the vital activities of my senseless and invisible being. But these extremely favorable conditions are rare; usually I feel myself gliding rapidly through the sphere of perception, anxious lest it should pass before I have made the most of it.
A long series of observations has made clear to me this above all: that there are various spheres which, on gaining consciousness, one immediately recognizes by their peculiar atmosphere, impossible more closely to describe. One knows what depths, what fields of observation one traverses.
There is a sphere wherein we see again the world of day-life – the earth we have seen with its landscapes and habitations – all strangely altered. It is not the same, but we know: this is meant.
Thus over and over again many a night I saw my paternal home in the city with its old-time luxury – but in its dream image. Moreover Lake Como and the forest of Gombo, near Pisa, and also England and the North Sea – but it is always the dream sea, and the dream forest, and the dream London, differing totally from the realities of day. But they themselves remain the same and without exception I immediately recognize them.
Thus there is a sphere of ecstasy and great joy. In this our consciousness of self is strongest, and it is impossible to give an idea of the wonderful clearness with which one views and admires everything, and the undoubted sense of a reality, though wholly unlike the reality of our waking hours. One sees vast, splendid, more or less clearly lighted landscapes, fashioned indeed according to earthy pattern, with mountains, trees, seas and rivers, but more beautiful and filling us with overwhelming admiration. And one sees them perfectly distinctly, with sharp intensity and full consciousness.
In this sphere one also possesses a peculiar body with very intense corporal feeling and definite qualities. One feels one’s own eyes opened wide and sees with them, one feels one’s mouth and speaks and sings at the top of one’s voice – wondering meanwhile that the sleeping body should lie there still as death – one sees one’s own hands and feet and the clothes one wears, resembling the clothes worn by day. It is all a little different, it is seen fleetingly as through running water, and it changes also through the influence of pronounced will. But one recognizes the dream-body exactly as one recognizes the waking body, when one has again returned to it. And one retains the sense recollection of both, each independent of the other. One remembers on awaking that the dream body has been actively stirring, but the waking body knows that it has been lying calm and still, though not wholly dead, for an unaccustomed noise would have wakened it. And the dream-body possesses all the sense perceptions and all the energies of the waking body and even more, for it can not only see, feel, hear, taste and smell, but also think very clearly and discern more delicate subtleties of mood. Yes! this last it does with such unwonted subtlety and acuteness that one cannot compare it to any sense perception of day and might with good reason speak of a new sense. And it can soar and fly. It feels light and free – though the waking body is wrapped in the deep sleep of weariness, the dream-body in this sphere is always supple, light and delightful beyond description. This ability to fly is always the infallible proclaimer of the advent of the joy-sphere. But this soaring power is not unlimited. The dream-body can safely descend into the deepest chasm, but it cannot rise to every height. Ascending requires exertion and often meets with failure despite the greatest efforts.
The careful observation of the reversion of the one body into the other on awakening is most remarkable.
One can always wake voluntarily from this joy-sphere. And to me it is an ever recurring and never waning wonder when the two bodies, each with its distinct bodily recollection, merge into one another. The dream-body, let us imagine, assumes an attitude, with arms stretched out and raised high above the head, and it shouts and sings, but at the same time it knows the sleeping body, still as death, is lying on its right side, with arms folded over the breast; this seems impossible, however, so distinct is the consciousness of speech, of the muscles, of the open eyes ? and yet there follows a single indescribable moment of transition and we regain the physical consciousness of the sleeping body with the memory of having lain silent, immovable, unseeing, in quite another attitude.
Who once has observed this, as I have hundreds of times observed it, no longer meets with flat denial the supposition that the decline and decay of this visible body does not exclude the possibility of reintegration and of renewed consciousness, will and perception. No more will he dare to confirm my father’s opinion that we possess no sign or proof of the existence of any part of our being, whether we call it “soul” or “spectre” or by another name, that can separate itself from the visible body.
It was this sphere of joy which I always hoped to regain and the attainment of which made me happy all day. In this sphere I can make music and sing wonderfully – a talent wherein by day I do not, alas, excel. In this sphere I can also exert influence on myself and on the life of day. A strong suggestion uttered by my dream-body acts upon my waking body and drives away weariness, dejection and some of the slight disorders that sometimes trouble me.
But what is of greater importance – in the joy-sphere I can pray without shame or embarrassment. Then I pour out my whole heart – I who was never a good speaker – in lucid, fervent, flowing language, thanking, asking, praising.
Auto-suggestion? Yes, surely! Yet of very peculiar kind. For there is response. Response that has never wholly deceived me. When, in this wonderful sphere, I pray in transcendent rapture – subtle, silent, deeply significant signs take place in the wonderful landscape before my eyes. A soft veil of clouds obscures the light, as a warning of danger or calamity, – a great glowing brilliance rises behind me or at my side as an encouraging greeting, – a light layer of clouds gradually evaporates and a deep, dark, boundless, ravishing azure comes to view, filling me with unknown comfort. Blue, an incomparably beautiful blue, is the most characteristic color for this sphere. When I see blue I know that all is well, that I am going right and safely, that divine favor and support surround me. Blue is the cosmic color, the color of sky and ocean, of the vaster universal life, just as green is the telluric color, the color of the more limited earthly existence.
Very gradually, very slowly, by repeated observation one acquires a thorough knowledge of all these spheres and impressions. I have tried to describe this more minutely in other writings. The full meaning can naturally not be computed solely from my observations. Years of repeated investigation by following generations are still required. But an unknown perspective of seeing and knowing opens itself, where before we could only believe and trust.
If only for the purpose of rightly following the brief history of my career in life, it will be necessary to know something of this nocturnal life of observation, for it has greatly influenced my lot. I record it, undisturbed by the fear that these pages may fall into the hands of the herd of philistines. For they will look upon it as an idle phantasy, as curious invention, in the style of some of the wonder tales by Rudyard Kipling or H. G. Wells, conceived for their amusement. You, dear reader, and ready sympathizer, will easily recognize the note of truth. I am anything but phantastic, and am a faithful and devoted follower of the sober naked truth; but I do not deny her because she reveals herself by night instead of by day, and to me a revelation remains a revelation, whether it does or does not come to me through the senses.
That the dream-spheres adhere to a definite arrangement and situation as well as the area perceived by day, I consider likely, because they appear in a fixed order of succession. Once only I was in a most profound sphere from which I could not voluntarily awaken and in which I had some very joyous encounters, – creatures resembling men but without mortal cares and a winged child which, in my dream, I already compared to Goethe’s Euphorion, the child of Faust and Helena. This sphere lay still deeper – though one must understand the word deep wholly as a metaphor – than the beautiful joy-sphere with its vast landscapes.
The joy-sphere, however, is inevitably followed toward waking by the sphere of the demons with their pranks and spook. This sphere is easily recognizable. One sees the visionary objects sharply and clearly, but they have an indescribable yet very distinct spectral character. A single object, a brush, a horseshoe or anything of the kind may suddenly come before my eyes and by the horror and ghastliness issuing from it, I immediately recognize it as an invention of the demons.
A very common pleasantry of this demon pack is to let you awaken apparently. You imagine it is morning, open your eyes, look around and recognize your bedroom. When you want to rise, however, you see all at once that there is something strange, something weird and spectral about the room – a chair moves by itself, an empty garment stalks about, the windows, the light – everything is different, unaccustomed, and all at once you realize that you are not yet awake, that you are still dreaming and have landed in a world of spectres. The first few times this occurred to me, I was frightened and nervously made strong efforts to wake. But after a few experiences of this false awakening it no longer caused me the slightest alarm. The curious spectre sphere with its sharp outlines and intense light interested me, and I woke from it voluntarily as easily and as calmly as from other dream-domains.
This land of demons most dreamers frequent without knowing it, and even to the present day, when my consciousness and memory are not very clear, I easily let myself be deceived by it. Then come the mocking dreams, the vile, offensive, bloody, immoral and obscene dreams.
But when I come from the joy-sphere and thus have clear consciousness and presence of mind, I see the strange images themselves in action, while traversing this spectral world. I cannot describe them better than Teniers and Breughel have portrayed them. This, however, the artists could not convey to us: that they were constantly changing in shape and color. And they do this not only of their own accord but also at my command, and sometimes I amuse myself by letting them grow larger or smaller, black or blue, and by making them assume curious shapes. Amid throngs numbering hundreds of them I have moved about, and though my power over them varies, yet I never feel again the old nameless dread and when they become too obtrusive I can keep them at a distance by vigorous words of authority and also by a lash of the whip. This perhaps sounds strange to you, dear reader, but you must in truth understand that even in the senseless sphere, thought alone is not efficacious without a certain plastic expression in shape of a visible, audible or palpable form. If this spectral company becomes too much for me I must loudly command them, even shout at them, “begone,” and if that does no good I must wish for a whip – which forthwith appears – and give them a sound thrashing. And I assure you, and you will yourself experience it if you test my statements by personal observation, that one never awakens more refreshed, never does there follow a happier, serener and freer morning than after such a successful struggle with the demons. Yet, it was this sort of fighting that, more than all my efforts by day, has helped me to overcome my low and vile temptations. Thus, much from the old transmitted tales regarding evil visitations and struggles with demons has appeared true to me in the light of new experience.
Here I must warn you against a very strange and important peculiarity of our dream-body and our dream-nature. In many respects it is superior to our waking body – in sensitiveness of mood and feeling, in keenness of vision, in the sense of peace, comfort and happiness, and also in subtlety of thought. But in one respect it is weaker, namely – in the control of passion. Once kindled to passion -in grief, in joy, in rapture, in every soul-stirring emotion – it very speedily grows beyond control. It then looses itself in countless extravagances, which the contemplating judgment does not countenance, even deplores, but is powerless to check or curb. From this I draw the conclusion that we must learn to regulate and control our passions by day, for though the senseless life is enriched by everything the day-life conveys to it, it can only avail itself of well-mastered and disciplined passions.
Therefore abiding in the demon-sphere is never without danger. If, with a little too much self-confidence, I let myself be induced to assume a less haughty and reserved manner, if I associated a little more familiarly with the bold tribe, I soon repented, for I was carried along by their wantonness and folly, I could no longer subdue the laughter and extravagances, nor could I, to my own disgrace and sorrow, restrain myself in my wrath toward them.
And this most especially applies to licentiousness, of which they are particularly ready to take advantage. They are past masters in lascivious pranks and practised on my weakness with much success. I soon noticed that they are sexless and can alternately appear as man or woman. As long as I clearly realize this I have power over them. But when the clearness of my consciousness and memory is dimmed they get the better of me.
Thus you must understand me rightly, dear reader, as regards the salutary effect resulting from this demon fight. Struggling with demons is not struggling with passions. Demons are enemies and stand outside our own individual domain. But passions are our friends, the useful domestic animals belonging to our own household, to the economy of our own personal nature. The passions and emotions should be tamed, never combatted. And this taming is accomplished by day, for at night they are more difficult to master, and the body invisible to the senses, that which can remain after the fading and wasting away of our material body, has no longer the power to tame. It only harvests what is sown by day.
Yet this nocturnal life of struggle with the demon brood is extremely stimulating to the soul, above all through the knowledge, the clearer comprehension, the deeper insight with regard to our own obscure being and its no less obscure besiegers.
In the better, the higher or deeper dream-spheres impure lust and base lasciviousness do not occur. Love transports of unknown splendor do, however. But it is an almost unfailing characteristic of everything pertaining to the joy-sphere, that it passes over sexual matters with a curious disregard, and never carries with it any suggestion of that lust for which we feel shame and humiliation. Yet there are in it unions and raptures very similar to the love-life of day, though more beautiful and tranquil. But the peculiar quality that is vile and leaves behind aversion and disgust, is eliminated with subtle separation.
XIII
The things I related to you in the preceding chapter are necessary for the comprehension of my subsequent life. But they are the issues of an entire lifetime, and in the years previous to my marriage, when I lived with my mother and her protégée, I was only at the beginning and knew yet very little of all this. I did not speak of it either, and in all my later life I mentioned it to only one person.
As my plan of entering the priesthood had come to naught, we were all three glad to leave the sultry city of Rome. We went to Como, occupying our villa at the lake. It was an old house with wainscotings of yellow stucco and a sad air of ruined stateliness, of a splendor that even in its prime had pretended to more than it really was. It was quite different than my memory had pictured it. Much humbler, smaller – a weak and feeble reflection of the solid marble splendor of antique and renaissance which it affected to imitate. But this very decay now spread over it an involuntary charm. For the garden with its cypresses, mimosas, magnolias and roses had grown all the more beautiful in its neglected wilderness, and we inhabited only a few rooms of the great still house, making ourselves at home in the nooks and corners as though we were caretakers instead of owners. And directly in front of the garden was the lake, with its smooth extent of deep blue, with satin or moiré sheen according as it was touched by the gentle breeze, – and behind were the mountains with thousands of primulas, the purple erica, and the pink and white Christmas rose. The brooklet was still there – and the old pillared portico, where the stone showed from under the crumbling stucco and the roses had pushed their way through the stone paving and entwined the columns.
Into this abode I withdrew, gathering books about me, and by study and a quiet, temperate life endeavored to attain by myself the consecration which I could not find in Rome. Lucia with her maid continued to live with us, and I saw her and my mother at the meals, but aside from that not often.
They were rigorous, tranquil, secluded years, which may probably be reckoned among the good years of my life. I quietly went my own way and studied, following only the guidings of my inner thirst for knowledge.
But the women waited, waited, and I did not see it, or did not heed it. Bernard Shaw, the Benjamin and the enfant terrible among my brethren, tries his best to show the world that it is the woman who wins the man and not the reverse – and surely there is more truth in this than the common herd suspects. But if one were to believe him, one should imagine that the woman thereby considers only selfish ends and primarily cares for, desires and accepts the man, because she finds him useful to the interest of her deep-seated instincts, of the desired good and beautiful child. But after all this is not true, and the woman in her quiet, unnoticed, luring and combining activities does not want to take only, but to give as well, above all to give, and usually she values the husband higher than the father.
Lucia was a very gentle woman, yet of firm character. She had the large firm build and the regular, massive features of Titian’s women, but her eyes were softer, and showed less of that daringly exuberant spirit.
She was also characteristically Latin and un-Germanic in her feelings and sentiments. Without criticism she subjected herself to the spiritual teachings of the group to which she belonged. The conventional was an unalterable mental reality to her, tradition possessed for her all the power of the living and the sublime. Thus the conception of “honor” with all its personal and social facets was to her as fixed, clear, clean-cut and immutable as a diamond. That it might be variable, that some ages had called honorable what was now considered dishonorable, and vice versa, on that she never reflected and she did not seek for the lasting kernel of the changing idea. Through this she possessed a serenity and peace of mind which, in my perplexities, often seemed very enviable to me. She had no tendencies which she despised, but also no ideals which, as I, she must constantly curtail at life’s behest. That a young bachelor like myself sometimes allowed himself dissipations, was a fact which she passed over with a light French step. And she bore allusions to it so undisturbed that it often impressed me painfully. She did not seem to feel the Englishwoman’s need of upholding the illusion of prematrimonial purity in both husband and wife, and though I recognized that she had a perfect right to this way of thinking, yet it annoyed me and I preferred Emmy’s ingenuous or assumed blindness.
But I also realized that Lucia’s indulgence would be turned into an equally rigid condemnation as soon as conventional bounds were overstepped. What a young man did before his marriage had in Latin countries never yet jeopardized his honor. But her honor as a wife, the honor of the home, the honor of a family name – these were for her circumscribed realities, which might be menaced by certain actions, and which if need be she would sacrifice her life to defend.
She had been reared in luxury, and on reaching her majority had a large fortune at her disposal. But she never seemed to give it a thought, and lived in my mother’s house with the utmost simplicity. That my mother cared just as little about it I dare not say, and for me this was another reason for maintaining my stubborn resistance. It impressed me most disagreeably to hear my mother forever talking of the miserableness and worthlessness of the earthly life, and of the blessedness hereafter as the only thing deserving of our attention, and at the same time observe how with unconscious motherly matchmaking and secret strategy she sought to arrange a rich marriage for her son. I therefore resisted her silent machinations as much as was possible without endangering the household peace.
It profited me nothing, however. I was bound to lose this game because I did not have my mind on it. The two women were determined to win it, not with conscious deliberate intent, but as women want a thing with all the obstinate strength of their mind, without ever saying a word about it or admitting it to themselves. And I was absorbed in chemistry and physics, in physiology and biology, my whole mind was engrossed in the great endeavor to decipher something of the mysterious writ of the phenomena of life and Nature, and in some degree to penetrate the dark recesses of my own nature.
Thus the conflict was unequal – and though it lasted for years I finally found myself conquered as by surprise. I felt that it was no longer possible for me to draw back, and moreover that I was alone responsible. There is no finer diplomacy than the unconscious diplomacy of women. I had been conquered and withal wholly maintained in the illusion that I myself was the acting, the attacking and the conquering party. But all this, mark it well, with the most devoted and unselfish love.
Actually in love, as with Emmy Tenders, I never was with Lucia del Bono: and this, despite my amorous nature, her great charm and our many years’ companionship. I admired her for her beauty and for what everyone must call her stainless character. But she lacked for me just that certain mysterious, impenetrable something that in Emmy excited me to so mad a passion. I loved Lucia for the same reason that everyone must love her, because she really was a very lovable creature. But this rational sentiment, that to many would seem a more solid basis for a happy union than most paroxysms of love, never rose to the height of a passion mightier than all reason. And I believed, as do many sensible and staid people, and as my mother also believed, that I could make this well-considered affection suffice for making her happy, and for giving direction and balance to my own life. I lived in the very common conceit that I had my own nature entirely in my power and thus, from out the headquarters of my self-consciousness, could freely dispose of it, always following the counsels of a reasonable deliberation.
That I should make Lucia happy by marrying her seemed beyond doubt. That I should ever feel for another woman what I had felt for Emmy, I could not believe. Then how could I do better than to devote my life to an excellent woman, to whom I thus accorded what she seemed to desire and who as my wife would surely never disappoint me? True, to save her from humiliation, I should have to feign a love which I never expected to feel. But I no longer faced mankind with the naive brotherly uprightness, and I saw no wrong in acting such a part with such good intention. I also considered myself perfectly capable of it, and again swore to myself an oath – no less sincerely meant and also no less fragile – that I would be a faithful and exemplary husband to her, and would at all times make my own happiness subservient to hers.
Now every human person is, according to the primitive meaning of this word, also a mask, and there is no person living, be he ever so simply sincere, so wholly uncomplicated, but has wrought for himself such a mask, has assumed such a rôle, according to his ideals of human worth, of fitness and breeding. And if he means it honestly, he tries to live himself into the part so that he can believe himself to be what he pretends. Thus, following his own or others’ form ideals, he moulds and fashions himself into a personality which will be the more respected the more pronounced, decided, and unchangeable it manifests itself. But would he assume a mask, enact a part far removed from his own form ideals and unattainable to the plasticity of his true nature, he fails miserably, is called a scoundrel and a knave and is indeed a wretch.
Thus the part I played toward Lucia was not one entirely foreign to my nature. I simply tried my best to efface the boundaries between, and merge the emotional degrees of affection and love. This was not difficult and I honestly hoped that my true nature would some time really fill the assumed form: that thus I would become for Lucia the true lover and devoted husband she expected to find in me. I also related to her the history of my heart and my past, in so far as was essential to a just estimation; and she accepted it all reverently, as a pleasing and honoring mark of confidence, and saw no difficulty whatsoever. She followed the suggestion of her own desire, that everything would be as she wished it, with the same complacence with which she had trusted in my mother’s wisdom, and she continued to hearken to the voice of the herd.
The wild, sultry sirocco had suddenly melted the snowy caps of the mountains to about half their former extent, the mimosas bloomed profusely, their luxuriant yellow masses standing out vividly against the deep blue ether, and up on the mountains everywhere beamed the hepatica with its myriad sweet flower-stare of faint and tender blue – when Lucia and I were to wed in the white marble cathedral of Como. I had acceded to her wish that all the ceremonies should be duly observed. More and more I had learned to divide my life, as the only means of keeping the peace with mankind and with myself. I realized that what in brother Michael had seemed to me despicable hypocrisy was nothing more than the brutal acceptance and shocking confirmation of a sad necessity, to which every deeply thinking person must submit. Was not Socrates far too wise a man to believe that if there really existed a god of medicine, Asklepias by name, he would please this personage by beheading and burning a cock? Yet he ordered this to be done in acknowledgment of the speedy effect of the poison that killed him; this at a moment when a sensible man does not usually jest or act. This poor cock of Socrates has often come to my mind; also on the day when I left my books and microscopes, my sprouting seeds and growing salamander larvae to array myself for the wedding ceremony. Even the very wisest man is obliged to offer to the gods of his time.
It was a lovely day and a brilliant scene. Lucia’s distinguished family had arrived in full force and glittering pageant. Not only the violet but the crimson clergy were represented. The street populace of Como were lined up from the landing place of our boats to the cathedral as at the arrival of royalty. The street urchins ran before us, and there was even cheering as though this event signified an additional joy on earth. The church was fragrant with masses of roses and radiant with – hundreds of candles, and returning our gondolas formed a long multi-colored line on the lake, with draperies trailing through the water, and songs and music, as though we were still in the good days of the Borgias.
Lucia was serene and beaming with quiet happiness, like a blue hepatica blossom, a little bashful, but responding archly and merrily, and her fine clear eyes dimmed by only the slightest suspicion of a tear. She saw nothing ahead of us but bliss, a welcome happiness, a regular God-pleasing life. For me it was not hard to sustain my part in this beautiful scene. It was not so much a rôle or a comedy that I enacted, as perhaps a lovely dream.
When the sun sank I sat on the terrace meditating and contemplating the colors of the darkly shimmering well-nigh blackish green foliage of the magnolias, the snow of the mountains opposite, glittering golden in the evening light, above it the luminous, pale greenish blue sky, and below the purplish violet mountain slopes and the soft steel blue lake. The colors merged and became one with the fragrance of the lemon blossoms surrounding me, marking this as one of the unforgettable representative moments, to which we look back repeatedly on our journey of life as the skipper looks back to a buoy or lighthouse passed.
I thought of my dream-world and compared the sharp brilliant impressions of the night with those of the day, asking myself when I was most truly and really myself, and which of the two worlds was the more real – and why?
XIV
Time is a sphere in the dream-world in which you, dear reader, have surely been as well as I, but probably without distinguishing it as such. Without doubt it has happened to you that you dreamt very vividly of persons who have died. Then you may have observed two peculiarities, first, that you usually do not remember in your dream that these persons are dead, and moreover that if you see others with them, or near them, or shortly after having met them these others are also dead persons, whose passing away you had forgotten in your dream. Long before the day of which I told you in the last chapter, I had already observed the regularity in these visions, and had formed a presumption from it, concerning the relation of their causes.
A presumption I say – not without value for all that. All that we call proofs are presumptions of different degrees of certainty. Nietzsche scornfully says that God is but a presumption. It is so. But it is not nice of him to fool people for that reason, and to thrust the superman, whom no one has ever seen and who is even slighter than a presumption, into their hands as a waggishly contrived idol.
Believe nothing beyond experience, dear reader. But God and Christ are more experience than the superman, even though they be presumptions. Your father and your mother, too, are but presumptions, deduced from experiences, aroused by what their skin and their eyes seem to imply and to conceal for you.
Thus I presumed that the dead also have their sphere, and that when the dream-body of living, sleeping man enters there, he cannot grasp the difference between this sphere and his own and therefore always retains the illusion that the dead are still alive.
Now I had very often before this dreamed of my father. First that I was still sailing with him on our last expedition. But this belonged to the terror-dream of which I spoke before, which at the beginning regularly repeated itself.
This dream I consider nothing but the painful echo in the deeper chasms of my soul, of the violent shock that my waking body had sustained. Beyond this I attach to it no deeper significance.
But then came a dream of wholly different character, in a perceptibly different sphere, in which I walked with my father while he put his arm around my shoulders and cried. It seemed to me as though he was trying his best to show me the marks of tenderness which he knew I was fond of and of which he was usually so sparing.
I did not remember that he was dead and I walked by his side somewhat embarrassed, as the child that unexpectedly gets more than it has asked for. So as also to do something on my part to please him, I caught a fine butterfly with curious blue arabesques on his wings, and I pronounced a Latin word to let him see that I knew the species. The word I no longer remember and moreover it was only dream Latin, that is to say: nonsense. But my good intention was apparently evident to him, and pointing to the wondrous design on the wings he said something about “plasmodic” or some such word, just as nonsensical as my name for the species. But in the dream there is a wholly different relation between word and spirit, and one can construe sensible meanings out of nonsense and also interchange thoughts without words, – and I knew very well at the time and also on awaking that my father wanted to make me think about the way in which this butterfly decoration was formed.
Then I woke and it took me a long time to realize fully that my father was dead. And this realization suddenly struck me like a cold whirlwind, making me shiver from head to foot.
The first hours after waking I was sure that it was he who had communed with me, that he felt remorse for his rage at me in the last moments of his life, and therefore cried and was unusually tender toward me. I also thought his pointing to the ornamented wings of the butterfly important and full of meaning, albeit not yet clear to me.
But the impressions of the day are so different from those of the night, the two are so hostile, that they alternately seek to supplant one another as absolutely as possible, as though by turns one had been in the company of a religious devotee and an atheist, of a poet and a dull philistine, of a spendthrift and a miser. No man so firm in character but undergoes this influence. And it still regularly befalls even me, after so many years, that at the end of day I face the night with its wonders with critical unbelieving expectancy. Even when falling asleep I cannot realize the coming transition, and only the next morning I again know how everything was, and am surprised that I could ever doubt and forget it, just as we see again the face of one we love and are surprised that the image in our memory could have faded so completely.
The mightiest and most prodigious fallacy of men in this age, that cripples their aspirations, and like a deadly frost bends low and kills the tender blossoms of their young growing wisdom, erecting cruel steep walls between heart and heart, between group and group – is the fallacy that in this struggle between belief and unbelief a verdict can be reached through something that they call Reason and that bears as its weapon the True Word. But reason rules only in the realm of imagination, in the realm of word, of language, of scheme and symbol. In the realm of actual experience Reason is not what we call Reason, and only the young person and the childish nation, as that of ancient Athens, confuse reason and see in the “Logos” the actual, and in the logical the truth, expecting that patient reasoning must indeed lead to the truth. But did not father Plato himself get nearest the truth where his logos is most illogical?
XV
It was really she! It was in a long lane bordered on both sides by dark spruce and beeches decked out in the golden brown tints of autumn. The sunbeams, distinctly bluish in the fine mist, slantingly penetrated the dark spruce, and fell in golden radiance upon the pale green moss, and the blue ether and the brown and green foliage shone in a brilliance of hue suggesting the brown and blue lustre of the opal. I had already seen her approaching from a distance, her white bare feet noiselessly pressing the soft moss. I gazed intently at her face; at the young fresh complexion; the softly waved lustrous blonde hair with the little, fine loose hairs standing out around her head, shimmering in the sunlight like a halo; at the amber tints in the shadows of her finely modelled ear.
It was she, and she laid her finger on her lips as though I should listen. But I heard nothing. I saw distinctly how the round spots of sunlight glided over her face and her hair and the shadows of the foliage fell upon her breast and shoulders draped in white.
While I gazed at her, wondering what she would say, my thoughts carried on their subtle play. The subtle play from which they so seldom rest, night or day. I thought: “How will the life after death be? Shall we perceive, see, hear, smell, taste, touch then too? Surely the perception can never be as positive as now – here. As clearly as I now see these trees and her dear face – now, now while I am alive and awake – so clearly I cannot perceive after death, without a body and sense.”
While I was thinking this, she had come close up to me and I spoke calmly:
“Is it you, Emmy?”
Then I looked at her, somewhat doubtfully, as though there were something unusual about her, and she whisperingly replied:
“Not yet entirely.”
These strange words did not surprise me. At the moment I understood very well what she meant to say with them, and I asked:
“Will you stay?”
Then I wanted to fold her in my arms. But I saw her shake her head and, with the slender fingers on her mouth, again motion as though I should listen. Then I heard sounds as of a wildly galloping beast, a trampling of hoofs that resounded hollowly on the wooded path. And all at once I remembered a heavy responsibility that rested upon me, and I knew that this trampling gallop was connected with it. It was to fetch me or to drive away Emmy, to put an end to this great serene happiness. And I felt a horrible, choking fear rising in me, while the sounds came nearer and nearer.
But Emmy smiled – a tender gracious smile and said:
“I shall come again.”
Then, at the very end of the straight lane, where the alternating brownish red beeches and blackish green spruce appeared very small, and the light green mossy path gleamed up and narrowing met the sky, I saw the galloping beast approaching. It was black, a horse or a bull – I could not distinguish which – but it came nearer and nearer and my fear rose to terror. Then all at once, sideways through the row of trees, the pale face of my father appeared, and he walked toward Emmy as though to shield her, saying:
“It is too late!”
After this that strange transition took place, which is like a chaotic mingling of two spheres of life, a rolling together of space and light, one moment oppressing, then again relieving, as the sensation of the diver who, turning around under water, loses the consciousness of up and down until he regains his balance, air and daylight, the transition from dreaming to waking.
I had dreamt and only now actually woke. And meanwhile, only a moment ago, I had thought that there could never be such clear and distinct perceptions in the life without the body and senses, as those which now after all turned out to belong to the dream – to the life without body and senses. I was astonished and perplexed as on so many a morning on waking.
But then came a yet more dazzling, more overwhelming memory – Emmy! I had seen her as positively as I had ever seen her, her glance still lived in my eyes, her voice in my ears. It was Emmy – and we had wanted to clasp each other in our arms, we had tasted each other’s love.
I opened my eyes and looked about the world in which I had awakened. I saw the cold, soulless luxury of a hotel apartment, mirrored wardrobes, thick red carpets. Out doors, bells were pealing, carts were rattling, and whips were cracking. Another bed stood next to mine and in it I saw dark, glossy hair – spread out dishevelled on the white cushion in the disarray of morning. It was my wife – Lucia.
A violent agitation seized me. My thoughts and feelings were stirred to commotion like a bee-hive which someone has knocked against. Vainly I sought to restore harmony and peace in myself by calm reflection.
My strongest feeling was one of guilt, terrible, inexpiable guilt. Much graver guilt than had ever oppressed me after my youthful errings. Guilt toward this gentle, dark-haired woman, who lay sleeping by my side, and whom I had permitted to become my wife. For after all it was deceit – Emmy still existed. I had seen her and spoken to her, and we loved each other, as I should never be able to love this other.
Emmy still existed – but where and how?
Then another memory came back to me which made me shiver with nervous fright. I had not only seen Emmy, but also my father with her. And I knew what this meant. Might her appearing to me so distinctly this night be an instance of the oft-propounded correspondence of death and the manifestation of the spirit?
In my anxiety I got up quietly, dressed and went out.
The air was keen and sparklingly fresh, the smoke from the houses rose up in straight columns. We were at Lucerne and the winter, which had already forsaken Italy, was here bidding a last farewell. A thin layer of snow covered the roofs and the mountains, and the transparent bright emerald green of the lake, the light brown of the antique wood work on the bridges, towers and houses, and the soft tender white of the snow formed a cool and noble harmony.
I roved about in the woods and mountains and only returned toward afternoon – my spiritual balance restored, but more than ever estranged from the human world.
I sent a telegram to Emmy’s family in London: “Wire address Mrs. Emmy Truant.” And toward night came the reply: “Mrs. Truant died fever Simla January.”
Not this night, but three months ago she had died. I attached no significance, as so many do, to the fact that the point of time did not correspond exactly. I knew that it had been she, and the certainty of her death made me calm. It was as though she was now really mine, and would ever remain mine.
I showed Lucia the message, thereby explaining my sad and introspective mood. She willingly forgave me and did not ask me more than I wished to tell, just as she had always met me with the utmost discretion in my, to her inexplainable, humors.
But if perchance she had hoped that my heart would now feel itself free, that my entire love would now be bestowed on her, she was miserably deceived. The effect was exactly the reverse. I only now fully realized what I had done, and only now felt it as a great wrong. I felt that I had a wife, but it was not the one who slept by my side and who bore my name. A fervent passionate desire went out toward the being whose fair image I had seen so clearly, whom I had wished to embrace with unutterable tenderness, and whose voice and whose presence had procured for me bliss such as the day had never brought me, and the clear, cold daylight could not dispel. I longed for the night all day long, – and with bitter certainty I felt that I should never be able to offer more to the poor woman, whom I had taken into my arms as my wife, than a friendly mask, an assumed appearance of loyalty and tenderness.
And the feeling of guilt, which in another might perhaps have been lulled by the news of her death, began to burn on my conscience with greater intensity than ever. I abused myself as a coward, a weakling, an adulterer, for something that no man on earth would ever have imputed to me as guilt.
But even then, while I writhed with pain, I knew that my free judgment never would have condemned as guilty one who had acted as I, thus – that remorse and the distressing consciousness of sin are not the logical and just consequence of a deed realized as bad and pernicious, but that it is the sad effect of a law, salutary for humanity as a whole, but often baneful and unjust for the individual, to which we must submit with love and patience for the sake of the sacred character of this law and out of respect to the sublime will of its Maker.
XVI
In order actively to carry out a thing in the dream world, I must resolve upon it betimes and definitely determine upon the plan. During the actual dream the time is usually too short, the incidents pass too fleetingly. Sometimes I soar on in swift flight so that everything rushes by me without my being able to delay the pace. It is usually after one of these happy dreams with full consciousness, that I plan out, that very morning before getting up, what I shall do the next time in my dream. And then, every evening before falling asleep, it is once more distinctly formulated and stamped upon the memory, so that like a ready tool it will be at hand during the moments of observation – just as astronomical instruments during an eclipse of the sun.
Thus I had determined on calling some one in my dream. And the first one I selected for this purpose was my father.
I had seen him many times in my dreams, but never with full consciousness, never with the memory that he was dead, never in the sphere of light and happiness.
I made up my mind to call him night after night, as soon as I should awaken in the sphere of observation. For it is an awakening just as much as our awakening in the morning, but the body sleeps on.
And I succeeded. One night I was dreaming in the usual way in the demon-sphere and they played one, of their familiar dismal pranks. We were acting a farce, some friends of my youth and I, and the stage was a cemetery and all the actors had grinning skulls. Then, firmly regarding one of these acting apparitions, I said: “There is no death,” as though to resist this obtruding horror. The head grinned mockingly and, with a sarcastic expression, pointed to all the skulls and bones round about. But I repeated, now with fixed determination and in a loud voice: “There is no death!” and behold! the eyes of the being before me faded, the whole apparition vanished – and I felt it was by my will. Then I gained full consciousness, the complete remembrance of my day-life and waking sensibilities, and blithely and thoroughly conscious I rose into the sphere of knowledge and joy. Then hastily and animatedly I spoke to myself, and I felt my mouth, my breath, my whole body, the animæ corpus; and yet I knew that my day body lay sleeping and silent and did not stir. Hastily I spoke: “I am there! I am there! What is it that I wanted? I wanted to see my father. Oh yes! my father! I wanted to see my father!”
Then I saw a sunny, green landscape spread out before me, a little house, low and small. “He is inside,” said I. “Here I shall find him.” I ran through many rooms and did not see him, but I continued my search from room to room. And when I saw the last room empty too, I made an additional room. And behold! I saw him sitting there.
This time he looked exactly like my father as I had known him, only much younger than when he left me. He wore a dark blue suit, top boots and a felt hat. The expression on his face was mild, and his eyes shone clear and bright.
“Father!” said I; “Father!” and with a beseeching gesture I walked toward him. I heard him say: “Good day, Vico mio!” And it was his voice, even more than it was his face.
Then I gave him my hand and he took it. He tried to press my hand and it seemed to cost him physical exertion.
I said, “Have you forgiven me?”
It was a warm, glorious sensation; I saw that he tried his best and he looked at me mildly.
He murmured something, but I could not understand it or I have forgotten it. Thereupon, with the utmost effort to express myself clearly and with sincerest fervor, I asked: “Can you give me advice? I seek for the best. Tell me what I must do, counsel me!”
But he said nothing.
Then an old question arose in me, unexpectedly and without my having resolved anything about it:
“Father,” I said, “what is Christ?”
Then I heard him say:
“Ask the butterfly.”
And I understood that he meant the butterfly in the last dream with the blue decorated wings. I asked:
“Can you tell me nothing?”
Then he shook his head very gently and everything in my dream vanished; I saw only his head shaking “no” – and with that I awoke. The day was dawning, and I lay thinking over everything and impressing it on my memory.
I felt absolutely certain that I had spoken with him.
I went to sleep again and dreamed, as frequently happens after a dream of this kind, that I related my dream, but without knowing that I was sleeping.
That morning I was extraordinarily refreshed and happy. And the whole day the sound of his voice was in my ears, with the words: “Good day, Vico mio!” And repeatedly I tried to recall the exact tones.
I had this dream some time before the first appearance of Emmy, and had asked for advice, because at the time I was still in conflict with myself whether I should take Lucia for my wife.
XVII
“How is it that they wired you so late that your little friend had died, so many months after?” Lucia asked me, some days after we had left Lucerne.
“Because I, myself, had only then wired to inquire about her.”
Lucia looked at we silently and thoughtfully for a while, and then said with a kindly unsuspecting earnestness, full of delicate chastity:
“Oh, then I understand. Then she appeared to you in a vision, didn’t she?”
I nodded and Lucia questioned me no further.
She had remained a strict Catholic and had retained much of the lavish popular superstition of my country. She attached importance to amulets, to trinkets blessed by the Pope, to the offering of candies to saints.
Regarding dreams she held a creed, elaborated in every detail, the accuracy of which she continued to maintain, although I never heard from her a single striking proof. To dream of flowers, of water, of money, of blood – it all meant something, but it was always equally vaguely asserted, equally inaccurately observed, and with equally little foundation accounted proved. For me it was absolutely worthless and I carefully guarded against contradicting her in these things and making her a partner of my own experiences.
But it was strange and remarkable that a certain dream to which she herself attached no significance and whereof her dream-lore made no mention, always repeated itself in connection with a certain experience of mine in my night and day life.
Whenever another woman stepped across my path in life, threatening to endanger the soundness of my union with Lucia, she would dream of a large, wild horse that frightened her or bore down upon her. Sometimes it was white, sometimes brown, sometimes black, – there also would be two or three of them; they menaced and frightened her, but did her no harm. She always faithfully and unsuspectingly reported to me when she had again dreamt of horses, without having the least idea that for me this was a stern and covert warning.
For it never failed, whenever I had fallen into serious temptation – which, after the peaceful and secluded years at Como, was quite inevitable on our numerous journeys – she would very soon come to me with her innocent story that she had again been worried by the troublesome horses.
And as I know that not only she, but my mother too sometimes, as well as other women I have known, have been warned in this strange way, I would advise you, dear reader, to pay attention to this. It may have been a strange chance and coincidence; it may also be peculiarly proper to me and the persons associated with me, – but it may also have a more universal meaning, and no wonder, if we take into consideration the presumable slight coöperation of the men, that the women have not yet ascertained this meaning. But we should make reservations before sowing suspicion between the innocent!
After my first vision of Emmy I lived in a peculiar state of outward calm and inward happiness. To Lucia I was kind, tender and solicitous, but I did not feel myself her husband, nor could I approach her as such without a sense of guilt. At Como the temptations besetting my life as a youth had vanished. The close application to study, the simple, rural life, the absence of temptation, the pure, serene atmosphere of the little domestic circle – all this had given me support and kept me out of difficulties.
And when I travelled with Lucia the strange fact revealed itself that, mindful of Emmy’s love and her appearance to me, I charged myself with sin and baseness for what everyone considered just and lawful. The temptation against which I fought and to which, bitterly ashamed, I nevertheless repeatedly yielded, now no longer went out from hapless prostitutes, but from the beautiful and amiable woman whom I had made my wife. It would all have sounded very queer to other people, but once for all it was so, my spirit responded to life in its own original way and would not be forced. It was of no avail that I told myself how differently the world judged, and I was just as unhappy when I had yielded to Lucia’s charms as when I had succumbed to the intrigues of a strange woman. But nevertheless one as well as the other occurred, for the incongruous relations in my heart and life were not ordered and the wild lusts remained untamed. While all who knew me accounted me lucky on account of my marriage, I led for many long years a hard and tortured life. My love and devotion to my wife and children were forced and strained, and I grieved bitterly that so much beauty and loveliness did not attract my natural interest. My task was a giant task that often seemed too mighty for me, and what I attained was nothing unusual, nothing but what everyone expected as self-understood. I was called a good husband and father, but no one knew the enormous effort it cost me, and how far I still fell short, and no one would have believed me or showed me sympathetic understanding.
When I had succeeded in summoning my father in the night and thus knew that I possessed this power, the nights in which I penetrated to the clear dream-sphere became all the more important to me.
And when I had seen Emmy in the common dream-sphere, in the sphere of the dead, but without being myself clearly conscious, my first thought that morning was to call her as soon as the sphere of clear perception should open before me. And with great suspense I awaited such a night, and morning after morning was disappointed and vexed that this clarity had not come. For as I said before, sometimes this perception eludes me for months and the dreams are on the ordinary confused, insignificant order. Then all at once some inexplainable cause summons forth the good, happy and clear moments of perception three or four nights in succession.
But at last, after all, came the blessed night in which my project was completely realized.
It was after a most tiring and not very pleasant day. A long mountain excursion in the rain. I dreamed that I walked in the street among a crowd of people. Beside me walked a little friend of my youth. Suddenly it shot through my mind like a ray of light that I would call some one, I would summon Emmy. Hastily I said to my comrade: “I beg your pardon, but I must look for some one, Emmy Tenders!” I did indeed think meanwhile that I was giving publicity to something very intimate, but the matter was too important, I had to say the name. Then I ran through the crowd searching and calling: “Emmy! Emmy!” Meanwhile, I thought that I should be heard calling in my sleep, that Lucia would hear me. I passed by trees and verdure, observing everything sharply and distinctly. Busily absorbed in my quest I murmured to myself: “Yes! I see it distinctly – autumn sun on elm leaves – small green apples. I can remember their position, but I must have Emmy, – Emmy!”
Then I saw a closed door, and I pointed to it with my finger, saying: She is there! if I open this door I shall see her!
I opened the door and saw – a slaughter house. Pieces of meat, a floor streaming with blood, men slaughtering, a disgusting stench – horrible! a demon trick to hinder me.
Profound disappointment. Well-nigh despair. I sobbed convulsively, calling “Emmy!” Meanwhile, again the thought: “I shall find the marks of my tears on waking.”
I saw a piece of paper and wrote upon it with my finger dipped in blood: “I was here in my dream”; with a vague hope that this might serve as proof, one of the half-considered ideas that one sometimes has in these dreams.
Then, deeply grieved, I felt myself waking up. But I fell asleep again directly. And then I thought: “I shall go to her country,” and I ran hurriedly as though I knew the way. I considered meanwhile: “How shall I get there? She is in India. I don’t know the way and yet I am going there.”
Then I felt myself soar and I saw a sea foaming beneath me as in the wake of a big ship, and I saw the gulls flying around above it, preying upon the refuse.
After that a luxuriantly wooded mountain and on its slope a house. I hurriedly flew down and went into the house. I heard knocking and thought: “There she is.”
I saw a door on which it said: “Waiting room,” and it opened slowly. A figure emerged from it.
“Can it be she? She does not resemble her. And it so often happens that people are quite different in dreams. How can that give me assurance?” I came up closely. She had wound her thick blonde hair in braids around her head and upon it rested a wreath of myrtle and orange blossoms. I saw distinctly the small, shiny dark green leaves and the little reddish twigs – and I smelled the sweet fragrance of the orange blossoms. I looked at her and they were her eyes – very serious as though absorbed in her own deep thoughts.
Then I folded her in my arms and I knew positively that it was she and I called out passionately: “Are you there? How sweet of you that you came after all!” It was very happy – happier than any moment of my waking life has ever been.
I woke up, no longer sad, but very serious, and also, for the first time after such a dream, a trifle tired.
I did not find any marks of tears and I asked Lucia whether she had heard me cry or speak or making a noise in my sleep.
“No,” she said. “You were lying still and tranquilly sleeping, I believe. I was awake early. I again had such a disquieting dream about that white horse. It was a splendid creature with a heavy full mane, a long white tail and red glittering eyes. I stood close beside him and he would not let me pass. I was frightened to death, but when I kept quiet he did not harm me.”
XVIII
Very few people, you, dear reader, excepted, will find anything important or curious in these records. The lay philistine will consider them an idle play of the imagination for his amusement, and speedily forget them. The philistine scholar will smilingly utter a few words of authority, whereby he will consider the matter explained and settled. There is such a one, his book is lying before me, who pretends to have solved the entire mystery of dreams. Mind it well – the entire mystery. And then he pronounces a few hollow phrases, which as an “Open, sesame” should give admission to all the unspeakable wonders of this untrodden reality, saying: “the dream is a wish fulfilled.” Then upon this the man is contented and glad, considering that he has said something.
I cannot furnish you with positive proof, dear reader, that it was surely my beloved who appeared to me at night as my betrothed. Some of the facts could probably be accounted as proof that my nocturnal observations are not merely creations of my own imagination, but that they concern a world with which others also are in communion, and which has a peculiar nature. There was indeed a correspondence between the words heard and the things seen by me at night and that which, unknown to me, had occurred in the waking life. But I had no need of these proofs. The primal feeling of certainty is a feeling that one gains by experience. The communication of this feeling along the lines of reason is an illusion that never subsists, nor has subsisted. We communicate primal certainties to one another along intuitive and suggestive lines, not by proofs. Though my proofs were clear as crystal and firm as rock, the obstinate would easily reason them away; while only those who by repeated and repeated observation have gained complete assurance can also value the significance of the observations. For what I observed is like the tiny spark from the rubbed piece of amber, like the contraction of the muscles of the dead frog that Galvani observed – a small phenomenon that the unbelieving ridicules, but in which the wise sees the germ of new, never-guessed-at conceptions and deeds.
From that night when Emmy appeared to me, at my summons, as my bride, I led for many years a double life, in which the incidents of the day did not seem more important to me than the observations of the night. A successful reunion with Emmy in the joy sphere of the dream was to me the best and most joyous event, that I desired more and remembered with more grateful satisfaction, than the most fortunate incident of my daily life. The few solitary moments in the night, recurring only a limited number of times during the long year, and perhaps lasting but a few minutes, in force of impression and deep after-effects outweighed the many days crowded with events, so that now it seems to me as though the years had flown by and I can measure and define them better by the visions of the nights than by the events of the day.
Yet my life was not empty, not barren in deeds and experience; but it was the ordinary life that thousands lead and that has already left so many wise and sensitive men unsatisfied, because they could not penetrate the deeper meaning, and saw death and destruction so unavoidably threatening them at the end of their career.
In accordance with my father’s wishes, which my mother sanctioned, I became a diplomat and lived and worked in different countries, first as attaché and later as secretary of the legation. Outwardly my life was as prosperous as could be and all who knew me envied me, without therefore showing me ill will or seeking to harm me. I had a sweet, pretty wife who bore me four fair, healthy children, I had money enough for a life of luxury and plenty, and did my work with apparent devotion and success. Transferal was the cause of frequent travel, and I saw a large part of the civilized human world. We lived in sunny Madrid, fragrant with acacias and carnations, with its subtle dangerous atmosphere, its elegantly indolent culture, its desolate surroundings; – in restless Marseilles, full of crime and rabble, where we never felt safe; – in orderly, methodical, soberly bourgeois Berlin, where they strive so sagaciously and diligently for culture; – in blithe and beautiful Paris, where they still live on happily in the illusion that they are the leaders of civilization; – in the not less self-satisfied London, immutably grim in its sombreness, hardened in its dangerous luxury and misery, full of intellectual life, but without much sign of improvement, like a strong, prosperous, hardened villain; – in wanton St. Petersburg, with its extremely polished, yet withal ever equally barbarous luxury; – in vain, amusing Vienna, where all thought of the possibility of still higher culture has long ago been given up as insulting; – in the curiously grave and affected Washington, with its trim green lawns and white buildings of state in confectioner’s style, with its blasé air of aristocratic calm and state in the midst of the bustling, bourgeois, informal but intensely living American world; – finally in the little, neat, doll-like Hague, that is so difficult to consider as real, where the good Hollanders play at Metropolis and where even the diplomatic world acquires the well-nigh comic aspect of a very chic and well-cast amateur stage.
I could not have borne this existence calmly, without the stay of my nocturnal experiences, without the constant preoccupation with the miracle that again and again befell me, without the remembrance of how I had last seen and heard Emmy, without the looking forward to her return, and the considering of what I would do and say and what I should observe in her the next time.
I did not therefore neglect my daily work; on the contrary, I performed it with vigor and perseverance solely on that account. But how others could cheerfully persevere in it I could not understand – unless they were insignificant persons, wholly governed by the power of formal religion and conventional patriotism. And I must admit, too, that the most advanced and independent of my colleagues did not continue their task without bitter self-derision and a sort of melancholy epicureanism. Diplomacy may be carried on with fine forms and on a grand scale, yet it remains nothing but an exceedingly narrow-minded bickering for the greatest profit, for the largest morsel. Something remarkable lies in the fact that the diplomat does not fight directly for his own profit, but identifies himself with the Government he represents. But what man fights for a really personal profit and not for a fancied one? Thus the zeal, the enthusiasm, the satisfaction of the diplomat is usually the same as that of the player moving wooden figures about on a board, and finding his pleasure in the making and the disentangling of confusion. But an earnest man asks after all: what is the good of it all? Wherefore do I work and let so many others work for me? My body which I keep in condition with so much care shall wither, the royal house or the Government for which I fight and exert myself some day shall fall after all; and though I fought not for myself, nor even for my Government and people, but for a still higher ideal – humanity – will it not also die some time when the earth shall dry up and become uninhabitable?
These questions must be answered, for it is not true that it is man’s nature to go on working with courage and zeal without their being answered. No; if he now still goes on working without an answer, it is because he does not reflect. But it is truly man’s nature to reflect and thus he is still making his living by denying his nature. This is a contradiction doomed to disappear. And I witnessed with pity the endeavors of the so-called religious people, like my good wife Lucia, to escape the chill wind of the new knowledge by the fostering of a worn, patched and half-decayed Church system. Her cheerful acquiescence and placid contentment in the enervated, marrowless shadow of what was once, for a more childish generation, a solid joy, seemed pathetic to me. Faithfully she sought her daily share of consecration, edification and purification, that every human spirit needs as much as the body needs a bath. But it was a dead, nerveless consecration through sounds and impressions from which the living thought, the soul, had long vanished. How could the poetry of the Hebrews and the thoughts of the Middle Ages still touch her? Only the hollow tones of the declaiming priests and the outward magnificence of the churchly edifice brought something like a fleeting shadow of the true sense of the divine. And in the poetry or music which she could really and wholly feel, in the art of her age, in the thought and science of her age – the living, direct expression of God – in these she did not seek, because round about her no one realized that only in these consecration is found, and must be sought for.
But for me, that which had been indicated by the meditative of all the ages, in vague, and for the most part impotent, expression, began to acquire a new, wonderful character of reality. I had learned to speak, to hear, to see, to taste, to smell, to touch, to create things and beings, and to enter into relations with what seemed to me independent beings, without having the body – that which is positively doomed to destruction – take part. What generation after generation had repeated one after the other as empty sound, idle chimera, or suggestion, the existence of a world beyond the senses, had for me become actual experience. I knew now that I had another body, beside the ordinary one, an animæ corpus, with a proper world of perception; and this knowledge rested upon equally good foundations as every one’s knowledge concerning the existence of his ordinary body. Time and again I faced the undeniable wonder of another space, perceived by the selfsame I, from the same centre of observation, as the space by day.
What some sages had presumed and concluded by speculation – that what we call room and place is nothing but one of the infinitely numerous ways of perception of our being that neither taken up room nor occupies space, the ego that is neither here nor there – had become for me an ordinary fact, the knowledge of which influenced all my thought. That I, without stirring from my place, could arrive in a totally different world, in many worlds, all with a proper space, all with the same evidence of real existence, all full of life, full of sensations, fall of beauties and transports – this became for me a matter of simple experience. And no one only knowing it from hearsay can realize how different and how much more profound is the effect of actual experience.
In this conjunction the eternal error of the human phantasy in wishing to fly directly toward the perfect and complete revealed itself. All the defective work of the human imagination errs in wanting to make its creations too beautiful, in affording a soulless perfection, such as is manifested in human art by its decay after every period of bloom.
The insensible world is not full of pure loftiness and unmixed nobility. I do not constantly wander there in Elysian fields, absorbed in flowing conversations regarding important questions with spectres of noble stature and dignified bearing. As all reality, the reality of the beyond is unexpectedly fantastic, full of surprises and full of disillusions; but on the whole more stimulating and more beautiful than anything the imagination has pictured regarding it. And this is of supreme importance in the practice of our daily life – that the insensible world is in part our own creation, subject to our will, built up from the conclusions gathered in our day-life, with the faculties and powers which by practice and use we have in this same life made our own. To say for this reason that nothing new awaits us would be equal to the assertion that Beethoven had given nothing new to the world, because, after all, he only employed combinations of familiar sounds and tones. I again repeat – nothing in our actual day-life can equal the ecstasy of even a single awakening in the new sphere.
And who would now confront me with the assertion that then probably the dear being that appeared at my summons as my bride and made me supremely happy in her arms, was also my own creation – to him I can only reply as he himself would reply to the agnostic philosopher, if the latter asked him for proofs that the entire world of the senses, with his wife and children and the whole family included, were anything else than a product of his imagination.
Does it make much difference whether we give to one and the same thing, vehemently and intensely felt, the name of fancy or the name of reality? – and does anyone know a reliable mark of distinction between the two? Everything is the product of imagination, the sun and the stars are also works of God’s imagination. But there is weak and strong, enervated and potently creative imagination; and very subtle is the boundary line between the idle thought image and the created one, endowed with personal being and reality.
How absurd, in the light of my experience, now seemed to me the common idea of the so-called believers – as though the earthly life with all its joys and its misery would break off all at once with death and suddenly, without transition, change into a bliss the purer, the more miserable had been the earthly existence.
All that we can expect is directly connected with what we attained here. Here on earth, imperceptibly and continuously, we weave our future, not by a right to reward from on high, as compensation for sorrow and disaster, accounted and awarded irrespective of any action on our part, but by personal activity, personal ability, personal achievement of the joy and ecstasy we deem the most desirable.
Therefore the closer knowledge and study of the immaterial reality does not lead away from the earthly life and coöperation with all striving humanity, as the fanatics and ascetics in the misconception of their idle and defective phantasy have believed and taught.
No, the blessedness that we all desire and can attain at will, must already be sought for here in our mortal life, in this earthly sphere. For only from the transient can the less transitory be compiled.
I now knew that my immaterial being with the repose or decease of the waking body, also lost the heaviness and the aches, the melancholy and dejection proceeding from the mortal, defective nature of this body: but I also knew that its joys and transports are dependent upon the happiness obtained by the day body through an active, wise life brought into harmony with the development of all mankind.
The more beautiful my days, the more crowded with effective labor my life, the gladder and serener my soul – the loftier also are the exaltations and transports of my nights, the more glorious the scenes I behold, the more beneficent the moods and the influences I undergo.
True, often a dream of most sublime splendor comes to brighten a time of the very deepest dejection; but only when this earthly affliction in the necessary consequence of the struggle for a higher and more common happiness, when I am after all inwardly hopeful and know that I am on the right road.
But, poverty, want, misery, affliction and loneliness are not good guides toward a better life, and smothered desires not good travelling companions.
The will for happiness may indeed burn so brightly in some of us that its flame shoots up all the higher through all the accumulated sorrow; but the spark of joy must remain visibly glowing, and to keep the sacred lamp of gladness burning is the primal duty of every human being.
It is true that man has often shown that he could not stand luxury and, like a child, broke out into folly when abundance came after a long period of want. But wealth is the only nurturing ground for the bloom of beauty, whereto in our striving for a higher life, we feel ourselves called.
Only in the land of abundance can we play the game of beauty which is our sole destination and which unites our nature to God’s nature. And if we cannot stand abundance we must learn to accustom ourselves to it.
He who created us leads us by the line of joy, another link between Him and us does not exist. Though the way lead through dismal gloom, the luring voice of happiness continues to go before us. That is our will and God’s will, disagreement is but misunderstanding.
Forgive me, dear reader, if I join the conclusions to the facts. I know that among them there are many confirmations of ancient, long-known truths. But you shall see that the very simplest and most well-known facts must be repeated to men over and over again, because they lack the courage and originality to keep their hold on them.
XIX
If so far you have believed and understood me, dear reader, it cannot fail but you will demand more of me than I can give. You will not demand further proofs, but revelations: communications from beings of another sphere, distinct, well-formulated communications concerning the beyond, concerning the meaning of our life, concerning the soul, concerning Christ, concerning God. Everyone desires these, not considering that for a distinct communication two factors are always required – namely, a good communicator and a good understander; just as air and fuel are required to start a flame.
I myself, as everyone would have, also sought for revelation, and many a time instead of calling Emmy I committed the folly of calling for Christ, or even worse, for God.
In the clear moments of observation of the night one can only effectually carry through one thing, there is no time for more; and it would happen that throughout the entire vision I would pray passionately, not thinking of Emmy, thanking God for his favors and beseeching him for enlightenment, and in the same way Christ. I could never do it by day with so much earnestness, conviction and eloquence. In the daytime I am not eloquent, but bashful and embarrassed, even when alone. I cannot pray by day for fear of feeling ridiculous, for gêne. But at night this gêne is gone and I abandon myself to prayer with a true passion, sometimes – even as all passions in the immaterial life – going beyond my control. At times my devout passion during prayer, even at the very moment, seems exaggerated and affected to me, but I am unable to restrain it.
But now the remarkable fact about it is that I never, absolutely never, have perceived anything in my visions that at my passionate and ardent invocation appeared as a divine image, as an angel or as Christ. Human beings, dead or living, came almost always when at all strongly urged; Emmy I saw many times in various shapes and circumstances. But at my invocations and prayers to these higher beings, whose existence man has always had to conclude from the signs of the world perceptible to the senses or from inner consciousness, I have never seen anything but what we call natural beauties – sunlight; blue heavens; flaming evening skies; radiant horizons, brightening or clouding with promising or warning significance.
And this where the history of human civilization is replete with stories of visions of angels, of Mary, and of Christ. We may explain this as we like, yet it proves that the simple wish, the invocation, the self-suggestion is not enough to create a visionary image. The demons of the Middle Ages I have seen, but not their angels, their Marys, their Jesus, their God the Father, while yet I often longed for it as a child and prayed for it as a man, until I was old and wise enough to understand that I had to be glad of their non-appearance, because the apparition of an old, bearded king as God, of a white-robed, long-haired man as Jesus, of a winged man as an angel, would simply have been nothing but fancied images, spectral deception or impotent human phantasy.
Does not our simplest reason tell us that all life that is more than human life, all higher beings, whether superman, or Christ, or God, can have no form perceptible to man with his five senses? Do not all endeavors of art and imagination to create something above man, remain limited to a perfected humanity? Has not the sole conception of a superhuman being always been the impossible one of a man with wings? Yet we know that there is a higher being, higher life with more exalted beauties; but clear reflection must also teach us that its form remains imperceptible and unimaginable as long as our perceptive faculty and our knowledge have not, in a manner at present quite inconceivable, increased in a higher sphere, and that therefore all their awarded shapes, though formed by Dantesque phantasy, must be erroneous.
Sometimes, indeed, I saw worlds and sad beings that, much as they resembled the familiar and human, seemed to me to belong to a wholly different sphere. One night I dreamed of the sea, but it changed to something else, – a park, a landscape peopled with many creatures. I remember that the ground was moving like ocean waves, but magnificently blue and speckled with intensely yellow spots. There were also bushes and a multitude of happy, festive, richly dressed human beings. They were not demons, that I felt, but a species of men – happy, luxuriously living men.
Then I remembered that I was on another planet, and though my consciousness was not yet quite clear, still I began to pay close attention. Thus I remember that I gazed at the sky and seeing the blue color immediately drew the conclusion: “so there is oxygen in this atmosphere too,” because it is oxygen that gives the blue color to our atmosphere. I went on and on and the landscape changed repeatedly. The inhabitants were extremely sympathetic and kindly disposed toward me. Of language or words I have no remembrance, but there was a cordial understanding. Then I saw trees and hills or something resembling them, and I fell into raptures. “0 my earth!” I cried, “it resembles my earth!” and I wept with emotion, because it reminded me of my beloved earth. Then I noticed that everything differed somewhat from earthly things and yet resembled them. “Just as America resembles Europe and yet differs from it,” I thought in my dream.
Upon this I came into a barren and uninhabited part and I saw a perspective of mountains, a mountain chain rising out of the sea, luminous and steep, but so affecting and terrible to behold that it oppressed me. The perspective stretched out farther and farther – a dizzy extent, and all the way my eyes travelled along the ridge of faint-rose-colored rocks. Below me, at the left, was a mighty abyss, also, a distant mountain prospect. I saw everything with peculiar sharpness and distinctness. My mind was clear at the time and I was fully conscious – the terrific depth made me dizzy.
Thereupon I saw two strange beings in the wilderness. Human beings also – not demons. One was slate-colored like clay, the other brownish red like baked earth. They were hard at work – and the thought crossed my mind whether these were perchance the proletarians, who in this land supported the luxurious people I had just now seen. They were busy with a fire and I asked them something, about food or wood I believe. Laughingly they explained: “That is scarce here.” Then I pointed back toward the land where I had left the people living in affluence:
“Yet it is not scarce there.” Thereupon they laughed, feigning indifference, and intimated, how I no longer remember, that they were not envious of this, that these things were not essential, that it should be so. I awoke pondering the meaning of this dream, which I did not comprehend, and even now would not dare to explain entirely.
All that the perception during sleep teaches us, demands exactly as much scientific thought and comparison, critical analysis and selection, and building up into fixed, universal and lasting truth, as do all our waking perceptions. There can be no other true revelation than that of creative art and of science, established by all and for all. What would a personal revelation signify, that depended on the receptivity of a single individual, and could be affirmed in a few words and, by suggestion, forced upon the unreceptive? Would it not be as though the Divinity entrusted to the apostle the work of convincing thousands, where he himself had found only one – the apostle – susceptible to persuasion? Can such a revelation, spread by inculcation and pressure, by authority and servility, be anything else than passing fancy, and fleeting deception?
Therefore the study of the immaterial did not draw me away from the world of day, but caused me to work in it with all the more zeal and satisfaction, because I learned to look upon this world as our real field of labor, where the riches that shall count on a higher plane of vision are prepared.
Dreams only give us slight hints; the work must be done in this life.
But my dreams also showed me that solitude and seclusion could never lead to the highest joy and purest bliss. Unspeakably happy as were the moments of meeting with my dream bride, they were surpassed by those in which a universal joy, a great and transcendent enthusiasm simultaneously filling many beings – human happy beings – carried along myself and my beloved in a wave of radiant festive bliss.
I have had them often, such dreams, and they were the most beautiful of all. I know not whether they were the proclaimers of future or the dawning of already existing reality – but I would see spectacles of countless enthusiastic multitudes, processions of festive people streaming together and marching in solemn rhythm, with jubilation and sound of clarion. And we two, my beloved and I, were a part thereof, we belonged to it; and a feeling of festiveness and of unlimited confidence toward all possessed us, lifting us up into a bright and joyous mood, and yet not detracting from our mutual affection, but transfiguring and strengthening it.
Thereby – as through repeated experience I learned to understand them – truths were pointed out to me in a peculiar symbolical way. Thus I once saw in my dream many people building a large house and laying out a path, and they did it with marvellous alacrity. And there was no one to command them, to give directions, or point out anything.
The incredible swiftness with which the work advanced was due to the fact that each one of the builders, down to the very least, knew and comprehended the entire work and therefore did not need the slightest direction.
I understood these hints better and better, and more and more clearly comprehended what hindered man on his upward path – the dawning rays of pure universal blessedness shone for me ever more brightly from out the chaos of our confused personal and social life. But all the more tormentingly I felt my impotence to bring about an effectual reform.
XX
Ah, what could I do, imprisoned as I was in the cage of my honorable position, my definitely-prescribed sphere of action, my distinguished connections, my luxurious domestic establishment, my reputation and my money? The better I saw what society lacked for leading man toward the highest development, the more I felt myself paralyzed when I wished to contribute something toward his deliverance.
I felt as does the sailor on board a ship in distress who sees the safe waters and rescue close at hand – he alone, of all the others – but he has no authority, he knows that they would not believe him, discipline prevents him from speaking. Then it is harder for him to do his duty than for the others who plod on blindly, obedient to their superiors, without seeing deliverance.
I saw how men suffered misery through gigantic misunderstandings, which like great clouds of mist enveloped and confused the nations. I saw them blundering with their tongue and their words as children who have their first paint box and get as much color smeared over their dresses, hands and faces as on the paper. And on this mess-work they build their treaties, with this mess-work they enact laws, and thus messing, blundering and squandering they prepare their food, their clothing and their habitation.
From words wrongly understood and wrongly employed arose the bloody frenzy of revolutions, the grim party-rage, the useless slaughtering and disputing and the fatal dissipation of thinking and working powers. In their blind faith in reason and the True Word men destroyed their own and each other’s joy and happiness, not realizing that they all wanted one and the same thing, for which they employed many different terms.
I saw how they all acted from the mighty impulse of the herd-instinct, the group-sense, the sacred gift of Christ, warrant of their power and safety – but at the same time how they all thought they acted from personal, independent judgment and reasonable conviction, to their own miserable confusion and wretchedness.
I saw the grouping into rich and poor, because the wholesome craving for luxury and abundance is corrupted and weakened through neglect of the tie of love, so that the individual thinks that he alone can be luxurious and happy in a world of wretches, and thus no one attains blessedness. And this once more: – because there are no two people who with the same word know that they mean the same thing.
And I saw the demagogues taking advantage of our good instincts, of the craving for luxury, of the group-sense, to start up fatal currents through the influence of hollow catchwords and ridiculous over-estimation of self. As though the poor who had known nothing but poverty and envy would be better proof against luxury than the rich; as though self-insight and self-restriction were possible without culture; as though the perfect maturity of every individual, which demands the very highest organization and efficiency, and which in name is called the Christian ideal, could be attained all at once, without practice, without development, without patient discipline.
All this I saw, and what could I do? My sphere of activity bound me to fixed duties and to my superiors. I worked in a definite group-confederacy, the political world of diplomats, and to go beyond this meant immediate expulsion and ostracism.
Well, yes, in the clubs and “circles” people speak more freely. There one sometimes hears the entire diplomatic service ridiculed with cynical sarcasm by those of inferior rank, and the superiors listen smilingly, as though regretting that their higher dignity forbade them this freedom of speech. In these circles many a sharp word would sometimes escape me too, in regard to the structure of national prosperity, still everywhere based upon the want of the weaker, and also regarding the mighty ones on earth with whom I associated, and who were yet so often embarrassed and foolish when obliged to say something concerning the highest human gifts – wisdom, art and beauty. And from some vague confusion of thought, characteristic of the chaos of their ideas, I was known there as “the red duke,” or sometimes too as “the Christian diplomat.”
But nothing could weaken my conviction that the chaos is busy arranging itself, at first blindly, with a cruel indifference to suffering, driven by an inscrutable impulse – but by degrees with clearer consciousness, more insight, more skill, in proportion as higher wisdom gradually pairs itself with wider active power.
It was plain to me that if there ever was a time in human history in which men were awaiting a hero, a Messiah, a redeemer, it is ours. No opinion is more foolish than the one that in our age there would be no room for a prophet. But he must not be a moralist preaching repentance, not a speculative builder of systems, not a man of lamentations and warnings, but a poet in very deed.
Riper than was the French revolution for the advent of an organizing and suggestively powerful general and ruler like Napoleon, is our time for the advent of the wise and high-minded administrator, who will make use of the group-confederacy, the herd-spirit, so much stronger and more consolidated to-day than ever before.
I also knew what the qualities and talents of this hero should be. The time of the great generals is past; the brute power of force is no longer needed for establishing, only for preserving. The commercial alliance covers the entire world course, and tolerates war only as a secondary aid. The honor of the soldier becomes that of the police, the peace preserver.
But the qualities of the general, the ability for organizing, for ruling and for the bearing of responsibility, these remain equally necessary.
The Messiah of our time must be the hero-organizer who brings order into the confused operations and the half-conscious action of our society. And as in the time of the generals, it was only the poet-generals, the great dreamers of a world-realm, such as Alexander, Cæsar and Napoleon, who shone out through all the ages as heroes and geniuses, so in our time, it will be the poet organizer, the dreamer of a world fellowship, who will attain still greater heroism, and much more lasting honor.
The time of eloquence is also past. The elusive phrases of oratorical logic only blind young nations, and even America is outgrowing the authority of the orator who is solely an orator.
But the time of the drama and of music is not past, and he who knows how to handle these mighty suggestive expedients can turn the course of humanity. The herd will follow him though he lead them into the wilderness or the desert. Wagner and Ibsen have proved it.
But some day, and probably soon, it will come to pass that the hero of the new times, the poet organizer, will join hands with the one suggestively mighty through music and drama, or perchance that these rare powers shall be united in one man.
And only then shall the herd be led into green pastures and shall be satisfied and shall see the day of maturity dawning.
I say it, I, old hermit among the philistines, and my peace rests upon this knowledge. I had not the gift for ruling, for organizing, for leading. I was not eloquent. I had not the power of music or drama. I could not attempt to be this hero, this “Sotèr” of mankind, for I knew what was required of him. But I knew and still know that he shall be born with the infallible certainty with which statistics foretell the number of geniuses and defectives, the number of those above and below the normal. His birth is approaching, and speedily moreover, as surely as the birth of a majority of sons after a man-slaughtering war. For the race has need of him, Christ requires him.
And if I myself cannot be he, still I can be his John the Baptist, testifying of him, happy and enthusiastic in my solitude, in this desert of caddishness and provincialism.
XXI
I had been married seventeen years and my youngest child was eight years old when I returned to this same Holland, where so many strands of my rope of destiny are fastened. Little had changed in my life. Order and peace reigned in my family, prosperity in the sphere of my activities. Lucia seemed wholly satisfied and ruled her household with quiet devotion. My children were fair and well brought up. I felt my growing attachment to them and to their mother, as every creature is attached to the creatures and the things that have long been its daily companions – an affection from symbiosis, I might call it. Yet with my inmost being I remained a stranger to them, and my affection for them retained its forced quality. An ever-growing discontent was gathering in me. The older I grew, the nearer I saw the time approaching when age would make me powerless, the more intense became the strain. I felt as though I should die without really having lived. I did not fear death, but to be doomed to die without having revealed my true life, this was a prospect quite unbearable to me.
I lived on, strengthened only by my dream nights, but it seemed as though they were driving and spurring me on to something more – to an act, to an outbreak. They became rarer and I encountered greater difficulties in attaining the light and in seeing Emmy in my dreams. Often it was but a desperate struggle to force my way through chambers, garrets, and corridors. I could no longer see the unobstructed blue sky, I could no longer attain the ecstasy of joy so greatly desired, I could no longer pray in earnest, the voice of my dream-body grew husky and weak, sometimes when I called Emmy, it sounded as though I spoke in the tones of a dying man.
Moreover my temptations became stronger. As soon as the flame of life burns more dimly, the demons regain their influence and their wanton tricks are more successful. Lucia’s maternal instincts were satisfied, and her allurement, which had always seemed the same as seduction to me, lost its power and was most easily evaded. But the old tormenting life in the big cities began anew, not easier but harder to bear with the advancing years, for the shame and the self-contempt are greater; and the contrast between what one appears to be before the world, and what one knows oneself to be, becomes more painful the older one grows.
And the while I knew that I harbored thoughts and intentions and even planned deeds for which everyone, and above all, Lucia and my children, considered me too good, I at the same time felt something like contempt for their complacence, their content; I felt angry at this careless, happy household, in this great, imperfect world, full of misery, ugliness, error and confusion, this open wound from which it behooves each of us to suffer until it is healed.
The great love that burned in me, the great love for Christ, led me to what most people would call godless ingratitude. I cursed my prosperity and only with difficulty bore my apparent wedded happiness. I felt as does the soldier, who is left behind at the warm, comfortable hearth while the army to the strains of music marches out to take the field.
The first thing I did in Holland was to buy a little sail yacht. It was anchored at Amsterdam, as from there I could sail on the Zuiderzee. One day I had made an engagement with a colleague from the Austrian legation, a clever, strong, young Hungarian to sail to E——, the little town, then still unknown to me, where I now write these pages.
In those days I was passing through the gloomiest period of my life, I was nauseated with all the sweetness around me, the oppressive semblance of happiness suffocated and palled on me. I saw absolutely no deliverance, not even an accident that might threaten to change the course of my life – new abilities I should surely never acquire, nothing seemed in view that could bring about a change in my unreal existence. I was indeed willing humbly to submit if I must – but there was something that incited and disturbed me, as though submission was the very greatest sin.
Wanton suicide before I was brought to the last extremity filled me with aversion and disgust. But the perils of my sailing expeditions had again acquired for me their former attraction, as in the days when I sailed the North Sea with my father. To die the death of Shelley, my greatest-bard, is an honor I had desired from boyhood, and I thought: If after all it must be, then why not now, before I sink still deeper?
The day before our expedition I was deeply depressed. The wind was blowing strongly, but it was a summer day and my companion thought as little as I did of postponing our undertaking.
When I fell asleep that night, I knew that I was falling asleep and I retained perfect consciousness. In wondrous transition I suddenly rose from the deepest dejection to the light, free, joyous, soaring life of the dream. “Thank heaven!” I thought; “let the body sleep now, I rest, and really I am not at all tired now. I can sing and move about, fly and soar with thorough perceptive enjoyment.” Soon after I was out of doors in a vast wooded landscape under a sunny blue sky. For a long time the dream world had not been so beautiful. I was enchanted and grateful and soared upward. I met a bird, and talking aloud to myself all the time, I said that I not only wanted perceptive enjoyment but a being to understand me – spiritual and mental communion.
I saw a white bull – the animal which in ordinary dreams most alarmed me – the most feared dream-animal; but I felt no fear and soared high above him over a sea; there was no danger.
Then I called my beloved, just as always. But before I myself knew it I had called not “Emmy,” but “Elsie,” and this same mistake I repeated, without noticing my error. From out a dim valley I saw a maiden approaching, younger and smaller than Emmy, with smooth blonde hair. But I went to meet her nevertheless as though it were Emmy, and I walked and talked with her. I talked Dutch, which I had pretty well mastered by that time.
Then the maiden pointed to a dark, threatening thunder cloud which was slowly drawing up over the blue sky. This was a symbol of disaster. But I was proud and happy and not afraid and wanted to fold her in my arms. But she was gone; the perfect clarity of my thoughts declined, but not my sense of happiness. The dream then attained a symbolical significance, as often happens. I saw a long line of human beings in bondage, like a procession of slaves, and among them many priests. And I said things that I knew would cost others their life, heresies about the evil brought about by false religion, and I saw the poor creatures growing pale with fright and the priests pale with anger, but I soared out above them, and their hatred was powerless. Then I saw a large building, a most peculiarly beautiful and impressive temple, with mighty pillars of gray stone and carpeted with green moss. There none might enter without permission of the priests. But I soared far out above them, entering it from above by the windows. And everyone saw me and was astonished, and there was a sort of silent recognition that I was the only one that could do this, and the priests tried to deny the fact and even to seize me. But I laughed at them, and when they wanted to touch me I paralyzed them with a gesture.
And there was no palsied pride or hatred herein, but a calm self-consciousness of freedom, personal authority and triumph – a good and beautiful emotion.
When I awoke I was surprised that I had talked Dutch with Emmy. And I doubted whether it had indeed been she, although the face was like hers and I had indeed seen her in such youthful form before.
The following day we sailed with a stiff sou’-wester toward my little city, which I was then to see for the first time. From time to time there were rain showers, mist, with a rough and rising sea. My companion and I had donned our yellow oilskins and we had our hands full to keep the frail little craft in the right course. The sea was deserted, the fisherman had taken refuge in the harbors. When we saw the harbor of E—— before us and the little city veiled in gray mist, the waves were dashing over the rear of the boat and the little yacht was sinking her nose deep into the billows. We had to keep up bailing her busily, and with mute suspense we gazed toward the pier for which we were directly heading, expecting every minute to see the boat fill with water or the rigging break. We could distinguish the people on the stone pier which ran out into the sea. A crowd had gathered and stood watching us with mute interest, anxious to see whether we should make the landing safely. I was unusually calm and happy. I would have drowned with perfect composure, but I knew that this time it was not yet to be.
The black eyes of the Hungarian sparkled with pleasure and pride when at last, by dint of skilful man?uvring, with furled sail we ran safely through the narrow entrance of the port. He shouted in his excited way, and the sober Hollanders, sent up a little answering cheer.
Then as we glided along past the line of people who stood thronging the stone quay, amid the stupid indifferent or coolly critical boys’ faces and the faces of the fishermen, rough and weather-beaten as though carved out of wood, I caught sight of a pair of eyes full of intense interest and attention, that seemed to light up gladly as with relief, in a little face still pale from suspense or anxiety. Amid the men stood a young woman, bareheaded, the wet, blonde hair blowing about her cheeks. She had thrown a dark gray shawl around her as though she had run from the house just as she was to watch for us. She looked straight at me with an expression of concern and gladness.
I nodded to her, as every Italian, seeing a sweet woman manifesting concern in his danger which has aroused the general attention, would do. I nodded gaily and waved to her as though to thank her for her sympathy. She just gave a little smile and nodded back, not blushing, nor embarrassed or prudish – but grave and confiding as though she had expected it.
At the exchange of this greeting and these glances I had a curious sensation. It was as if I had forgotten myself for a moment and did not recognize myself, and as if everything I saw did not fit in the life of the day. I thought of my dream and without yet consciously drawing any inferences or comparisons, I for a moment was entirely gone from the ordinary waking world and in the land of dreams again.
“Hallo! Muralto – the boat hook!” my Hungarian called out.
With a shock I came back to earth, and it seemed as if I had been off a great way and as if everything I saw had been familiar to me, as though I saw it again after a long absence.
Before I came back to my senses sufficiently to hand over the boat hook, my eyes once more sought those of the young woman. But she had vanished from the quay. I only just caught sight of the slender figure in the gray shawl as she crossed the little square of the port. She hurried along with a glad, light step as though she had come solely for us and now went home, calm and well satisfied.
“What’s the matter? What ails you, Muralto? Do you see anything particular – or anyone?”
“Did you see the young woman standing on the quay?” I asked.
“No!” said the Hungarian, “I didn’t remark her. I knew of course that there were pretty girls here, but not that you knew them.”
“I know no one here. I’m here for the first time,” said I curtly, abstractedly.
We went to the hotel and dried and warmed ourselves and ordered the dinner. I looked at everything that, despite the rain, was to be seen of the little town, later so dear to me, – the pretty gables, the narrow little streets, glistening with water, the sombre elms creaking and groaning in the storm, the yellow raging sea. I also saw the house, in which I now live, and thought it a pretty, dignified little structure with its free-stone gable, and its tall windows.
After that we regaled ourselves with food and drink, and my companion said that after all I must surely have seen some good acquaintance of mine, some little friend or other – for I was so quiet, so abstracted and yet so merry.
That night I slept without dreams of any significance. But sleep itself had a character of gently elevating joy, and the morning found me without a semblance of the melancholy that so long had possessed me.
The weather had cleared, the wind gone down, the sky was blue. We decided to sail back early.
As we were leaving the hotel and stopping a moment in the vestibule, with the blue and white tiled marble flooring and the brown wooden ceiling, the young woman, who yesterday had stood upon the quay, came from the out-building and, running past us, went into the upper chamber. Again she looked me straight in the eyes and nodded cordially. I was even more confounded than the day before. But nevertheless I had time to remark that she was very graceful and that she had fine and noble features and long, aristocratic hands. Her eyes were bright and had the clear lustre that I had seen in only one pair of eyes, and an expression as though, together with me, they knew innumerable, unutterable secrets.
My Hungarian comrade now again saw my agitation and, moreover, the cause of it.
“Oh! was it she that you saw yesterday?” he cried out in French when the girl had passed. “Then I comprehend your dumbfoundedness.”
“Do you know her?” I asked.
“Certainly, she is one of the sights of the town. All the strangers know her.”
“Is this her home?”
“Of course! and not to the loss of the hotel-keeper. She’s his daughter or his adopted daughter. But not interesting to me, because notoriously unapproachable.”
“What’s her name?”
“Elsie – Elsie van Vianen, or Elsje as they say here.”
On our prosperous homeward voyage over the sunny sea I was even more quiet and even merrier than the night before.
XXII
As soon as I could make myself free for a day I went out sailing again. I now knew the way and the water and took no one with me this time. At daybreak I left The Hague and was beyond the locks before eight o’clock. I had not mentioned my encounter to Lucia, but nevertheless I felt none of that secret sense of guilt of a married man, who feels himself charmed by a strange woman.
To-day it was a warm summer’s day with a light eastern breeze blowing. The great yellow sheet of water looked as peaceful and friendly as it had appeared wild and wicked the time before. The little waves sparkled in the sun and with sweetly soothing murmurings splashed against the little boat. The shores with their steeples and windmills lay rosy and placid round about me in perfect dream splendor. I was six hours on my way instead of three, as before, and they were hours full of light and sunny bliss. My little city lay as sweetly pensive in the bright glow of sunlight as a drifting isle of the blessed. The round, leafy, blue-gray crowns of the trees with the little belfry peaking out above them, appeared as if tranquilly floating above the sparkling silvery sheet of water –
“Du bist Orplid, mein Land!
Das ferne leuchtet -“
I sang. I smiled at the contrast between the meaningless and trivial life of the people, who presumably lived there, and the wondrous magic glory it all assumed through the power of my imagination. I meditated on the land Orplid – the youthful phantasy of Möricke – to which with a few measured words he was able to lend a deep, mysterious, glowing splendor, which has filled thousands, like myself, with a yearningly passionate thrill of beauty, yes, with a real longing. Is not the dreamed Orplid that for so many shines afar, more real than all the lands that waking we behold?
When I landed there was hardly anyone on the quay; the fisherman sat caulking his boat, a few boys were fishing in the dark green waters of the harbor – everything exactly as I can still see it to-day – my future dwelling-house already looked at me with familiar friendliness from out its cool, dark window-eyes; the doves cooed in the softly rustling elms; it smelled of pitch and tar and of the inevitable Dutch peat-smoke, which rose from the stove pipes of the fishing smacks lying in the harbor, where the fishermen’s wives were cooking the dinner.
I went straight ahead toward my goal as though I were already a loved and longingly expected lover, smiling and myself wondering at my assurance. I went past the little rope shops, where the door-bell sounded loudly through the empty street when a solitary visitor in Sunday attire stepped out of the shop, past the barber shop with the brightly polished brass basins, past the few stately mansions with ancient stone gables representing “Fortune” or “Love,” where the daughters of the house, from dark side chambers peeped out, from behind the inevitable Clivia Hower-pot, at the rarely passing stranger, on to the hotel “de Toelast.”
I have, indeed, as I have already with shame confessed to you, been out a couple of times on gallant adventure, but never with such point-blank, unabashed directness as on this summer’s day in my beloved little Dutch city. I also felt none, absolutely none, of the shyness, the conscientious scruples, the nervousness that usually attend the gallant adventures of a married man. I felt like a schoolboy going to claim a prize after a successful examination. My heart only beat a trifle faster with glad expectation – perhaps too with a little fear at the thought of the type that would present itself before my eyes as the father.
I asked directly for the hotel keeper. At my first visit he had not made his appearance. From the out-house, after a long wait, a big lazy Dutch man came shuffling on in a very slovenly and ill-fitting gray suit, a black silk cap, a soiled shirt in place of the missing collar and tie, an open vest full of cigar ashes, a cigar in a paper holder in his mouth, and worn, flowered, green slippers on his feet. When after some little conflict with myself I finally looked into his face, I saw a flushed, full-moon countenance, clean-shaven except for a drooping