The Bride of Dreams

by Frederik van Eeden

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

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

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

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

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

"Ahi, selva Italia! di dolore ostello!"

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

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

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

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