The Bride of Dreams Part 10

"It does not befit us, dear Muralto, to loathe one whom G.o.d has created after his own image. We have every one of us been saddled with a portion of filth and it does not seem enviable to me to work that off alone, as you. I can go to confession and belong to a large friendly circle, where they one and all are bitten by the same fleas and must chop with the same hatchet. We understand one another, and trust one another and forgive one another and help one another. There are weak brothers and strong brothers, we all of us know that, and we do not despise one another for that reason. This seems to me a much more desirable way of carrying your burden than as you do, who shoulder it alone. We at least do not dissemble toward one another, but you play the part of ingenue, not only toward the entire commonalty, but even toward us who know quite well what to think of your pretension to moral superiority."

I felt that I should succ.u.mb to this struggle. I gave it up. With a cool bow I parted from him and from that moment avoided all a.s.sociation with younger or older members of the clergy. Though I was willing to a.s.sume that I had not met the best soldiers of the camp, still the honor of fighting in their ranks did not entice me. I preferred, after all, to fight it out alone.

From this moment on my seclusion begins: I felt that Michael was right - my pretensions were ridiculous, I had nothing by which I could claim superiority, I was a hypocrite, I played an underhand game as well as they whom I seemed to look down upon.

And yet - and yet - I felt that I was not understood, that my erring was different from theirs, and that my piety had a quality lacking in theirs. And this undestroyable consciousness of a superiority, which I could not make prevail, of an inner life which I could not find in anyone and could reveal to none, drove me back into total, absolute solitude and inner separation from the human world in which I had to move.

This is an old story that constantly repeats itself. You know it all too well, do you not, reader? And we are not the only ones to undergo this process. In thousands and thousands of every generation the new life attempts to break the old group-ideas. In most of them it is overcome and subjected to the old. In a very few it breaks loose, prevails for a moment, and then is annihilated in the tragic destruction of body and soul by a death of torture, suicide, or insanity, as an inspiring example for a few, as a disheartening warning to many. In still others, as in you and me, dear reader, it finds a way of maintaining itself in the hostile world, protected by a tough hide of pretext and disguise, as the tiny seed swallowed by the birds withstands a.s.similation and, thrown out, finds a way of growth.

Thus for twenty years I have wandered about like a stranger in the world, apparently wholly subjected and belonging to it, but inwardly totally estranged, leading an independent life of my own: all this time inwardly struggling without rest, without peace in a battle apparently hopeless; until, strengthened and taught by a brief period of bright, true living, of blithe, vigorous action and nameless, deep sorrow, I have now entered with wholly different feelings, with trust and resignation, this last voluntary hermitage, to build with glad delight and joyous insight upon the mansion of the future.

I told my mother that nothing would probably come of my priesthood. She listened to it with the pa.s.sive calmness which had grown customary to her through continuous practice in forced resignation, but which did not hide from the subtle observer the undercurrents of very ordinary human pa.s.sions and desires. I had gradually come to observe these so plainly that the lack of self-perception in her grew constantly more difficult for me to bear without irritation.

This time I saw that she readily abandoned the proud hope of seeing her son a priest, for the possibility of now achieving the realization of her favorite marriage scheme. But she intended to show only sorrow and compa.s.sion, and shaking her head, she said:

"So your pride is not overcome, the viper's head not crushed, poor Vico?"

"I am obedient to that which is most divine in me, mother."

"Your human sense, you mean? Or your human pride?"

"Mother, what other means have we for distinguis.h.i.+ng the truth save the sense that tells us: 'this is true!' exactly as our eye tells us: 'this is light!' and our skin: 'this is warm!' Would you have me say: 'this is darkness,' where I see light, or 'this is right,' where I see wrong, only because you call it right?"

"I cannot argue with you, Vico. Do what seems right to you. I have learned to be resigned."

"But you desire my happiness, don't you, mother?"

"Ah, dear son, I wish that people would stop seeking for their happiness. It is all deception and vanity, a bright soap bubble. I have never known happiness, but have learned to sacrifice all pleasure and all joy for love of the Saviour."

"Listen a second, mother!" said I, now no longer wholly suppressing my anger; "if you tell me that there are phantom joys and false happiness and that we must be careful not to fling ourselves away on these, I'll admit you are perfectly right. But if you want to make me believe that the desire for joy and happiness, which was given to all of us, is a devilish invention that we must not obey - then I call your world a chaos and your life an offence. The very deepest, all-controlling basis of our pa.s.sions is that for happiness and joy, for the true, lasting, peace-giving happiness, that we sometimes mistakenly seek in idle pleasures. If G.o.d has created us with the intention that we should not follow the most profound, all-controlling pa.s.sion he has planted in us, then G.o.d is a foot who has given life to cripples. Profoundly as I have searched myself, I always find the impulse toward light, toward beauty, toward happiness - to wish to turn me from it is to wish to destroy me.

Never will I be able to follow another guiding star, for I have none, nor do I see one in any other person. And to none, to none on earth or in the heavens, shall I subject myself so slavishly as to deny for him my true, profoundest nature."

My mother carried her handkerchief to her eyes and shook her head with a sad shrug of the shoulders, but she did not reply.

Then as a lure I dropped a word, to see whether I understood her rightly - better than she understood herself.

"Isn't Lucia coming? We were to drive to the Pincio?"

The handkerchief dropped and her eyes sparkled a moment. "Lucia? Of course she is coming. I did not know that you intended to go with us."

Then I knew that I had guessed right, and it was this that estranged me from my mother, while I gave in nevertheless to her unconscious desire.

XII

Call Holland a dreamy country because its beauty is as that of a dream.

Sometimes it is black, wildly inhospitable and dispiriting - and suddenly, in calm, mild weather, the entire country with its trees, ca.n.a.ls, cities and inhabitants sparkles in an indescribable tender radiance, enhancing everything with a deep mysterious meaning impossible to explain or describe more fully, and resembling the peculiar beauty of dreams. One must have seen my little city from the sea on a still, clear September eve, when the sun goes to bide behind the bell-tower, flooding the cloudless, luminous blue-green heavens with orange and gold, when pastures and the shadows of trees merged in a fairy tinted blue haze unite in wondrous harmony - when the milkers come home with heavy tread, balancing at their sides the pails of cobalt blue - when all that sounds is harmonious from the striking of the clock on the tower to the rattling of a homeward driving cart, and all that breathes from the coa.r.s.e Hollanders to the dull cows seems wrapped in this selfsame peaceful, poetic evening bliss - one must have seen it thus to understand how much all this resembles the wondrous illusion of our dreams, when in some inexplicable manner the simplest object gleams with a glow of heavenly splendor and unspeakable beauty and for days can fill our memory with the bliss of it.

But the inhabitants of this dreamy little country do not like to be called dreamy. As I understand the word, it is a compliment better deserved by my own countrymen; but the Hollanders themselves feel flattered, though quite erroneously, when I casually remark at the club that the Italians are a much dreamier people than they. To the Hollander a dreamer is a blockhead and a dullard, and our broker, a little fellow with gray beard and little leering cunningly-stupid eyes, who thinks himself very smart because he knows bow to eke out a profit everywhere and thus to swell his bank account, always states with much satisfaction that he never knew what it was to dream. When he sleeps he sleeps absolutely and is conscious of nothing, thus - of less even than when he is awake. And the doctor - a fat jovial young fellow of strong mulatto type and popular for his good-natured cordiality and stale college jokes - says that all dreams are pathological and the best medicine for them is a good cigar and a stiff rum punch before retiring.

A Dutch peasant in his blue blouse, on a meadow flooded by the golden evening sun, amongst the black and white cattle, with a background of white and pale green dunes in fine undulating outline, is a marvel of dream beauty. But he himself knows nothing of this, as little or even less than the cow beside him. And the broker and the doctor only recognize it when a dreamer such as Rembrandt or Ruysdaal has revealed it, and the papers record how many thousands of golden gilders their reverie has yielded. But in my country the humblest peasant lad, clambering barefooted and singing down the Piedmontese foothills behind his black goats in the golden evening light, is enough of a dreamer to have a clear conception of the grand concert of beauty whereof he is a single tone. In the cities it is of course equally bad everywhere, and dreamers are as rare among the sleek, smart officers and loungers of the Toledo in Naples as among the portly, blond-bearded sons of the merchants and shopkeepers in the Kalverstraat at Amsterdam.

Now it also seems to me that he who dreams is more awake than he who sleeps, and that he who spends a third part of his life in utter unconsciousness better deserves to be called a sleepyhead and dullard, than he for whom the dark nights are also vivid and rich with pulsing life. To me it has always seemed a shame to lie like a stone for so many hours, and to arise from sleep no wiser than when we sank into it.

And after having experienced several times in my early youth that sleep possesses riches of sensations and a wealth of rapture that surpa.s.s the intensest joys of brilliant day, shedding behind them a radiance that penetrates the brightest daylight as suns.h.i.+ne penetrates an electrically lighted hall, - I began to pay more attention to my dreams and, especially in dreary joyless days, to look forward to the nights in which I had unmistakably felt the s.h.i.+ning presence of such great treasure.

As to the doctors' opinion regarding the morbidness of dreams, I refer again to my observations on the philistinism prevalent among physicians, and I know from very positive experience that there are healthy as well as morbid sensations in sleep, precisely as in the day-life. I may speak with some authority because in my day-life I never experienced any serious morbid disorder and no doctor could ever cast a doubt on the excellence of my health. Yet for me a dreamless night is a bad night, and I call the man who pa.s.ses his days in the following of perverted and inharmonious impulses, in deviations from the good instincts for refreshment and nourishment, for propagation and acc.u.mulation, for peace and happiness, and his nights in dull unconsciousness and thoughtlessness, dead as a cork, or at most, a little mad temporarily from foolish and confused dreams, - such a man I, with good reason, call sickly and abnormal.

For our highest instinct, that like a stately royal stag, proudly holding aloft his widely branching antlers, should take the lead of all the wanton and timid flock of our impulses and pa.s.sions uniting and guarding them, is the impulse toward beauty, toward sublimity, and toward purest blessedness. Even the mighty pa.s.sion for knowledge, which impels us so untiringly to seek for the secret of life, is subordinate to this, though it is the second in rank - the most beautiful hind of the flock.

And if in our sleep and dreams we perceive, more distinctly than in the day life, signs of the highest beauty and the purest bliss, - should we not then give them our closest attention?

And this I would now point out to you, dear reader, as the first new idea, strange - till now - to the present world, the first thought-child pulsing with life and future promise, born of the profound union of my experience and contemplation:

The solution of the secret of our lives lies in our dreams.

You think - do you not? - that this solution is not attainable to man.

Nor indeed is it - at least not to mortal man. And yet all mankind, through the medium of its naturalists, is patiently and hopefully seeking it. But, though they have already unearthed much that is useful, measuring and recording and comparing with ever finer and sharper instruments, they are still digging in a direction that inevitably leads into a blind alley.

For the manifestations of day-life, the only ones that attract the attention of the searchers, do not reach beyond the grave and end with the withering of the body. But the manifestations of sleep, yet unexplored and unmeasured, begin where the eyes are shut, the ears do not hear, the skin does not feel, and extend into the regions concerning which we want enlightenment as much as - yes, even more than - concerning the sphere of day.

As long as I can remember, I have always been a great and vivid dreamer; therefore I know I must count myself among the breakers of suggestion, among the pathfinders, just as you too, dear reader and sympathizer, are one of them. And therefore, also, when the ideas of the group and traditional creed became too narrow for me and neither the words of my great hero brothers, nor intercourse with my contemporaries, nor the latest discoveries of science could satisfy me, I could forthwith see an outlet and discover light on a path which no one had yet pointed out to me and none, before me, had trod. Thus my alienation from the world has not made me unruly. Thus alone is it possible for me to find peace and contentment in this life amid narrow, sordid souls and barbarians. For aside from my monotonous daily life, with brief moments of rapture aroused by the beauty of these low lands and the sea, by work and study, I have the rich nights full of marvelous mystic realities which I gratefully and attentively observe and record by day. Thus, despite the loss of all that was dear to me, I am happy in the consciousness of being a useful laborer in the fields of the future, ploughing.

"For the promise of a later birth

The wilderness of this Elysian earth."

Before, therefore, speaking to you of my marriage to Lucia del Bono and the long, outwardly prosperous period following, I must acquaint you with my nocturnal observations.

The dreams of terror and bliss, that to you too surely are not unknown, I dreamed with vivid intensity. And it had immediately struck me that their vehement sensations - the inexplicable, deadly, hopeless terror and disgust or the wondrous, perfect bliss were quite disproportionate to, and could not be explained by, the things we saw and experienced in the dream. I remember a dream of a bare, gray room, without windows or furniture, and moving about in a corner some indistinct object, whose terrifying weird impression could make me shudder even by day; another one of a small, narrow, square courtyard enclosed by high walls overgrown with ivy, which was also gruesome and appalling beyond description, - and then again blissful dreams of meetings with a strange youth or maiden in some unknown garden, or in a rocky valley with gigantic golden-leaved chestnut trees, whose memory filled me with sweet delight for days and weeks - yes! that even now in my old age can make me happy when I vividly recall them.

No one hearing such a dream recounted would be able to comprehend its impressions of terror or delight. Only this was plain to we - that the blissful dreams dealt with love. In my earliest youth it was a boy whom I would meet in my dreams and who by a single word, without much sense, would make me marvellously happy and the scenery around him glorious; later it was a girl. The boy and the girl returned several times, though not very often, and did not resemble any friend or sweetheart of my day-life.

At first the weird terror seemed much more mysterious, for it was connected in some unaccountable way with the simplest and most innocent objects and scenes I dreamed of.

We, indeed, talk of nightmare and usually seek its cause in a poor digestion and the doctors talk a great deal about improper circulation and suggest all kinds of remedies. But throughout a long life I have been a close observer and have come to the conclusion that indigestion and improper circulation are no more the cause of this nightly terror than of rain and wind, though a frail condition will make the one as well as the other harder to endure. Wait, my reader, until you are as old and experienced a dreamer as I am, and you shall see for yourself these terror-inspirers and bloodcurdlers, these buffoons and jesters at work in the shapes in which Breughel and Teniers portrayed them in so life-like a manner. You shall learn to know their tricks and malicious inventions, and the queer furnis.h.i.+ngs of their dwelling sphere. You shall learn to track them, as it were, - as the dog tracks the game - by their peculiar scent of gruesomeness. You shall see them unfolding their loathsome and dark spectacles before you -their battlefields reeking with blood, their swamps filled with corpses - besmirching your path with mud, and playing fantastic tricks on you without its causing you the slightest degree of alarm or fear, or depressing you as it did before you knew the cause of all these things - because now you apprehend them in their wretched malignity and dare to face them and, if need be, duly to chastise them.

These are the creatures that Sh.e.l.ley calls

"The ghastly people of the realm of dreams,"

and of whose miserable existence and restless activity neither he, nor Goethe, nor any other of the world's sages and seers ever doubted.

Indeed, would not this doubt signify that we are ourselves responsible for the mult.i.tude of horrible, utterly vulgar, heinous and vile or obscene illusions that menace us at night and yet all bear an unmistakable imprint of thought and imagination, compiled with reason and deliberation, and thus betray a thinking mind though a low-thinking one? Do you not know the dream in which you know yourself to be guilty of murder, of b.l.o.o.d.y murder through covetousness, of theft, or of plotting to kill and inciting the innocent to it -with all the horrid retinue of fear of discovery and lies upon lies to escape it? And do you hold your own soul responsible for this? Or do you believe that chance can beget such artfully contrived complexities?

It was this sort of deception that incited me to indignant defiance.

The war I had to carry on by day against my troublesome pa.s.sions, also put me on my guard at night, and I would not absolve myself with the excuse that sleep renders irresponsible. For I knew that it was I, myself, I, Lodovico Muralto, an honest, well-meaning fellow, who in the dream-life of night had done and felt all kinds of malicious wicked and low-minded things, and I would not have it.

Not only the baseness, but also the absurdities of dreams, exasperated me. Night after night I was imposed upon and led about by the nose in the most ridiculous fas.h.i.+on. It often seemed as though my most earnest resolutions and most sacred feelings were the very ones to draw their shafts of ridicule. And morning after morning it was not only with surprise, but also with growing shame and wrath that I discovered on awakening, how absurdly I had again been fooled. This could not issue from myself, it must have been thrust on me; it was suggestion, infusion, that menaced and confounded my mind and judgment, and I was determined not to endure it. I would not stand it and earnestly sought a means of defending my healthy soul and free judgment. Thus I may say that my vehement lifelong struggle for self-purification and advance toward salvation was doubled, being carried on by night as well as by day, and indeed to great advantage. For it is the same soul, and they are the same forces which by night as well as by day act and react upon one another, and life with the physical senses of day has been made not a little clearer to me by the nightly senseless life.