The Bride of Dreams

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These were the warnings that beset me every morning when the morning
light had once more dispelled the fearful vision. In vain I sounded the
depths of my soul - to find whence issued these compelling and
distressing thoughts. A power dwelt within me which seemed to possess a
mighty voice, and a strong coercive force when I did not want to
listen. And I soon observed that this power increased in proportion as
I felt weaker and more discouraged. Was it the voice of the herd, which
my father had taught me to despise, but which he no more than I could
infallibly distinguish from his own voice? Who was this speaker, this
tyrant?

There existed a bridge of heartiness and affection between my mother
and myself which always remained practicable even when the flood of
controversy raged highest. When it seemed as though we would never
understand each other, we would simply stay the structure of our
phrases and without détour approach one another through the ever open
door of our love, without troubling ourselves about logic or
consistency.

And Lucia was much less averse to theology than Emmy. Supplied by my
mother with shining words of authority and bombastic arguments, and no
less anxious than my mother herself to let the son participate in the
joy of her conviction, she eagerly granted any request for engaging in
deep conversation. We did not go walking alone together, as this did
not agree with her principles of education, but when we three were
together the origin and prospect of our life was discussed more, and
with greater fervor, than anywhere probably in all the little seaside
town, perchance in all the little land.

And it is good that people do not act as reasonably as they imagine,
otherwise we should see all mankind engaged in such conversations: they
would forget to reap the harvest, to start the trains, to keep the
fires of the factories going.

For it is strange to see everyone making the greatest efforts and
wearing himself out and hardly anyone trying to render account to
himself of the why and wherefore. Especially the so-called thoughtful
people cut a strange figure, as usually they all disagree, or only
agree about their own ignorance; and yet they go on living complacently
without earnestly persevering in their efforts of reaching a
conclusion. They all pretend to believe in the true word, but they do
not manifest much faith in their idol, because words concerning the
most important truths have but little power to attract them. It is good
so, for otherwise, from sheer uncertainty, the entire machinery would
come to a standstill and the truly free, such as you, dear reader, and
I, would find no opportunity to gather the leading truths for them,
and, wrapped in glowing formula, so dexterously to throw them before
their feet that they perceive them and pick them up as their own
discoveries.

Lucia del Bono was not only a beautiful, but also a bright, clever and,
as my mother assured me, good and noble Italian woman. She had lost her
parents, and my mother who had taken her into her home as her adopted
daughter, was her saint, her oracle. Whatever mother did was good,
whatever mother said was true, what mother wished was the nearest to
God's will of anything we could know. And soon I perceived that, among
other things, mother had long wished Lucia to become my wife. Through
Emmy's loss and through the unchanging persistence of my passions,
Satan's voracious pets, I however considered myself peculiarly fitted
for a monastery, if I could only once reconcile myself to the doctrines
suitable to such a life.

"After all, there is no other way of salvation for me" - I once said to
my mother when I was alone with her on the hotel veranda. "Now I may
indeed have holy resolves again and make solemn promises, but I look
reality too squarely in the face to believe, myself, in these promises.
I can never love a woman more truly and more fervently than Emmy, - and
even this love was not strong enough to shield me from the temptations
of the low and the vile. If I remain in the world, I shall nowhere
escape temptation. I have seen enough to know that there is temptation
everywhere for one like myself. It is bitter and humiliating,
particularly for one with a proud and haughty nature, and who does not
like to turn away from an enemy. I feel myself a match for men and
would be willing to fight an overpowering majority, but God has left me
defenceless in the hands of women."

To this mother replied: "There is no life more splendid and lofty than
that of the monk who denies and suppresses all the lower, worldly and
transitory feelings in order to let the eternal develop the more
freely. But it requires a good deal to consecrate yourself wholly to
Jesus, Vico dear. If only you are strong enough for that!"

"No, mother! I want to do it just because I am not strong enough to
resist the world and my fleshly desires. I must be in an absolutely
pure environment and lead an abstemious life, only then will I remain
good. I have tried it for three weeks. But then I fell ill and was
nursed and petted by kind hands and then Satan again had me in his
power."

"You can fall ill in a monastery too, Vico. And Satan will not leave
you in peace there either. Think of how even the saints were tormented
by demons and temptations."

"Ali, mother, what I have read about that, and seen on paintings,
proves that they do not know my temptations. Did you imagine that I
would succumb to the pretty ladies who troubled Antonius of Padua? They
are much too pretty, too poetic, I should say. With them I would feel
ashamed. And all those monsters and demons, as Teniers paints them,
they would not frighten me in the least. I know them well from my
dreams. They give you a fright, but you can easily drive them away,
much more easily than -"

"Than what, Vico?" my mother asked. But before I could conquer my
strong disinclination to give an idea of the true nature of my
visitants, Lucia came out of her room.

"What do you say to this, little daughter!" my mother said with grave,
almost embarrassed mien, "Vico wants to enter the priesthood."

It was curious to mark the change of expression on Lucia's face. With a
peculiar wide, shining look, her great dark eyes travelled from mother
to me, but she cleverly concealed that it was a painful surprise. She
could not suppress a deep blush, however, and when she felt it and
realized that it could not help betraying an all too deep and painful
interest, the blush of shame became yet deeper.

"That is fine!" she said in a voice solemn with emotion.

"If Christ will only accept me," I said; "according to you two I am
still half a heathen."

"Oh, he will surely accept you! he will be good to you!" said Lucia, in
a tone which betrayed more certainty concerning the being of whom she
spoke than Emmy's "Jesus Christ our Lord."

"How do you know that so surely, Lucia?" I asked, immediately
attentive. "Do you know him so well? Can you explain to me what he is?"

"Do I know him?" she cried out passionately, with a little
comprehensive smile at mother. "What shall I reply, mother? He asks
whether we know the dear Lord Jesus."

"What would you yourself reply, Vico, if she asked you whether you knew
me, your mother?"

I was silent, and thoughtfully regarded the two women, so obviously
convinced. Then Lucia said: "I know him much better, Vico, than you
know your mother, for you have not had her near you for very long, nor
is she with you all the time. But my Jesus never leaves me. I have
always had him near me as long as I can remember day and night."

I said nothing, but looked at her encouragingly, intimating that she
should go on and tell me more of Jesus. And she did it gladly, - far
more eagerly than Emmy, - and though it was not all clearly and
absolutely lucidly expressed, not entirely connected and too long, to
repeat it all to you here, yet it was captivating and instructive and,
to me, implied the existence of a firm and neither weak nor transitory
reality.

Suggestion is a very convenient word with a meaning easily adaptable to
all sorts of explanations; but if there were no bounds and no end to
this explaining by suggestion, we might as well rub out from our
suggested slate of life, with a suggested sponge, the whole beautiful
world of clear and eternal realities. No, the Christ of Lucia and my
mother was no suggested fancy, but a living reality.

But what was he?

Of the Bible the two women knew very little. My mother, despite her
Northern origin, had had an Italian Catholic education as well as
Lucia. In this, for valid reasons, the Bible is forbidden. They did not
speak much of the life of Jesus as an historical person, nor of his
adventures, nor of his teachings. It was his suffering, his martyrdom,
and his death that to them seemed to be above all deserving of
meditation.

And if I had not known it - if the Nazarene of whom the New Testament
narrates had borne another name, it might perhaps never have occurred
to me to identify him with the Deity worshipped by my mother.

But now that I must needs assume that all information regarding the
being, personally wholly unknown to me, that so occupied the lives of
these two women and of millions of human beings besides, was to be
found in these ancient writings, the English translation of which,
contrary to my mother's wishes, I faithfully kept - now I began to read
with renewed and even closer attention.

But I found nothing to give me light. I found a very beautiful and
touching narrative full of dramatic power, written by the hand of a
master, but to its detriment four times retold with embellishments and
obvious falsifications. And the hero of this narrative was a very human
mortal, more delicate, more sensitive and nearer akin to us than Hiob:
just as bold in the flight of his thought, just as fanatic and even
immoderate in his declarations, and certainly less strong, less
resolute, his character less unmoved by the lot threatening him than
the mighty hero of the older drama. I was deeply stirred by the reading
of this wonderful creation, by the thoroughly human truth of his
struggle, his disappointments, waverings and weaknesses, his courage
and self-denial, his alternately proud and discouraged bearing, his
very explainable self-deception, caused by the influence of his
childish followers and worshippers, his fatal and truly tragic ending,
not desired but foreboded, and manfully not evaded, - immutable
necessary result of human weakness in human heroic strength.

But what did all this have to do with the wonderful reality in which my
mother and millions with her found all their joy and their security,
with which, through which, for which, in which they lived as fish live
in the water?

I found nothing but a little outward resemblance, the name, the death
he suffered. But for the rest it seemed to me that they might as well
have named any other hero of tragedy - Prometheus for example - as the
mighty and loving being that, even now, directed all their steps and
shed light upon their path.

And through many careful and attentive conversations with the fair
Lucia, in the presence of my mother, who was for her the living
fountain from which she gratefully drew when her wisdom threatened to
forsake her, I became convinced that had Lucia been taught that the
divine reality she felt in herself was named Spinoza, because Spinoza
was a God, incarnate in human form, who had lived in Rynsburg as a man,
had proclaimed many words of living wisdom and therefore suffered scorn
and contempt and finally, after a life of simplicity and chastity, had
died in loneliness and poverty for our salvation - the pious maiden
would just as readily have accepted it and would have found exactly as
much strength, happiness and contentment in it.

Do not lose patience, my reader, because I tell you such commonplace
things. Of course as an independently thinking and observing person,
you know all this just as well as I. But for the herd it is all new,
absolutely new. And it will still be so when you read this and I am
dead and for many, many years after. Do not forget that we too belong
to the herd, you and I, and that an accurate comprehension of our
relations does not exclude a loving understanding and a wise affection.
There is joy in my pride only because it rests on an immutable
estimation of worth. I know that the herd thinks and feels slavishly
and I do not, and that it is therefore necessarily subject to me; but
my joy would rot and wither in my pride, did I not know the comforting
and refreshing humility, the humility that by patient deeds of love
unites me to the herd, and gives me full measure of comfort in this
faithful, sincere and patient record for the good of all, so that I
have found peace, tranquillity of mind and a foretaste of bliss in the
utmost spiritual loneliness, in this dead life.

There is neither contentment nor happiness in unshared wisdom.
Therefore I make bold once more to speak plainly of such commonplace
things. If we would build our towers higher and higher, we must seek to
broaden the foundations, otherwise we topple over with our individual
wisdom just as we had imagined heaven attained. The herd does not need
our leading more urgently than we its following.

True, it must have been a great and ingenious Jew, who, now more than
eighteen hundred years ago, wisely responding to the cry of anguish
from his enslaved countrymen for a redeemer, as king, as Christ,
pointed out to them the new man, the meek, the "Chrestus," with whom
the whole earth felt herself pregnant.

No one can have known the divine reality, which so many millions have
called Christ, so profoundly, and have felt it more clearly living in
himself than he, when flown from his subdued and desolate country to
Alexandria, be created the mighty and tragic heroic figure and chose
the name that for so many centuries was to be accepted by mankind, as
the personification and epithet of this same reality.

But I charge him gravely that with Jewish fearfulness he withdrew his
own person from the struggle in which he let his hero perish, and
suffered or even wished his noble and true work of art to be changed
into a false piece of history. What might have gladdened and elevated
poor suffering and blinded humanity as a wonderful masterpiece of art,
like the book of Hiob, or the Iliad, or Prometheus Vinctus, or the
Athene of the Parthenon, or the Zeus of Olympus, showing how man in the
creations of the artist rises highest above personal pettiness and
weakness, how the genius in fiction creates the highest perfection,
such as has never been seen in flesh and blood, - has now, as an
invented historical occurrence, driven the whole world to the rudest
falsifications of truth and impossible efforts of imitation.

The glorious shapes of Phidias, more beautiful than any living human
race has ever actually been, have still brought us joy and inspiration
after a miserable barbaric Christian world bad mutilated and neglected
them, - but the beautiful figure of Jesus, which as a work of art might
have been immortal and beneficent, embellished with Pauline metaphysics
and mixed in the Byzantine sorcerer's pot with Egyptian and Chaldean
hodgepodge, has become an evil spirit for wretched human kind.

For eighteen hundred years the world has been the dupe of this
marvellous dramatic genius and his work, changed in a fatal hour from
fiction to history. I know no stronger proof for the existence of a
malicious devil who takes pleasure in our amusing errors.

And many a night, when it is warm and the sea calm and the doves coo in
the softly whispering elms on the city walls, I wander out of my quiet
little city and gaze over the smooth extent of water, musing for hours
on the beauty and the joy that would now reign on earth if,
unprejudiced and unconfounded, men had asked what God it was that so
mightily revealed himself in them and urged them with such perceptible
will and pressure, and spoke in so audible a voice: if they had
earnestly and attentively hearkened to the constant whisperings and
warnings of their deep true nature, if they had borne and learned to
follow the bridle of this faithful warner in their own soul, who
strongly desires and alone has power to give us peace, - instead of
worshipping the true word, and looking for outward signs and miracles,
and through the beautiful creations of a human genius letting
themselves be seduced to human deification, to stupid imitation, to
fanaticism, to falsification of word and reality, to a sickly pursuit
of pain, glorification of poverty, fear of knowledge, scorn of the
world, hatred of beauty, poor stray sheep!

Then the great and good works of Greeks and Romans, of Indians and
Saracens would have been thoughtfully carried on, art preserved,
knowledge esteemed, - and the garden of peace made verdant with clear
springs of beauty from these two pure fountains. While now, alas! again
and again, in thousands of hearts, the true Christ must die the bitter
death upon the cross because the truest word that he inspired one of
his dearest favorites to utter was besmirched by a flat lie, and his
most beautiful poetical image destroyed by a grossly sensuous error.

But be of good cheer, my reader; the devil made a good move, but shall
lose the game nevertheless. The falsehood poison has soon spent itself,
and the powers of the sick increase. No longer do the shepherdless dogs
drive the flock asunder in a hundred different directions. You live, my
reader, and hear the voice of me, the dead, - and as though heralded
forth by trumpets, you learn that the crucified in you and in me is
also victoriously and gloriously risen again.

XI

It was three weeks before the body of my father was found. A stormy
nor-wester had thrown it high up on shore at the foot of the dunes not
far from the mouth of the Rhine, and a clam-digger came to claim the
promised reward. My mother went there with me and prayed a long time by
the side of the body. I did too, in my own way; that is to say, with a
constant reservation, as one might write a letter to someone whose
address one was not sure of. Nevertheless every prayer is a suggestion
in which through words of invocation one creates an image of a Deity
and through forcibly uttered exhortations and protestations changes
one's own soul. Is there in any act greater possibility for
self-deception? As a child and youth, it is still possible to observe
oneself praying and to continue in the belief that one is acting
worthily and honestly. But for a man, self-observation during this act
usually also carries with it shame at the game that he is playing and
the pose that he assumes.

The body lay in a coffin, already closed, in a tiny church of the
fisher village, and it seemed as though my father's surviving spirit
mocked me for the trifling words with which I, foolish boy, thought to
reach and to move the soul of clouds and sea, of sun and stars. How
childish the burning candles and the chanting voice of the priest
seemed, with the roaring of the wind over the reed-covered sand hills,
and the glowing eye with which the setting sun looked upon her earth
from across the sea.

When the funeral was over, we decided to leave Holland for my native
country. There, in Rome, I would, if anywhere, find my way back to the
mother church. Solemn, talking little, full of expectation, and usually
deep in thought, I travelled swiftly across the continent in the
company of the two women. Italy, that I had not seen for many years,
lured me with a thousand sweet memories, with the combined charm of the
wonderland of sun and beauty which it is to all Northerners, and of the
world of dear childish moods, whose deceiving sweetness increases with
distance and length of separation, and can make even the most barren
country gleam as a place of refuge and consolation. With a little more
experience of life I might have considered beforehand that the real
Italy could not fulfil all the blessed promises of the imaginary Italy.
At the beginning they did indeed all seem to be realized. It commenced
with sunshine, and the vintage - golden light upon browning foliage,
merry country folk and song; a gleam of a better world after the dull
and solemn North: a glorious sensation of being at home among people
who like myself dared to say something graceful and to do something
wanton; the beloved flexible and vigorous sounds of my mother tongue,
and the great joy of the people's craving for beauty and elegance down
into the very lowest circles: roughness and wildness not without a
certain dignity, not simply rude and coarse as with the Northern
barbarians: a poor lad in rags who sings something on the street that
penetrates my inmost soul. Ah! how little the rude among this Dutch
people can do or say that penetrates my soul! If my reason did not tell
me, what then could convince my heart that they and I are beings of a
kind?

I cannot dwell here on the charm with which my native land stirred my
emotions when I beheld it again. It has nothing to do with the task and
the duty that I fulfil in these writings. Hundreds of writers can
delight you with subtle sensuous fancies and can comfort you for a
moment with beautiful visions, warming the cold indolent spirit by
colorful, glowing or gracefully woven words. My task is to give lasting
consolation through the unsensual force of unchanging thought, so that
you will know a point of rest in all sorrows and can taste every
pleasure with calmer attention.

In Rome my disillusionment came with the rainy days of winter. Then all
at once it penetrated my consciousness from every side, like a cold
draft through broken window panes - the realization that something was
still wanting here, that in the North had been attained: an established
order of institutions, a general moral integrity. The half-forgotten
shadows of my childhood, hidden behind the beautiful, came to view,
called forth by kindred miseries. We had to live comparatively simply,
and my dignified old mother, as well as I, had to climb the four
chilly, dimly lighted, stony flights to our apartment, where it was
cold and uncomfortable too. To let Lucia go about alone in Rome, like
an English girl in London, was simply out of the question. I myself had
to be very much on my guard against suspicious persons who whisperingly
accosted me with foul proposals. And a stroll through the section San
Lorenzo on a bleak December day, where I saw, how my poor people, kept
in ignorance and filth, manfully battle against suffering and misery,
made me feel that Italy, when her glorious sunlight fades, is still
ever the land of the "sofferenza" and still deserves the cry of
lamentation:

"Ahi, selva Italia! di dolore ostello!"

This sorrowful word never leaves me; often do I sigh it through the
stillness of my gloomily respectable house, the abode of the old Dutch
merchants; and then too perchance I scream it out into the gale on the
open sea-dike where my petty fellow citizens cannot hear it.

In this gray, beclouded, chilly land, where the bleak, restless wind
bends low and razes to the ground everything that standing alone would
lift up its head, less rude anguish is suffered nevertheless than among
the sunny, luxuriant, blue-skied hills of my beautiful native land.

But this does not imply that the Italians should envy this so much more
methodical, cleanly and prosperous nation. For glowing life and
blooming beauty fare still more madly among the Hollanders, and sharp
anguish is more salutary to man, and preferred by the genitive soul of
humanity, than the unfelt evil of ugliness, of dullness and of the
great and beautiful passions stifled by fear. Everywhere in the present
world a minority sensitive to beauty exists among a great horde of
cads. But in no country is the minority nobler, but smaller also, and
the horde more caddish than in Holland - and in imagination I often see
the Neapolitan tramp and loafer stand out as a prince or nobleman among
the inmates of a Dutch village inn, or hall for more respectable
entertainment. But your purse and your life are safer and the average
standard of middle-class respectability higher here below the sea level
than in most countries above.

The first ones that I sought in my native land were the priests, whom
my father had always made me shun. My mother's sentimental wisdom did
not satisfy the wants of my reason, and she herself thought that I
should be easily and swiftly convinced of what, to her, seemed so
evidently true, if I but heard someone versed in the eloquence and the
logical argumentative power which her intuitive knowledge lacked.

But ah me! we were sadly mistaken there, my mother and I.

Her position and rank enabled her to refer me to the very best address;
and none less than one of the most powerful and influential prelates of
the age, an intimate of the Vatican and a political celebrity, was to
guide me, youthful errant, back into the path of salvation. I was much
impressed by his great name, and in the beginning I also could not
withhold myself from the suggestion that goes out from each one into
whose hands the herd has pressed the magic rose of deference and
subjugation. But neither his environment, - a gloomy apartment
tastelessly furnished in bourgeois style, - nor his outward appearance,
a bony, half jovial, half cautiously cunning, more or less boorish face
upon a heavy unwieldy body, was adapted to strengthen my illusion. He
was very genial, talkative, good-natured, and made a little kindly
intended speech to which I sat and listened with the conviction that I
must be making a confused, distressed and foolish appearance.

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