Call Holland a dreamy country because its beauty is as that of a dream.
Sometimes it is black, wildly inhospitable and dispiriting - and
suddenly, in calm, mild weather, the entire country with its trees,
canals, cities and inhabitants sparkles in an indescribable tender
radiance, enhancing everything with a deep mysterious meaning
impossible to explain or describe more fully, and resembling the
peculiar beauty of dreams. One must have seen my little city from the
sea on a still, clear September eve, when the sun goes to bide behind
the bell-tower, flooding the cloudless, luminous blue-green heavens
with orange and gold, when pastures and the shadows of trees merged in
a fairy tinted blue haze unite in wondrous harmony - when the milkers
come home with heavy tread, balancing at their sides the pails of
cobalt blue - when all that sounds is harmonious from the striking of
the clock on the tower to the rattling of a homeward driving cart, and
all that breathes from the coarse Hollanders to the dull cows seems
wrapped in this selfsame peaceful, poetic evening bliss - one must have
seen it thus to understand how much all this resembles the wondrous
illusion of our dreams, when in some inexplicable manner the simplest
object gleams with a glow of heavenly splendor and unspeakable beauty
and for days can fill our memory with the bliss of it.
But the inhabitants of this dreamy little country do not like to be
called dreamy. As I understand the word, it is a compliment better
deserved by my own countrymen; but the Hollanders themselves feel
flattered, though quite erroneously, when I casually remark at the club
that the Italians are a much dreamier people than they. To the
Hollander a dreamer is a blockhead and a dullard, and our broker, a
little fellow with gray beard and little leering cunningly-stupid eyes,
who thinks himself very smart because he knows bow to eke out a profit
everywhere and thus to swell his bank account, always states with much
satisfaction that he never knew what it was to dream. When he sleeps he
sleeps absolutely and is conscious of nothing, thus - of less even than
when he is awake. And the doctor - a fat jovial young fellow of strong
mulatto type and popular for his good-natured cordiality and stale
college jokes - says that all dreams are pathological and the best
medicine for them is a good cigar and a stiff rum punch before retiring.
A Dutch peasant in his blue blouse, on a meadow flooded by the golden
evening sun, amongst the black and white cattle, with a background of
white and pale green dunes in fine undulating outline, is a marvel of
dream beauty. But he himself knows nothing of this, as little or even
less than the cow beside him. And the broker and the doctor only
recognize it when a dreamer such as Rembrandt or Ruysdaal has revealed
it, and the papers record how many thousands of golden gilders their
reverie has yielded. But in my country the humblest peasant lad,
clambering barefooted and singing down the Piedmontese foothills behind
his black goats in the golden evening light, is enough of a dreamer to
have a clear conception of the grand concert of beauty whereof he is a
single tone. In the cities it is of course equally bad everywhere, and
dreamers are as rare among the sleek, smart officers and loungers of
the Toledo in Naples as among the portly, blond-bearded sons of the
merchants and shopkeepers in the Kalverstraat at Amsterdam.
Now it also seems to me that he who dreams is more awake than he who
sleeps, and that he who spends a third part of his life in utter
unconsciousness better deserves to be called a sleepyhead and dullard,
than he for whom the dark nights are also vivid and rich with pulsing
life. To me it has always seemed a shame to lie like a stone for so
many hours, and to arise from sleep no wiser than when we sank into it.
And after having experienced several times in my early youth that sleep
possesses riches of sensations and a wealth of rapture that surpass the
intensest joys of brilliant day, shedding behind them a radiance that
penetrates the brightest daylight as sunshine penetrates an
electrically lighted hall, - I began to pay more attention to my dreams
and, especially in dreary joyless days, to look forward to the nights
in which I had unmistakably felt the shining presence of such great
treasure.
As to the doctors' opinion regarding the morbidness of dreams, I refer
again to my observations on the philistinism prevalent among
physicians, and I know from very positive experience that there are
healthy as well as morbid sensations in sleep, precisely as in the
day-life. I may speak with some authority because in my day-life I
never experienced any serious morbid disorder and no doctor could ever
cast a doubt on the excellence of my health. Yet for me a dreamless
night is a bad night, and I call the man who passes his days in the
following of perverted and inharmonious impulses, in deviations from
the good instincts for refreshment and nourishment, for propagation and
accumulation, for peace and happiness, and his nights in dull
unconsciousness and thoughtlessness, dead as a cork, or at most, a
little mad temporarily from foolish and confused dreams, - such a man
I, with good reason, call sickly and abnormal.
For our highest instinct, that like a stately royal stag, proudly
holding aloft his widely branching antlers, should take the lead of all
the wanton and timid flock of our impulses and passions uniting and
guarding them, is the impulse toward beauty, toward sublimity, and
toward purest blessedness. Even the mighty passion for knowledge, which
impels us so untiringly to seek for the secret of life, is subordinate
to this, though it is the second in rank - the most beautiful hind of
the flock.
And if in our sleep and dreams we perceive, more distinctly than in the
day life, signs of the highest beauty and the purest bliss, - should we
not then give them our closest attention?
And this I would now point out to you, dear reader, as the first new
idea, strange - till now - to the present world, the first
thought-child pulsing with life and future promise, born of the
profound union of my experience and contemplation:
The solution of the secret of our lives lies in our dreams.
You think - do you not? - that this solution is not attainable to man.
Nor indeed is it - at least not to mortal man. And yet all mankind,
through the medium of its naturalists, is patiently and hopefully
seeking it. But, though they have already unearthed much that is
useful, measuring and recording and comparing with ever finer and
sharper instruments, they are still digging in a direction that
inevitably leads into a blind alley.
For the manifestations of day-life, the only ones that attract the
attention of the searchers, do not reach beyond the grave and end with
the withering of the body. But the manifestations of sleep, yet
unexplored and unmeasured, begin where the eyes are shut, the ears do
not hear, the skin does not feel, and extend into the regions
concerning which we want enlightenment as much as - yes, even more than
- concerning the sphere of day.
As long as I can remember, I have always been a great and vivid
dreamer; therefore I know I must count myself among the breakers of
suggestion, among the pathfinders, just as you too, dear reader and
sympathizer, are one of them. And therefore, also, when the ideas of
the group and traditional creed became too narrow for me and neither
the words of my great hero brothers, nor intercourse with my
contemporaries, nor the latest discoveries of science could satisfy me,
I could forthwith see an outlet and discover light on a path which no
one had yet pointed out to me and none, before me, had trod. Thus my
alienation from the world has not made me unruly. Thus alone is it
possible for me to find peace and contentment in this life amid narrow,
sordid souls and barbarians. For aside from my monotonous daily life,
with brief moments of rapture aroused by the beauty of these low lands
and the sea, by work and study, I have the rich nights full of
marvelous mystic realities which I gratefully and attentively observe
and record by day. Thus, despite the loss of all that was dear to me, I
am happy in the consciousness of being a useful laborer in the fields
of the future, ploughing.
"For the promise of a later birth