The Bride of Dreams

by Frederik van Eeden

The seceder who is not able to change the ideas of the group and to make the herd follow, is annihilated and deserves annihilation. In the human economy he is only harmful and his existence is unwarranted.

The gentleman on the contrary has a pre-eminently useful and important function. He is that member of the group who without separating from the union retains most of the original element. He combines the highest possible originality with the strictest subordination to the group nature, which only very few exceptional natures can defy with impunity. He changes nothing, but he inclines toward the original, thus making the entire herd more adaptable to change, while be lacks the ever-dangerous tendency of the originals to break loose, and keeps alive in the herd the lofty, indispensable virtue of respecting and upholding the sacredness of the union.

The more the group ideas diverge from the elemental ideas of human nature, the rarer the type of "gentleman" becomes in the group. And so my little brother Shaw's lament that the true English gentleman has become extinct is comprehensible, as in the entire tremendous herd of the nations of West-European or Anglo-Saxon civilization, ideas are current which every original immediately recognizes as conflicting with the nature of humanity, as hostile to Christ.

The term "un-Christian" is with just consistency applied to them. Un-Christian means the enriching oneself at the cost of others, the enriching oneself by means of craft, the enriching oneself without bound or measure. In many groups of ancient times these things were not lawful. But the great herd of the nations calling themselves Christian, include these so unmistakably un-Christian actions among the lawful, even honorable and generally admitted. And this moreover in the very worst form. It is one of the group-ideas of the great herd, that without oneself doing any work, one may enrich oneself unrestrictedly, by means of craft, at the expense of the very poorest. Only the unprecedented magnitude of the herd and its unparalleled firm coherence made so great a deviation from Primal Reason conceivable and possible.

The type of "gentleman" has changed, however, and grown rarer in this process. It is well-nigh impossible to preserve one's originality without separating from the union of the group, or without, as the socialists and anarchists, forming new groups that stand hostile to the great herd. The respecting of group-ideas and at the same time preserving one's original human feelings, demands a forcing and straining of truth that only few sagacious and honest people succeed in.

Judge Elkinson still represented the fast disappearing type of gentleman, and I knew that for him this was possible through an extraordinary suppleness of mind, fineness of tact and feeling, and a philosophic broadness of view.

Honest in the strict sense of the word, with naïve uprightness - that he could not be any more than any other faithful member of the herd, with some astuteness. But he was at least capable of giving everyone the impression that he always desired to be honest. He forgave himself the necessary distortion demanded by the group union, as the humane physician does not charge himself with the lies he tells for the good of his patients. He also comprehended the relativeness of words, the vagueness of conceptions, the faultiness of all communion, but was nevertheless not so broad-minded that he found extenuating circumstances everywhere and for everyone. His great power lay in his demand for fixedness of opinion. Growth and development were thereby excluded, but he sacrificed these, for the sake of the support so necessary to the herd, that positiveness and regularity afford.

One could depend on him absolutely; he was called "a man of character" and thereby exercised the most beneficial influence at the cost of personal development, actuated as it were by unconscious love, by a preservative instinct for the masses. His moral code was as broad as the group-ideas allowed, but beyond that point - immutable. He maintained it with the same sacred respect which as judge he demanded for the law, though his philosophic reason told him that neither could by any means exclude injustice. He called a rogue a rogue, though he realized that complete comprehension means complete forgiveness; he considered an anarchist an enemy to mankind, a harmful monster, even though he had to admit that the anarchistic criticism of society was well founded.

If the group-ideas and the group-union of those calling themselves socialists, had not been so wretchedly vague, confused and based on pseudo-science and hollow rhetoric, he would perhaps have joined that brotherhood. For he had the full measure of American courage and resolution. And he would have represented the "gentleman" in that confederacy just as well as in the old union. But, as every "gentleman," he had the intuitive dislike of bad company, the natural and wholesome aristocracy that makes one shun a group if it is represented by inferior people. And in the socialist herd he saw nothing much better than uncultured followers driven by fanatic leaders, a very sorry realization of the Originals who had brought about the movement. Moreover the union of this group was so weak, so entirely based upon the negative, so badly formulated, that it was impossible for him to transfer to it his natural respect for the union.

With this man, then, I considered that I might try my luck. He had grown very rich by clever, but according to group-ideas perfectly lawful money transactions, as commissioner of all sorts of large undertakings, and he had a fine mansion in Washington and in New York. Toward me he would, as a philosopher, sometimes jokingly excuse his wealth, referring in this connection to the example of Seneca the sage.