
tender woes beyond Adam and Eve or the Pithecantropus Erectus, even
should I then have to launch my accusations at Powers which from
generation to generation have imprinted in us the belief in their
inviolability.

And now observe what makes the matter still more strange and illogical.
I am not only of a very amorous but also of a very sensual nature.
Together with my strong susceptibility to the joys of soul communion
there went the mighty overpowering impulse of propagation. Before the
contact of these two currents had been brought about in such a painful
manner the low, dark, physical instinct had filled me with a continual
though not very distressing restlessness and with doubt concerning my
health. The splendid equilibrium of my other functions, that has
maintained itself to this day, always outweighed this doubt.

But when the secret was half explained it became all the more absorbing
and enticing and so occupied my thoughts that, even now an old man, I
wonder again and again that a human brain can ponder over such
comparatively simple facts ad infinitum, without having them lose their
interest, and without really arriving at any conclusion.

Physicians would speak of pathological conditions and of libido
sexualis. But I would point out to you, dear reader, that though there
may be very good and noble men among physicians, every physician of our
day without exception, in so much as he would be called a physician, is
at the same time also a philistine. With their explanations and their
fine words for things that are beyond their comprehension because their
science is still unpoetical and unphilosophical, they do not serve us
in the least.

And how could one of these present-day sages reasonably explain to me
that in a noble and lofty human type such as I, certainly not without
some right, dared call myself, the very strong working of an impulse
common to all animals was coupled with an exaggerated sensitiveness for
its ignoble character? Were this impulse good and beautiful and in no
part ignoble, whence then my aversion? - were it really low and
unworthy, whence its presence, so impertinent and overpowering, in a
refined and highly cultured member of the human race?

And if any would speak here of exceptions and strange freaks of nature,
should we not immediately bar his lips with a series of names all
shining in the history of mankind? Are we not acquainted with
Sophocles' very significant sigh of relief at being delivered from this
plague by his years? Is it without a deeper meaning that Dante on the
summit of the mount of redemption lets his dearest and most honored
poets do penance for this very weakness - Arnaut de Verigord, Guittons
of Arezzo and also Guido Guinicello his father and the father of all
those -

che mai

rime d'amore usar dolci e leggiadre.

Did it stand differently with Dante himself, with Shelley, Byron,
Heine, Goethe?

My father's deed arose from an imagined sense of duty, but had wholly
different consequences than he probably expected. He must surely have
thought that now, knowing what it implied, I would either steer
straight for matrimony or renounce my boyish love. He had
satisfactorily torn to pieces the veil of illusion that something
loftier and more mysterious than common propagation was concerned here
- woman's witchery which he knew and from which he wished to shield me.
He also expected my confidence and my appeal for advice in difficulties
and dangers of a kindred nature.

But behold, I remained as ardently devoted and valiantly true to Emmy
as ever. I felt a desire to shield her with my life against the
baseness of this world and let my body serve her as a bridge across the
earthly pool of mire. And higher than ever, I held her image above
every profaning thought. I considered it a sacrilege to think of her as
one of the thousand females about me and to confound my love with the
wooing and wedding of the rest of the world.

But with that, the passions suddenly awakened by my father, fed by a
vivid imagination and now craving recognition and liberty, were not
stilled. The slumbering hounds were aroused and clamored for food. And
as I had not the slightest intention of granting them what my father
pointed out as their natural and lawful portion, but what, as something
sacred and holy, I was determined to keep from their devouring jaws
cost what it would, they sought other food and threatened to destroy me.

"But what would you do about it, old hermit?" the young reader will
ask; "what do you consider a model solution of the question?"

I would do nothing about it, young reader!

The old Muralto is not called to draw up for you a scheme of life. He
only shoves his little lamp ahead as far as he can reach into the
darkness. For the confusion and the rubbish thus brought to light he is
not responsible and each must see for himself how he finds his way
through.

The hounds want food, that is certain. And, whether intentionally or
not, some day they will be awakened; from that, too, there is no
escaping. Blessed is he who can forthwith offer them their proper prey.
And woe to him who thinks that, without danger to himself, he can let
them starve to death or seek for booty unbridled!

And would you retain the confidence of your children do not threaten to
mutilate the feet of their sensibilities for the sake of a narrow
theory. I myself at least, after what I had experienced, would sooner
have gone to the nearest police agent for intimate advice, than back to
my father.

Emmy's home was situated in London on the Thames. The smooth
emerald-green, well-trimmed lawn with the multi-colored flower-borders,
and the blue porcelain vases, extended to the water, and there on
summer afternoons the family sat on the cane chairs partaking of tea,
feeding the swans swimming by, and watching the gay traffic, - the
multitude of graceful little crafts with fashionably dressed men and
women in softly blending tones of green, violet, pink and white, the
muscular gig-rowers in training, shooting by with a regular swish of
oars and followed by shouting friends on horseback; the competitors in
a swimming match making their way amidst all this tumult cheered on
every side; the luxuriant houseboats floating by, full of flowers and
happy people, from which echoed strains of music and a flood of light
emanated at night.

I lived in the suburbs with my father, and when I mingled with the
bright, merry, fair and innocent human world, then all my father had
told me seemed but an ugly fairy-tale.

But London is a strange and, for a person of my temperament, a most
dangerous city. The glamour of angelic human purity is so successfully
assumed there that it makes itself all the more glaringly and horribly
manifest, and exercises a more exciting influence, when the black demon
suddenly leers at us from behind the veil.

Not only Emmy Tenders, but every woman of her type and race, every
cultured English woman, possessed for me something lofty, something
holy and irreproachable. The women of other countries still bore some
resemblance to the female animal; there I could still conceive and
imagine this fatal humiliation; but an English woman seemed so pure, so
noble, so chaste and yet so candidly innocent that her mere presence
sufficed to drive away all impure thoughts. And of all English women,
Emmy Tenders was indeed the sweetest and purest. When I saw her again
all anxiety and horror vanished. I was completely happy and also
thankful that no revolver had been within my reach in that dark moment
following the revelation. That summer's afternoon by the Thames amid
the merry family group some vague conception dawned in me that Emmy's
wondrous power would have made pure all that appeared ugly and vile to
me, if only the revelation had come to me through her.

But it seems indeed that the English rely too much upon the cleansing
power of innocence in their woman. And it is curious how public opinion
among this prudish nation will permit exhibitions of unabashed
flirtation which would be publicly tolerated in probably no other part
of Europe and certainly not in Asia or Africa. In the light, graceful
little boat I glided over the sparkling river amid the tender summer's
bloom which clothed everything with a charm of fairyland and facing me,
on the silken cushions, sat my beloved, in her white dress, holding the
cords of the rudder. And to the left and right, under the shadowing
branches of the drooping willows, my now wide-opened eyes saw pairs of
lovers, each in their own boat, in affectionate attitudes that greatly
embarrassed and distressed me. Emmy did not seem to see them or
appeared to be wholly undisturbed thereby. Then it occurred to me that
I myself must be to blame here and that a peculiar inborn depravity
made the natural appear so hideous to me and obtrude itself so plainly
on my view. And all the more I honored and admired the pure creature
the bright mirror of whose soul the impure breath of the world could
not dim, and to whom the human love-life seemed as natural, common and
unexciting as to the naturalist or ancient philosopher.

The old hermit and philosopher Muralto would here remark, that the
young poetic lover Muralto was a long distance from the sage. It has
indeed occurred to the old man, though seldom, thank heaven, despite
his many years, that he could regard the human love-life like a
naturalist or an old satiated philosopher without the pleasing
distress, the sweet excitement of former days - yet he did not feel
better and wiser at such times, but deeply mourned a precious loss. I
may err, reader, but consider the words of experience!

And in these same ardent days of first true love the giant city exposed
herself to my now enlightened eyes in all her disharmony. And I, who in
wanton Paris had passed as an innocent child through a hotbed of
sensuality and a hailstorm of seduction, on a single twilight eve in
London had four or five encounters the particulars of which remained in
my memory as barbed arrows remain imbedded in the flesh, smarting and
itching and burning like the thorny fibres of cactus or sweetbriar seed
with which one has come into too close contact.

When the women of my country, of a Latin race, cast away their pride
and, from need or indifference, make the game of love their profession,
they still retain a natural and charming glamour and play the sorry
game with a certain grace and conviction as a poor homage to the lofty
secret which they must needs desecrate.

But the English or German woman who lays aside her chastity - God be
gracious to these bunglers! - casts off her modesty as downrightly as
though she were glad that she need not carry it longer - no! let us say
as though the greater depth of her fall resulted also in a more
absolute hopelessness of ever arising again. Cold, businesslike and
practical, they carry on their profession and regard the human
love-life as unmoved and unexcited as a naturalist or an old
philosopher.

But just this class distinction, this sharp and dreadful contrast
between the pure English woman, so nobly represented in my queenly
love, and the creatures who, fifty years ago and probably to the
present day, toward twilight haunted the fine London parks and in the
most unabashed manner reminded me of the recently received fatherly
disclosures - just this stirred the newly aroused passions within me to
an untamable uproar. The tormented hungry dogs raged blindly.

Was the noble creature that filled my heart too good for them - well:
they would then procure for themselves other food. Eat they would,
though it were hideous carrion! The tormented dogs became wolves,
became hyenas.

Let this not arouse your indignation, dear reader. I gladly believe
that your beasties never caused you much trouble, that they were
willingly satisfied with lettuce leaves, or would probably also fast at
will, or submit contentedly to the matrimonial leash. Possibly they
were marmots. But did you yourself rear this tractable race? Then count
not yours the honor nor mine the shame, but accord both to that unknown
Breeder who followed the genealogical tables and selected the mothers
and fathers, uniting them with delicate discernment and hidden design.
The pasturing of docile cattle involves no honor or glory, and I choose
to render account of my pasturage to him alone who knew, better than I,
what he did when he entrusted me with the savage drove.

Neither let it surprise you that my love for Emmy could not drive away
the impure images and destroy their power of attraction. The
reconciliation of ape and angel that our human nature demands had,
thanks to my father's bungling match-making, gone fatally wrong. A
hopeless separation had arisen, the angel seemed inaccessible and the
beast sought his own wild paths. My thoughts would suffer no
desecration of Emmy's sacredness. But the fatherly lesson had startled
up in me a seething swarm of thoughts as difficult to direct or drive
away as a roomful of flies. I could scarcely keep them off the one
white lily in my chamber, what wonder then that the stinking carrion
brought from the nocturnal London parks was black with them?

V

Emmy was nineteen years old when I made her acquaintance, and I was
sixteen, but fully developed at that age, as is not unusual in my
country. For three years I courted her, steadfastly, but in a curiously
capricious and inconsistent way, with all the changes of an all-daring
and naught-fearing devotion, wildly-blazing happiness, sudden shyness
and trembling shrinking, violent dismay, self-reproach, deep
self-contempt - all this being caused by the confusion and the strife
in the intimate household of my soul.

Emmy was, as I can now say without partiality, a good, dear, natural
and simple child, born to make an excellent and loving housewife and
consort.

How often I imagine that I, the patriarch of to-day, with my present
knowledge, would have stepped between the two and easily steered the
two little boats into safe currents on a joint and prosperous journey.
So little would have been needed, a little hint, a loving word of
direction, a gentle stay - and everything would have been well. But
these are idle and tormenting after-thoughts, perhaps quite erroneous
too.

I was not so undesirable a suitor, even though I was three years her
junior. Emmy's parents were liberal-minded, like most English people
not insensible to rank and title, and would surely not have precluded
the young noble Italian from their family, even though he had been
brought up in the Catholic faith.

Thus the amiable child complacently bore with my stormy adoration, less
hidden by me than is customary among the English, schooled in
self-restraint; she waited patiently; gently, almost imperceptibly,
encouraging me the while until I should be old enough to dare press my
suit more urgently. It sometimes seemed to me as though a girl was much
less curious and surprised, and, from out a hidden well, much sooner
and better informed concerning the course of the coming mysteries than
a boy. She does not think about it and would not be able to express it,
and yet she knows everything at the right time, as though the body had
thought for her.

Though our travelling life continued still, my father stopped oftener
and longer in London than in any other place, as though yielding to the
unpronounced pressure of his son. Perhaps this time he purposely wished
to submit me to the flames, my reserve hiding from him the true state
of my heart and my thoughts.

And when, after our first meeting, we were again on our way, it was
Emmy who gave the first timid sign to enter into correspondence. On St.
Valentine's day, the significance of which I knew full well, a colored
scrap-picture arrived, representing a rosy woman's hand with elegantly
curved finger tips offering a bouquet of blue forget-me-nots. The
source from whence it came was evident enough to me, and I, awkward
churl, was rude enough to send her a rapturous letter of thanks for it,
which of course met with a very cool rejection and denial.

At long as I was away from London I had comparative peace. I thought
about my beloved, wrote to her and of her in my diary and studied the
subjects which my father, who wished to make a diplomat of me,
appointed. I spent the winter with him in Berlin, but there I noticed
nothing of the London scandal, though I fully realized that something
of the sort could not well be missing in the big city. All my thoughts
of love, the pure and beautiful as well as its base desecration,
swarmed about the great, gray, smoke-darkened and fog-bound city across
the sea.

Just as the elements of our sensually visible being, the cells of the
body, manifest a peculiar life and independent nature, so the elements
of our invisible being - the desires and passions - seem to be beings
with a peculiar nature. They are like animals and children, hearkening
to the voice that first called them, following the habits first taught
them, curiously stubborn in the errors grown habitual to them in youth,
and with a strange tendency toward the lower, as though falling through
the influence of a gravitation.

I had my "low" and my "lofty" times, as I called them. Sometimes for
weeks and months my thoughts would be pure and tranquil: then they
would be again suddenly aroused by some trifling cause - sometimes
mental: a newspaper article, a conversation overheard - sometimes
physical: a little fête, carrying on their harassing and tormenting
game, constantly repeating and circling around the same facts and
words, throughout entire sleepless nights, gnawing and picking at these
never satiating subjects, so offensive and yet so attractive, as a dog
gnaws at an old whitened bone.

Especially in a time of dejection and gloom, when the world offered me
no flower of outward beauty, the imagination immediately sought comfort
in that which was always exciting, always charming and intriguing, and
never satiated or vexed me. Neither study nor physical exercise had the
power to restrain the arbitrary course of the thoughts; the mind
possessed no weapons against them.

A feverish suspense beset me when it became certain that I was to see
Emmy again. A clear apprehension had already been born in me that only
her presence, her encouragement, her devotion could redeem me. And when
I saw her cordially bowing from the carriage that awaited us at the
suburban station on a bright, sunny May day, and went to meet her
trembling and dizzy with emotion, and seeing nothing of the great world
about me save her hair, golden in the sunlight, the white dress, the
broad-brimmed straw hat and the shining eyes - I really believed that I
was saved, and I no longer wavered in my heart and was positively
determined that I actually wanted her for my wife, no matter what a
saint she might be and how unworthy I.

Thus everything might have come out right, but things do not run so
smoothly in this world. I was seventeen and Emmy twenty. There still
followed weeks, long months - melancholy moods returned again,
discouragements - there were also walks through the dusky parks. And
the hungry dogs continued to whine and to howl and the thought-flies
continued to buzz and to defile themselves. Man may be reasonable and
patient; he has natures to control, apparently for his own good, that
are neither reasonable nor patient; that themselves never rest and
demand guidance from a spirit, that does need rest; that always want to
have their own way, and yet sink fatally downward if the government of
the mind leaves them unguarded. And these are given us by nature, as we
are told, the same nature which according to my father is always good
if man does not spoil her.

So as not to disturb you by exciting your imagination, dear reader,
which might make the driving of your own team more troublesome to you,
I shall mention no particulars of my struggle and my defeat. This
precaution of an old man need not hurt you.

I fell under the joint influence of the following things: the fatally
arisen rupture between corporal and spiritual desires, - the sharp
contrast between English purity and English lewdness that, with its
incomprehensible contradiction, has as exciting an effect as the dog in
the duck-yard, who decoys the inquisitive ducks into the mouth of the
strangler, - and finally the accursed self-contempt that makes one say:
"There's nothing lost with me anyway."

With his attention so steadily fixed upon me, my father could not
remain without suspicion. He came to my room one morning, installed
himself there, and said:

"I hope, Vico mio, that you have remained and will remain a nobleman in
all things."

When we Italians perceive that someone would enter upon a friendly
conversation with us, we look upon it as an invitation to set up
together and complete a small work of art, and we gladly give it an
attentive hearing and zealously assist with careful application, so
that something good and fine be brought forth. When I hear two
Hollanders carrying on a conversation, it sounds more like children of
a village school repeating their penal task, careless, slipshod,
unwilling and embarrassed - if only they get it over with.

"My father," I answered, "I believe I know quite well how you wish a
nobleman to be, but perhaps I do not know how he should comport himself
in everything. Do you refer to any particular circumstance, or are you
speaking generally?"

"If you recognize generally that a nobleman must avoid all intimate
intercourse with ignoble persons, Vico, - the particular instances that
I have in mind are therein included."

"That is plain, father. But yet I have something more to ask. First
this: do you call it intimate intercourse where the spirit on either
side remains at an infinite distance? And then this: can a nobleman
have ignoble desires?"

I saw my father start painfully. Slowly and eyeing me sharply, he said:

"I fear, Vico, that I must speak plainly here, too. To the first I make
this reply: It is certain that we have a body, but of a spirit that can
separate itself from this body we know nothing and have no single
proof. And as concerns the second question: natural desires are never
ignoble as long as they remain in the natural channels."

"Without agreeing to the first," I replied, "I shall let it rest,
because our natures are too different, and we do not understand each
other anyway. But your answer to the second gives me much to ask. If a
desire in me is natural and thus not ignoble, how then can it drive me
to ignoble things? Are all natural desires good in all men? And how do
I distinguish between natural and noble desires and unnatural and
ignoble desires?"

"Have you no power of discrimination for that, Vico?" my father asked.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20