"We'll go on a while yet," he said with a ghastly affected airiness,
and I sat there with the blood freezing in my veins, fearing he was
going mad. All at once he burst out again.
"The blood of his son! the blood of his son! to buy off sin with which
he himself had burdened us - his own debts thrust on us and accepted by
us against our will and pleasure, and this acceptance paid for with the
blood of his own child. What a Jew! What a sly, heartless usurer! Did
you make these debts, Vico? - value received? What did you get for it?
What did you get for this hereditary sin? Hereditary sin! Ha! ha! ha!
hereditary sin! what an invention! - Hereditary debt! What a crafty,
bartering Jew one must be to invent such an idea."
Once more I made an attempt, and standing upright at the mast I cried
vigorously:
"Come about, father! - about!"
But he called back with even greater vehemence:
"Go ahead, I tell you!"
And then whilst I looked about over the sea and considered what to do:
"I tell you, Vico, there is life and there is death. And we must live
as long as we can. But it must be real life too. Death is no life. The
life of most men is a slow miserable death. There is no honor and no
merit in maintaining a life that should more truly be called death. A
bloodless, enervated, foul, rotten life. It is a shame that men do not
yet know how to live, and even greater shame that they know still less
how to die. I wanted to have you live. But I did not succeed and now I
shall teach you to die. - Are you afraid?"
Then something began to stir and rise up in my soul, like a snake
goaded forth from her cavern. I, too, began to forget the wind and the
waves about me. True, I felt a tingling down my back to my very finger
tips. Yet I was not a coward and I spoke firmly:
"I am not afraid, father. I believe I shall know quite as well as you
how to die if it should be necessary, even without your teaching me.
But I won't be murdered, not even by my father."
The tears from the fixed, now red-rimmed eyes began to flow more
abundantly.
"Vico!" he cried in a much softer, trembling voice: "Will you be true
to me then? Will you let yourself be saved? Will you save your precious
life and your reason? Will you abjure this accursed harpy? Will you
escape the sinister band?"
But I was irritated and excited and proudly replied: "I shall save
myself, I shall be true to whomever I find worthy. I do not respect the
man that curses my mother."
Then his face changed horribly, he lifted up his trembling right hand,
thereby awkwardly knocking off the canvas cap from his head so that the
damp gray hair fluttered. He made Jesus' sign of doom in Michel
Angelo's last judgment, screaming loudly meanwhile:
"Then I curse you, do you hear! I curse you, Lodovico Muralto. Your
father curses you!"
I had enough of Old Testament sentiments left in me not to be
indifferent to such an imprecation!
I started, but tried my very utmost to see in him only the raving,
irresponsible maniac. At the same time the thought flashed across my
mind that he himself must also have been infected by Jewish ideas, that
he should clutch at these weapons, more sounding than wounding. But I
said nothing, walked up to him and from behind his hand attempted to
grasp the tiller. "About!" I cried.
"Very well! about!" my father cried fiercely, and with that be wrenched
the tiller out of my hand and pulled it violently toward himself, so
that instead of sailing before the wind it struck us directly on the
beam with mainsail closely hauled and sheet fixed.
Even had I desired death as eagerly as he did at the time, yet now I
would instinctively have resisted. Seamanship teaches scorn of death
but still greater scorn for bad man?uvring. "Blockhead!" I cried out,
hastily cutting the taut rope so that the sail fluttered out into the
wind like a half-escaped bird. But the boat had shipped so much water
that I could not right her again and in a moment she was entirely
swamped. I climbed to the high side stretching out my hand to my
father. But he gave me one look of bitter scorn, shook his head and let
himself sink, freeing his hand with a wild jerk from a loop in the
rigging.
After this, I drifted about four hours. We had been missed and the
life-boat had been sent out after us, but for a long time was unable to
find me, as the dusk had begun to fall. Finally I was picked up by a
fisherman who signalled for the life-boat to come and get me. I had
lost consciousness and when I awoke it was night and I found myself in
bed hearkening to the soft voices of two women in the room. I thought I
was in Italy with my mother and my nurse in our house at Milan, so
eloquent of the past were the old familiar sharp sss and rr sounds of
these soft Italian whisperings. But soon I recognized the Dutch hotel
furnishings, Lucia, and beneath the black lace veil the silvery hair of
my venerable mother.
X
When for four hours, wet and benumbed upon a wave-swept piece of wood,
with nothing round about but the sea and falling night, one has fought
for the maintenance of a thing, one begins to consider that thing
important after all, even though before it was ever so indifferent to
us.
I had never valued my life so highly; but after I had once been incited
to a stubborn, desperate but successful resistance against the attempt
of robbing me of it, it had become dearer to me. Now I was determined
to know everything there is to be known concerning the value of this
hard-won treasure.
Why did I make this tremendous effort? What do I gain by it? And all
these others, none of whom, forsooth, praise life as so glorious and
desirable a joy, what induces them to cling to it so frantically at the
cost of so much pain and trouble?
My father had taught me, and no one, not even my mother and the priests
denied it, that we are reasonable beings who ought to act reasonably.
To exert oneself for something undesirable, I consider, and everyone
with me considers, unreasonable. If it is a Jewish idea to do or to
give naught for naught - well, you may label me Jew then. That was also
my idea of justice. And then I felt myself more of a Jew than the Jew,
Spinoza, who says that one should love God without expecting love in
return. My inborn passion for sober truth was stirred to opposition by
these words. I did not believe that this feeling could be true, not
even in Spinoza. He must merely have imagined it because he wished to
be different from the grasping Jews and Hollanders of his age. Right
remains right. Love demands love in return, - and life must be good for
something if we are willing to suffer and struggle for it. I could be
as liberal and generous as the best of Italians, but the highest
striving in all nature is for balance, and he who lets himself be
pushed off his chair disturbs the balance instead of preserving it, and
he who throws his own cabbages to his neighbor's hogs fosters laziness
and injustice.
"Yes! now my life has been saved, dear mother," I said on the first day
of my recovery. "But at the cost of much trouble and distress. Father
and I parted the while he cursed me and I denounced him as a
'blockhead.' I am not superstitious, but these are not comforting
memories. I defied his curse, I resisted him and retained my life. But
for what? Who tells me that he was not right and that it had not been
better for me to die?"
"God has willed it so, my boy. I fear that for your unhappy father
there is no salvation; he died cursing and without repentance. But God
has preserved you so that you should live for him."
"Preserved me to live for him? Does he need me then? The creator of the
sun and the fixed stars, the milky way and the nebulae? Needs me? How
is that, mother?"
"He wished to preserve you through his merciful love. You need him.
Therefore you must live for him."
"If I need him, mother, then he must live for me and not I for him. How
can anyone who needs help himself live for another? God is surely not
in need of help. But I -"
"You must love him with all your heart and all your soul. You must be
ready to offer all to him. You must be willing to bear life and to
suffer for him. You have received everything from him. Joy and sorrow
- it must all be equally dear to you because it comes from him."
"Dear mother, then I must surely have received my reason and my tastes
from him too. And when my father gave me a watch and a compass I
trusted that these things would point right. And when God gives me
reason and tastes, must I then suppose that these point wrong?
Wherefore did I receive them then? My reason calls it nonsensical to
lead a wretched and miserable life, even for the sake of the Almighty
Creator of Heaven and Earth. How can this be pleasing to a supreme
being? What can it matter to him? And my taste calls happiness
desirable and sorrow reprehensible, whether it come from one or from
another. Sugar is sweet though it come from the devil, and quinine is
bitter though it come from God. I cannot taste it differently."
"And is the bitter not just what you need to heal you, Vico?"
"Is it less bitter, therefore? And should I even thank the Almighty for
first letting me get sick, which is unpleasant enough already, and
moreover giving a bitter taste to the medicine which he made necessary?
He has made me so that I feel glad and thankful for whatever gives
happiness and tastes sweet, but not for affliction and bitterness."
"That is your pride, Vico! Your father instilled that into you. Learn
to love God! Lay away your pride. Learn to love God humbly and through
love thankfully to accept the bitter from him."
"Listen, mother. I might say now: Yes! yes! I can repeat it all after
you exactly and persuade myself that I feel it all too. But then I
would lie. And God has made me so that I would rather not lie if I can
help it. I know no reason why I should be thankful to God for
afflictions or should call the bitter sweet and the ugly beautiful. If
he is my creator then he is also responsible for the desires and
feelings of his creature."
"What I tell you, Vico, is something you cannot understand except
through the light of grace. You must be born again through faith. You
reason now as all who trust to their human understanding. I can only
pray that his grace will be poured out over you. And for the sake of
your mother, who loves you so, you surely do not wish to shut your
heart and blind yourself to the true light? You surely will want to
hear what the church teaches and want to obey and accept what older and
wiser people, through love, tell and advise you."
"My heart is open to every light, mother. I am willing to hear and to
consider everything. But though I would ever so gladly, I cannot obey
and accept unless what I am told and advised seems acceptable to me."
"May God break your self-conceit!" my mother sighed.
What I have written here is an average and collective type of many
hundreds of conversations which I had with my mother during the ten
years following. With the indefatigable zeal of flies incessantly
buzzing up and down and striking against a window pane, we two
tenacious and autocratic persons tried to thrust upon one another our
own peculiar individuality. My mother with a more aggressive love, I
more on the defensive, but in my self-assertion, none the less
militant. Possessed by the universal conceit of the reasonableness of
our feelings and convictions, neither one of us noticed that this was
simply a struggle between two natures whereof one was trying to subject
the other. And accustomed as almost all the human herd to the idolatry
of the true word, we both imagined that by merely talking, talking we
could finally make the word which we ourselves considered true the idol
of our fellow-man too, like two missionaries of different faith holding
up their symbol before one another until one of the two falls on his
knees.
And the mother now said that it was the father's education that made me
refractory, just as the father had thought to oppose the maternal
influence: as though they continued the old feud about me and through
me.
The four hours of anxious suspense on the capsized boat, my father's
curse ringing in my ears, his grim sinking face before my eyes, had
struck such a deep gash into my young and tender soul that at first I
would awaken every morning from a dream, in which the whole thing was
lived through again, crying for help in a voice hoarse from screaming
as I had cried so long across the lonely dusky sea. Only very gradually
did these evil memory dreams cease, and till late in my life they would
recur whenever my power of resistance was weakened.
These dreams acted upon me like warnings, repeating the stern lesson of
the terrible event. "You have repelled your father and chosen your
mother's side. You have rejected his ideas and thereby driven him to
death. And what if he had been right now? Are you sure that your mother
deserved this sacrifice? Are you sure that your life was worth saving?
What have you - really - of that life which you so desperately
defended? By your defiance you have taken a heavy responsibility upon
yourself. You must now seek this assurance: the assurance that your
father was in the wrong and that you are doing right by continuing to
live and adhering to your mother."
These were the warnings that beset me every morning when the morning
light had once more dispelled the fearful vision. In vain I sounded the
depths of my soul - to find whence issued these compelling and
distressing thoughts. A power dwelt within me which seemed to possess a
mighty voice, and a strong coercive force when I did not want to
listen. And I soon observed that this power increased in proportion as
I felt weaker and more discouraged. Was it the voice of the herd, which
my father had taught me to despise, but which he no more than I could
infallibly distinguish from his own voice? Who was this speaker, this
tyrant?
There existed a bridge of heartiness and affection between my mother
and myself which always remained practicable even when the flood of
controversy raged highest. When it seemed as though we would never
understand each other, we would simply stay the structure of our
phrases and without détour approach one another through the ever open
door of our love, without troubling ourselves about logic or
consistency.
And Lucia was much less averse to theology than Emmy. Supplied by my
mother with shining words of authority and bombastic arguments, and no
less anxious than my mother herself to let the son participate in the
joy of her conviction, she eagerly granted any request for engaging in
deep conversation. We did not go walking alone together, as this did
not agree with her principles of education, but when we three were
together the origin and prospect of our life was discussed more, and
with greater fervor, than anywhere probably in all the little seaside
town, perchance in all the little land.
And it is good that people do not act as reasonably as they imagine,
otherwise we should see all mankind engaged in such conversations: they
would forget to reap the harvest, to start the trains, to keep the
fires of the factories going.
For it is strange to see everyone making the greatest efforts and
wearing himself out and hardly anyone trying to render account to
himself of the why and wherefore. Especially the so-called thoughtful
people cut a strange figure, as usually they all disagree, or only
agree about their own ignorance; and yet they go on living complacently
without earnestly persevering in their efforts of reaching a
conclusion. They all pretend to believe in the true word, but they do
not manifest much faith in their idol, because words concerning the
most important truths have but little power to attract them. It is good
so, for otherwise, from sheer uncertainty, the entire machinery would
come to a standstill and the truly free, such as you, dear reader, and
I, would find no opportunity to gather the leading truths for them,
and, wrapped in glowing formula, so dexterously to throw them before
their feet that they perceive them and pick them up as their own
discoveries.
Lucia del Bono was not only a beautiful, but also a bright, clever and,
as my mother assured me, good and noble Italian woman. She had lost her
parents, and my mother who had taken her into her home as her adopted
daughter, was her saint, her oracle. Whatever mother did was good,
whatever mother said was true, what mother wished was the nearest to
God's will of anything we could know. And soon I perceived that, among
other things, mother had long wished Lucia to become my wife. Through
Emmy's loss and through the unchanging persistence of my passions,
Satan's voracious pets, I however considered myself peculiarly fitted
for a monastery, if I could only once reconcile myself to the doctrines
suitable to such a life.
"After all, there is no other way of salvation for me" - I once said to
my mother when I was alone with her on the hotel veranda. "Now I may
indeed have holy resolves again and make solemn promises, but I look
reality too squarely in the face to believe, myself, in these promises.
I can never love a woman more truly and more fervently than Emmy, - and
even this love was not strong enough to shield me from the temptations
of the low and the vile. If I remain in the world, I shall nowhere
escape temptation. I have seen enough to know that there is temptation
everywhere for one like myself. It is bitter and humiliating,
particularly for one with a proud and haughty nature, and who does not
like to turn away from an enemy. I feel myself a match for men and
would be willing to fight an overpowering majority, but God has left me
defenceless in the hands of women."
To this mother replied: "There is no life more splendid and lofty than
that of the monk who denies and suppresses all the lower, worldly and
transitory feelings in order to let the eternal develop the more
freely. But it requires a good deal to consecrate yourself wholly to
Jesus, Vico dear. If only you are strong enough for that!"
"No, mother! I want to do it just because I am not strong enough to
resist the world and my fleshly desires. I must be in an absolutely
pure environment and lead an abstemious life, only then will I remain
good. I have tried it for three weeks. But then I fell ill and was
nursed and petted by kind hands and then Satan again had me in his
power."
"You can fall ill in a monastery too, Vico. And Satan will not leave
you in peace there either. Think of how even the saints were tormented
by demons and temptations."
"Ali, mother, what I have read about that, and seen on paintings,
proves that they do not know my temptations. Did you imagine that I
would succumb to the pretty ladies who troubled Antonius of Padua? They
are much too pretty, too poetic, I should say. With them I would feel
ashamed. And all those monsters and demons, as Teniers paints them,
they would not frighten me in the least. I know them well from my
dreams. They give you a fright, but you can easily drive them away,
much more easily than -"
"Than what, Vico?" my mother asked. But before I could conquer my
strong disinclination to give an idea of the true nature of my
visitants, Lucia came out of her room.
"What do you say to this, little daughter!" my mother said with grave,
almost embarrassed mien, "Vico wants to enter the priesthood."
It was curious to mark the change of expression on Lucia's face. With a
peculiar wide, shining look, her great dark eyes travelled from mother
to me, but she cleverly concealed that it was a painful surprise. She
could not suppress a deep blush, however, and when she felt it and
realized that it could not help betraying an all too deep and painful
interest, the blush of shame became yet deeper.
"That is fine!" she said in a voice solemn with emotion.
"If Christ will only accept me," I said; "according to you two I am
still half a heathen."
"Oh, he will surely accept you! he will be good to you!" said Lucia, in
a tone which betrayed more certainty concerning the being of whom she
spoke than Emmy's "Jesus Christ our Lord."
"How do you know that so surely, Lucia?" I asked, immediately
attentive. "Do you know him so well? Can you explain to me what he is?"
"Do I know him?" she cried out passionately, with a little
comprehensive smile at mother. "What shall I reply, mother? He asks
whether we know the dear Lord Jesus."
"What would you yourself reply, Vico, if she asked you whether you knew
me, your mother?"
I was silent, and thoughtfully regarded the two women, so obviously
convinced. Then Lucia said: "I know him much better, Vico, than you
know your mother, for you have not had her near you for very long, nor
is she with you all the time. But my Jesus never leaves me. I have
always had him near me as long as I can remember day and night."
I said nothing, but looked at her encouragingly, intimating that she
should go on and tell me more of Jesus. And she did it gladly, - far
more eagerly than Emmy, - and though it was not all clearly and
absolutely lucidly expressed, not entirely connected and too long, to
repeat it all to you here, yet it was captivating and instructive and,
to me, implied the existence of a firm and neither weak nor transitory
reality.
Suggestion is a very convenient word with a meaning easily adaptable to
all sorts of explanations; but if there were no bounds and no end to
this explaining by suggestion, we might as well rub out from our
suggested slate of life, with a suggested sponge, the whole beautiful
world of clear and eternal realities. No, the Christ of Lucia and my
mother was no suggested fancy, but a living reality.
But what was he?
Of the Bible the two women knew very little. My mother, despite her
Northern origin, had had an Italian Catholic education as well as
Lucia. In this, for valid reasons, the Bible is forbidden. They did not
speak much of the life of Jesus as an historical person, nor of his
adventures, nor of his teachings. It was his suffering, his martyrdom,
and his death that to them seemed to be above all deserving of
meditation.
And if I had not known it - if the Nazarene of whom the New Testament
narrates had borne another name, it might perhaps never have occurred
to me to identify him with the Deity worshipped by my mother.
But now that I must needs assume that all information regarding the
being, personally wholly unknown to me, that so occupied the lives of
these two women and of millions of human beings besides, was to be
found in these ancient writings, the English translation of which,
contrary to my mother's wishes, I faithfully kept - now I began to read
with renewed and even closer attention.
But I found nothing to give me light. I found a very beautiful and
touching narrative full of dramatic power, written by the hand of a
master, but to its detriment four times retold with embellishments and
obvious falsifications. And the hero of this narrative was a very human
mortal, more delicate, more sensitive and nearer akin to us than Hiob:
just as bold in the flight of his thought, just as fanatic and even
immoderate in his declarations, and certainly less strong, less
resolute, his character less unmoved by the lot threatening him than
the mighty hero of the older drama. I was deeply stirred by the reading
of this wonderful creation, by the thoroughly human truth of his
struggle, his disappointments, waverings and weaknesses, his courage
and self-denial, his alternately proud and discouraged bearing, his
very explainable self-deception, caused by the influence of his
childish followers and worshippers, his fatal and truly tragic ending,
not desired but foreboded, and manfully not evaded, - immutable
necessary result of human weakness in human heroic strength.
But what did all this have to do with the wonderful reality in which my
mother and millions with her found all their joy and their security,
with which, through which, for which, in which they lived as fish live
in the water?
I found nothing but a little outward resemblance, the name, the death
he suffered. But for the rest it seemed to me that they might as well
have named any other hero of tragedy - Prometheus for example - as the
mighty and loving being that, even now, directed all their steps and
shed light upon their path.
And through many careful and attentive conversations with the fair
Lucia, in the presence of my mother, who was for her the living
fountain from which she gratefully drew when her wisdom threatened to
forsake her, I became convinced that had Lucia been taught that the
divine reality she felt in herself was named Spinoza, because Spinoza
was a God, incarnate in human form, who had lived in Rynsburg as a man,
had proclaimed many words of living wisdom and therefore suffered scorn
and contempt and finally, after a life of simplicity and chastity, had
died in loneliness and poverty for our salvation - the pious maiden
would just as readily have accepted it and would have found exactly as
much strength, happiness and contentment in it.
Do not lose patience, my reader, because I tell you such commonplace
things. Of course as an independently thinking and observing person,
you know all this just as well as I. But for the herd it is all new,
absolutely new. And it will still be so when you read this and I am
dead and for many, many years after. Do not forget that we too belong
to the herd, you and I, and that an accurate comprehension of our
relations does not exclude a loving understanding and a wise affection.
There is joy in my pride only because it rests on an immutable
estimation of worth. I know that the herd thinks and feels slavishly
and I do not, and that it is therefore necessarily subject to me; but
my joy would rot and wither in my pride, did I not know the comforting
and refreshing humility, the humility that by patient deeds of love
unites me to the herd, and gives me full measure of comfort in this
faithful, sincere and patient record for the good of all, so that I
have found peace, tranquillity of mind and a foretaste of bliss in the
utmost spiritual loneliness, in this dead life.
There is neither contentment nor happiness in unshared wisdom.
Therefore I make bold once more to speak plainly of such commonplace
things. If we would build our towers higher and higher, we must seek to
broaden the foundations, otherwise we topple over with our individual
wisdom just as we had imagined heaven attained. The herd does not need
our leading more urgently than we its following.
True, it must have been a great and ingenious Jew, who, now more than
eighteen hundred years ago, wisely responding to the cry of anguish
from his enslaved countrymen for a redeemer, as king, as Christ,
pointed out to them the new man, the meek, the "Chrestus," with whom
the whole earth felt herself pregnant.
No one can have known the divine reality, which so many millions have
called Christ, so profoundly, and have felt it more clearly living in
himself than he, when flown from his subdued and desolate country to
Alexandria, be created the mighty and tragic heroic figure and chose
the name that for so many centuries was to be accepted by mankind, as
the personification and epithet of this same reality.
But I charge him gravely that with Jewish fearfulness he withdrew his
own person from the struggle in which he let his hero perish, and
suffered or even wished his noble and true work of art to be changed
into a false piece of history. What might have gladdened and elevated
poor suffering and blinded humanity as a wonderful masterpiece of art,
like the book of Hiob, or the Iliad, or Prometheus Vinctus, or the
Athene of the Parthenon, or the Zeus of Olympus, showing how man in the
creations of the artist rises highest above personal pettiness and
weakness, how the genius in fiction creates the highest perfection,
such as has never been seen in flesh and blood, - has now, as an
invented historical occurrence, driven the whole world to the rudest
falsifications of truth and impossible efforts of imitation.
The glorious shapes of Phidias, more beautiful than any living human
race has ever actually been, have still brought us joy and inspiration
after a miserable barbaric Christian world bad mutilated and neglected
them, - but the beautiful figure of Jesus, which as a work of art might
have been immortal and beneficent, embellished with Pauline metaphysics
and mixed in the Byzantine sorcerer's pot with Egyptian and Chaldean
hodgepodge, has become an evil spirit for wretched human kind.
For eighteen hundred years the world has been the dupe of this
marvellous dramatic genius and his work, changed in a fatal hour from
fiction to history. I know no stronger proof for the existence of a
malicious devil who takes pleasure in our amusing errors.
And many a night, when it is warm and the sea calm and the doves coo in
the softly whispering elms on the city walls, I wander out of my quiet
little city and gaze over the smooth extent of water, musing for hours
on the beauty and the joy that would now reign on earth if,
unprejudiced and unconfounded, men had asked what God it was that so
mightily revealed himself in them and urged them with such perceptible
will and pressure, and spoke in so audible a voice: if they had
earnestly and attentively hearkened to the constant whisperings and
warnings of their deep true nature, if they had borne and learned to
follow the bridle of this faithful warner in their own soul, who
strongly desires and alone has power to give us peace, - instead of
worshipping the true word, and looking for outward signs and miracles,
and through the beautiful creations of a human genius letting
themselves be seduced to human deification, to stupid imitation, to
fanaticism, to falsification of word and reality, to a sickly pursuit
of pain, glorification of poverty, fear of knowledge, scorn of the
world, hatred of beauty, poor stray sheep!
Then the great and good works of Greeks and Romans, of Indians and
Saracens would have been thoughtfully carried on, art preserved,
knowledge esteemed, - and the garden of peace made verdant with clear
springs of beauty from these two pure fountains. While now, alas! again
and again, in thousands of hearts, the true Christ must die the bitter
death upon the cross because the truest word that he inspired one of
his dearest favorites to utter was besmirched by a flat lie, and his
most beautiful poetical image destroyed by a grossly sensuous error.
But be of good cheer, my reader; the devil made a good move, but shall
lose the game nevertheless. The falsehood poison has soon spent itself,
and the powers of the sick increase. No longer do the shepherdless dogs
drive the flock asunder in a hundred different directions. You live, my
reader, and hear the voice of me, the dead, - and as though heralded
forth by trumpets, you learn that the crucified in you and in me is
also victoriously and gloriously risen again.