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Title: We Women and Our Authors

Author: Laura Marholm

Translator: Hermione Charlotte Ramsden

Release date: March 6, 2022 [eBook #67577]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1899

Credits: Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WE WOMEN AND OUR AUTHORS ***


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_We Women and our Authors_




BY THE SAME AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR

     MODERN WOMEN: STUDIES OF SONIA KOVALEVSKY, GEORGE EGERTON,
     ELEONORA DUSE, AMALIE SKRAM, MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF, AND A. CH.
     EDGREN-LEFFLER.

_Uniform with this volume, 3s. 6d. net._


JOHN LANE, LONDON AND NEW YORK




WE WOMEN AND OUR
AUTHORS [dec] BY LAURA
MARHOLM HANSSON [dec] AN
ENGLISH RENDERING FROM
THE SECOND EDITION OF
THE GERMAN WORK, BY
HERMIONE RAMSDEN [dec]

JOHN LANE THE BODLEY
HEAD [dec] LONDON AND
NEW YORK [decs] 1899


_All rights reserved_




CONTENTS

                                             PAGE
WE WOMEN AND OUR AUTHORS                        1

GOTTFRIED KELLER AND WOMEN                     23

PAUL HEYSE AND THE INCOMMENSURABLE             61

THE AUTHOR IN A CUL-DE-SAC (IBSEN)             80

THE HIGH PRIEST OF PURITY (BJÖRNSON)          100

THE WOMEN-HATERS, TOLSTOY AND STRINDBERG:

    I. TOLSTOY                                132

   II. STRINDBERG                             146

MAUPASSANT AND THE “FIN DE SIÈCLE” WOMAN      179

BARBEY D’AUREVILLY ON THE MYSTERY OF WOMAN    197

HOW DO WE STAND?                              212




_We Women and our Authors_


We German women are accustomed to look upon ourselves as an appendage
to or a part of man. Up till now it has been the chief object and the
pride of our existence to subordinate ourselves to him, and to look
after his comforts. It is so no longer, or at any rate it is not as
common as it used to be. Women have begun to ask: Who am I? and not:
Whose am I? which proves that they are conscious of their individuality
and wish to live their own lives. At present they are only helpless
beginners filled with desires, needs and claims, which they themselves
do not understand and which they would rather not admit. Their first
longing is for outward independence, and in that they are not even
original, as the economic conditions of the middle classes have long
since forced women to exert themselves to the utmost in order that
they may be self-supporting in part, if not entirely. And they are
proud and happy when they have succeeded thus far, they fight for it in
public and in private life, in the family, in Associations for Women’s
Rights, in newspapers, and in books where the movement has advanced
the furthest. They fight for the first and rudest basis of their
independence, for the right to maintain themselves, which, while it
is the lowest step on the way to freedom, is the one that gives them
the first title to the possession and disposal of their own selves.
It is by no means an aimless struggle, but it is a sad one, in which
the woman only too often forfeits her most precious possession--her
womanliness.

But there is something in the background, besides what a woman ventures
for the sake of attaining her wishes and advancing her claims. Many
women have not yet learned to express it, many consider it their duty
to dispute it even to themselves, while some give way to the indistinct
longing with fear and hesitation, and only a very few know what it is
and welcome it with gladness and with the consciousness that through
it their lives are being strengthened, and their souls and bodies
beautified. Women have passed through a fresh development and have
entered upon a new stage of their inner consciousness.

It was an event which it took the whole of this century to bring about,
and which has only now begun to draw attention to itself and its
consequences.

One of the causes which brought it into being was due to the authors of
this present century.

There has never been a literature so rich and so full of variety as
that which has surrounded us women of the present day. Woman has
never played such an important part in the literature of any century
as in ours. It is not merely that writers have made use of her as
a speaking-trumpet to say much that they could not have trusted
themselves to say more plainly, but they have needed the woman herself
in many and more various ways than was ever the case in former times.
They wanted to have her with them in all that they thought and created,
they needed her with her soul, her mind, her approbation, in order
that she might make them strong, and give them confidence. Since the
end of the last century there have been few literary or intellectual
works, either during the classical or the romantic period, or about
the year ’48, with which a woman has not been closely connected.
The relationship between man and woman had changed from its simple
foundation and had assumed a tenderer, more delicate form. This
betrays the fact that the men, or rather let us say the _élite_ among
the men, of this century have become more sensitive, more refined,
more nervous. But the same is true of women, only that they have also
become more self-conscious, and this is largely owing to the influence
of the superior men of their time. It was an influence that extended
far beyond the limits of personal acquaintance. How many young girls
have experienced their first soul-rapture in fearful bliss over a
book, and have felt their heart and the world and existence itself to
be too narrow for their emotions! How many women there are who have
been awakened through the influence of writers in distant lands! How
many of the tenderest emotions have been lived in secluded country
districts and barren towns of which he, their awakener, never hears,
although they are often richer and fresher than all the love that he
has ever encountered! But the women who were thus moved could never
grow entirely stupefied over the kitchen pot, nor could their minds be
stultified with knitting, and it was they who became the discontented
ones, who felt themselves thwarted and driven to despair by hopes
doomed to disappointment; and these natures were among the first to go
forth into the world, determined to become independent in order that
they might find themselves, to become free, in order that their ego
might speak.

If they had a real talent of any sort or kind they were sometimes able
to work out their own self-development; but how many women, and many
of the best women too, have only the one talent, and that is their
warm-hearted womanly nature. It was just this that was a hindrance to
them, that prevented them from elbowing their way out of their narrow,
gloomy surroundings, and prevented them from attaining to anything
higher than a teacher or governess, or some such position of dependence
which necessitates a loveless and celibate youth--and they were not
happy. Or else they married as best they could in their small circle of
acquaintances--and were not happy either.

Some of these unhappy ones became the pioneers of emancipation, and
stamped it with their hallmark.

In the meantime the image of the woman in the author’s soul underwent a
surprising and rapid change.

The spirit of gallantry towards women with which the classics were
imbued had soon disappeared. The writers of young Germany were already
too much occupied in revolutionising the woman to do homage to her, and
they had to be quick about it, for their own feverish spirits warned
them that their reprieve was short. They drove her before them and
rebuked her, saying that she was too timid and too luxurious to keep
pace with them; they felt as in a wilderness without her, yet they had
not the strength to drag her after them. They longed for her that she
might rouse them and comfort them, and they found the time pass wearily
for both.

They aroused the woman, awoke her out of a condition of vegetative
ease, shook her personality awake, taught her to be discontented,
to wish, to think, but they gave her nothing, and mirrored her
indistinctly in their books.

The first to possess what they lacked was Gottfried Keller, and he
possessed it unmistakably. No German writer has ever given us a truer,
finer, more complete picture of the German woman. We meet with his
models everywhere in life, whether it be in the great world, or in
small towns, or in lonely country houses. The woman who is good _comme
le bon pain_, simple, honest, warm-hearted, merry, motherly, the woman
who is generous as the fruitful earth, who understands everything
from instinct, and who grows more submissive the more she loves--it
is the temperament of the German woman in short, with all its native
conditionality and indissolubility, with its homely attractions,
its domestic bondage, and also with its little and all too simple
perversities.

In Keller’s writings the German woman saw herself for the first time
reflected as in a truthful mirror, and she was astonished when she
recognised the likeness and learned to know herself.

How many of us have been told by Keller what we are, and what we need,
and what we endure, and what we ought not to endure! He became, what
he least of all men ever dreamed of becoming, an awakener of women,
and while he bade them glance into that part of their being of which
they knew nothing, he awakened in them the consciousness of their
personality.

In their surroundings and external circumstances, Keller’s women
belonged to a bygone age. The social conditions in which they lived
were simple and primitive as their own souls. They were never in want,
or overworked, and they had no need to earn their living.

In Paul Heyse’s writings also there is no outward misery, no cruel
restraint. But in spite of the absence of this peculiar feature of
the time, he too has become an awakener of the individual woman of our
century.

In the first place he understood women. Not one of his contemporaries
can produce as rich a portrait gallery. His success did not depend upon
one or two special types, for he never confined himself to exteriors,
however interesting. He understood women in all the impetuosity of
their being, he had the intuition necessary for seeing them as they
really are in all their various moods, and he, of all the writers of
the age, was the only one who invariably respected them. By these means
he introduced something into literature and into the nature of women
which was destined to bear incalculable results, for by regarding them
in every position and under all circumstances as individuals, he taught
them so to regard themselves. Till then women had been accustomed to
be more or less at the disposal of others--Paul Heyse aroused them to
the consciousness of their own worth. He gave them the right to dispose
of themselves. He led them out of mere vegetation into the light of
existence and taught them to reverence their sex. He taught them the
courage of individualism.

He did more. After having improved and enriched these women, he freed
them from household drudgery, and gave them the grace and manners of
the outer world. To a cultivated soul he added a cultivated mind, a
fearless gaze, and a certain _savoir faire_ in all the circumstances
of life.

In former days the German woman in fiction had been a native of the
provinces, her chief charm lay in her romantic imagination, and
she looked up to man with the trustful admiration that is born of
inexperience; but Heyse’s woman sometimes overlooked man altogether,
she possessed the knowledge of life and discernment of one who
had travelled and seen the world, she was a cosmopolitan with few
illusions. She had a keen sense of proportion, and was in the habit of
criticising every one, even the man she loved; she had analysed life
to its core, and she knew the why and the wherefore of her affections,
but her scepticism only made her love richer, fuller, deeper and
more attractive than it had been before. She was innocent, not from
ignorance, but from a certain delicacy of soul, and chaste, not from
piety or duty or coldness, but from a finer cult of the ego, which
loathes impurity as if it were actual dirt, and reserves itself for
rare and noble enjoyments.

It was thus that we women encountered ourselves in Heyse’s portrait
gallery, at a time when we had reached our most impressionable age and
were beginning to dream about life. We were made of pliant material,
and a rough hand might have left its clumsy mark upon us, especially
if it had been the hand of a favourite author. We shut ourselves out
from our surroundings, we would not allow ourselves to be stamped with
the dull stupid sameness of the life in which we had been brought up,
we stretched out our open hands to receive all that was brought to us
by the precious, forbidden books, the books which made our pulses beat
faster, and aroused from the darkest depths of our souls all that was
capable of perfection in us. How many helpless women whose talents
bore no hope of fruition have lived their youth solely in books and
for books! And as though their hearts were the chords of a quivering
instrument, Heyse played his tender tale of the far horizon, and sang
to them of liberty, of spiritual greatness, and of the glory of woman,
beside which the doctrine of self-renunciation which was preached to us
at home and at school appeared ugly and dull in the extreme.

Then came Ibsen, the first after Heyse whose woman-problems were
discussed by the press and in the family between the girls and older
women. He succeeded Heyse in the souls of the younger generation, and
put his stamp upon the women among them just as Heyse had done to his
pupils in former times. But the daughters of Ibsen were different from
the daughters of Heyse. They were poor people’s children and had to
earn their own living; they lived in mean surroundings without any
prospect of improving them, and love was a luxury which they had not
time to think about. They had grown up in poverty and were poorly
dressed; they had over-exerted themselves in the “struggle for life”
which sometimes attained the dimensions of an entire philosophy of
life; yet they too, one and all, claimed a right which they would not
relinquish; it was the same which had been made by Heyse’s women, it
was the right to cultivate the ego.

Paul Heyse had pictured woman in her best moments, and under the
most favourable circumstances of her development, the high days
and holidays of life. But Ibsen drew our wretched, bitter, barren
existence such as it was every day of our lives, he described our
mothers, brothers, husbands, guardians and teachers as they only too
often were, when they deprived us of light and air and expected us to
be thankful for the little that was left, when they broke our wings
and asked us in surprise why it was that we could not fly. He threw
a fierce, penetrating light into the back parlours of the middle
classes, revealing with a disgusting plainness the dingy make-believe
of respectable family life. Horror and disgust, combined with a nervous
longing to escape, to find oneself, to live one’s own life in this
short existence where so much had already been lost,--such were the
feelings which Ibsen aroused with inconceivable intensity. I cannot
better describe the influence which these two writers exerted over some
of the most gifted women of their time than by quoting what one of
them said to me on the subject. She was a woman who afterwards filled
an important position in life besides attaining to personal happiness,
and all through her own courage and her own unaided efforts. “I was
doomed to be discontented,” she said. “I was born in one of the most
out-of-the-way places on the frontier, amid social conditions worthy
of Little Peddlington. At the age of fourteen or fifteen I read Heyse.
He did not arouse me to rebellion, he only woke me quite imperceptibly
to the knowledge of myself. He gave me a spirit of proud reserve, he
taught me to respect my physical and spiritual nature as a woman, and
to watch over my integrity for its own sake. He gave me a glimpse
into the possibilities of great happiness or of no happiness at all,
and he made me understand that one could not choose. He gave me a
certain dreamy peace, which refreshed and soothed me. Ten years later
Ibsen’s books found their way into our nest. I read him and was beside
myself. I lay on the floor and writhed with feelings which could not
find expression either in thoughts or words. The people and the social
conditions in his dramas were just my circle, my social conditions, my
world. Never before had I seen so clearly what it was that bound me
down and thwarted me. I saw that I must get away, that I should have
no peace if I remained. Go I must, and at once! I had no connections
anywhere, and I was ignorant of the world, but I went with a desperate
faith in the one thing that I possessed--my scrap of talent. If it
had not been for Ibsen I should never have gone. I lived for years
alone in a strange country among strangers, among people who were
indifferent to me,--but I belonged to myself. I was free from the
stupid tempers and prejudices of others. I read and thought about what
I liked. I belonged to myself! I supported myself entirely, and felt
my personality, both intellectual and spiritual, struggling towards
freedom. I owed nothing to my surroundings or personal intercourse.
Heyse and Ibsen were my awakeners and the guides of my life.”

The curious thing in this life was that the influence of these two
great antipodeans was held in the balance, and the one appeared as
continuing the work begun by the other.

One would have thought that it was impossible, and that the influence
of the one would not have allowed itself to be ingrafted on the work of
the other. Imagine Heyse’s refined sensualism beside Ibsen’s negation
of the senses! Between the disciples of the one, a comprehensive
sympathy; between the others--no mercy. That there is no mercy to be
found amongst the people of our day--that each one is imprisoned in the
iron harness of his own interests--that was just the terrible news that
Ibsen imparted to us in his dramas, when he urged us to help ourselves
because there was no other help to be had.

Yet the figures of Ibsen’s principal women are to be found in Heyse,
for before Ibsen Heyse had already met with and understood the
apparitions with which Ibsen has revolutionised us; Heyse discovered
the same highly developed type in a few solitary specimens which have
only been discovered by Ibsen many years later.

There is Nora, for instance, who has become the platform woman. I do
not think that anyone has ever explained in what Nora’s sacrifice for
her husband consisted. It rests upon Heyse’s fundamental principle--the
incommensurable, _i.e._, that which cannot be measured by the common
standard. In the essay upon Heyse I have enlarged upon this. In Nora’s
eyes love is the great miracle, the gift that one receives without
having done anything to deserve it. In her eyes there is nothing above
or below that can be compared to love. That is how she loves her
Helmer. Social duties and other considerations, unless they are in some
way connected with him, have no existence for her. Her husband takes
the place of the entire network of engagements and obligations with
which most people, especially women, occupy the greater part of their
lives. Everything that is exists for her only in its relation to him;
if it bears no relation to him, it has no existence for her either.
Her love is her religion, her law book, her moral code, and the sole
object of her being. And her great disappointment is this: that for
Helmer love is not the incommensurable, it is not the thing which is of
chief importance in his life. She had given herself to him entirely,
but he had not given himself in like manner, and the discovery freezes
her heart and her senses. The much-talked of “miracle” in which she
can no longer believe is nothing other than the awakening of the
incommensurable in Helmer’s soul.

Here we have the fundamental instinct of human nature which both
Heyse and Ibsen, independently of one another, discover to be the
absolute and all-ruling motive in the lives of hundreds of the women
of their time. Heyse was the first to immortalise this variety, and
in his _Children of the World_ he calls her Toinette; Ibsen calls her
Hedda Gabler. She is the sexless woman who is filled with spiritual
emotions, and who, though utterly passionless, is a mistress of the
art of attracting and fascinating the man, though the mere thought of
abandoning herself to him fills her with a feeling of unconquerable
horror. It is a type which has considerably increased in numbers and
lost in charm during the last ten years; the woman who is really
emancipated and entirely freed from man, the unmarried professional
woman who is perfectly contented with her lot and who preaches
happiness in independence--Björnson’s apostles of purity with Svava at
their head, or Hauptmann with his Anna Mahr and the brother and sister
theory (_Lonely People_), which same doctrine is now being ardently
preached by the aged Tolstoy.

Björnson’s Svava is also forestalled by Heyse in the person of a
young girl of noble family (_In Paradise_) who sends away her strong,
handsome young lover as soon as she discovers that he has lived with
another woman.

Thus we find that the heroines of the Scandinavian problem-novel are
no northern discoveries, but are developments of this century who had
their origin in real life, where Heyse, who understood women, found
them, and made them known to the public in his writings long before the
problem-novel was invented.

In the meantime external conditions have undergone a considerable
change.

Heyse’s woman was an aristocrat who was protected on all sides, but
Ibsen’s woman lived alone in the midst of that universal “struggle
for life,” which is the peculiar feature of our time, and Björnson’s
reformer was a woman of the people, who elbowed her way alone through
the crowd, and preached morals to men.

From Russia, England and Sweden, the new type of woman gladly joined in
the cry.

What a difference between the noble, spiritual-minded woman of Heyse’s
time and the women of Strindberg’s creation! How changed was the image
of the woman in the author’s soul! The entire character of the age had
undergone a great change in the last twenty or thirty years. Women had
entered into the war of competition with men, and had really won some
success in the battle. Numbers of fathers and brothers were released
from the burden of supporting their unmarried women-folk; they were
even released from the necessity of marrying them. Indeed, nowadays,
many daughters and sisters work for their parents and younger
brothers. The world has grown more morose, and the whole of existence
has assumed the appearance of an immense grey day of toil. Year after
year competition grows harder, and every department of labour is
overcrowded with envious, nervous, panting people, who are pitted one
against the other. Merchant against merchant, author against author,
man against woman,--all business people, all race-runners for their
own gain, all struggling, restless, joyless ... all in a rudimentary
or advanced stage of degeneration. And woman keeps pace bravely. She
keeps pace because she knows that this is the only possible means by
which she can attain to the full possession of herself, to perfect
independence, to the right to dispose of her own person; she keeps pace
because she must either run or be downtrodden; she runs, because every
one else runs, and she takes the matter seriously, as is invariably
the case with beginners. But she expects a great deal too much. She
whose bodily frame is so dependent on leading a natural and healthy
life, whose brain gets so easily tired, sits on school benches and
studies for junior and senior examinations, and goes in for higher
educational courses, and continues with these until she has reached
or passed her twentieth year. She then sits on in badly-ventilated
rooms as an art-worker, a book-keeper, or a telegraph clerk, and if
she is exceptionally clever and industrious and has the necessary
means, she studies, and when she has finished, she is six-and-twenty,
eight-and-twenty, or more. After that the real work of life begins.

She is free!

True--but she is also a woman; or has she ceased to be one?

Many women have instinctively avoided this question, in the same way
as they would avoid the subject of death, and they are apt to give way
to an ugly exhibition of temper towards the man, but more especially
towards the woman, who ventures to allude to it; but for all that, they
cannot dispose of the fact any more than they can dispose of death.
When they look at themselves in their glasses, they see that their eyes
are tired, and their skin faded and pale from anæmia ... they see that
they are sickly and overworked; the sweetest instincts of womanhood
are silenced within them, or are shown only by fits and starts. Work,
always work; they have few pleasures, and even those few are often too
much for them. Of what use is their liberty?

They look at themselves in another glass, and this time it is the
woman’s own mirror,--the works of her favourite authors. And what do
they see there? It is no longer Keller and Heyse, nor even Ibsen. It
is no longer those who first opened the eyes of woman, who handed us
our youth as though it were a budding rose, and who let the zephyrs of
spring expand our sails, while they threw open to us the door of life,
and led us by the hand towards the man who loves us for our own sakes,
and whom we love with the whole strength of our being. No, these old
gentlemen are quite out of date nowadays, and the woman sees herself in
the writings of the new authors.

There she discovers that she is good for nothing,--a vampire, an ugly,
sickly, troublesome creature, only capable of exciting a passing
passion, that she is a burden which a man drags after him, a luxury
which he can scarcely afford, an evil which is only borne from a
natural compulsion, a thing that always remains strange to us, and with
which we cannot have any real sympathy, to which we are only bound by a
kind of instinct, a parasite that is shaken off as we grow older, and
which we attack with our fists when we meet it in the labour-market.
That, according to Strindberg, is the relationship between man and
woman.

Or else a Russian barbarian--who was never even heard of in Germany
until his best talent was spent--comes and denounces woman as impure,
advocates childlessness, and preaches subjection and the suppression of
the personality, preaches a servile self-renunciation, and will have
nothing but the brotherly and sisterly affection of sexless men and
women. From him woman learns to regard herself as a harmful superfluity
who cannot become anything worthy of respect, until she ceases to be a
woman.

She has no longer either the time or the strength to be a woman.
Competition in the labour-market monopolizes all her time and all
her strength, she begins of her own accord to despise her womanhood,
and to look upon it as a burden, while she persuades herself that a
state of childless liberty is everything, and that work is the only
satisfaction. This is because she has become an incongruous being, who
no longer believes in herself as woman!

Nevertheless Strindberg was a great writer; he let woman gaze down into
the abysses of her own nature, whose depths she had never guessed, and
because he was afraid of her, he gave her an idea of her own power,
such as was never dreamed of before.

Tolstoy too, in his younger days, has described the natural instinct
of women as few have succeeded in doing, and he, too, was one of those
who revealed woman to herself. But there was no good in either of these
writers now that the confidence which had existed between man and woman
had become a thing of the past. The source of their most intimate
relationship was poisoned, the union between man and woman was changed
into an ugly, brutal act, from which both needed to be purified, and
above the yawning gulf that stretched between the sexes sat two fierce,
suspicious-looking beasts of prey, who lay in wait for one another.

This was the latest revelation which woman received from her authors.

The well of her existence--the rich stream of her life--was beginning
to be drained, man no longer wanted it, he asked for nothing better
than to be quite free of her. She had become a torment to him.

There is yet another generation which consists of quite young girls,
and the latest school of so-called “authors,” viz., our young
naturalists.

They are there, no doubt. But these young people are the last to have
any idea as to how they are to treat women!

Naturalism, as through a slight misunderstanding it is generally
called, is the point of view taken by the Philistine in literature. In
Germany it is through naturalism especially that the bourgeois spirit
tries to become literary. These “authors” seem to say: “We cannot
afford to waste anything, we have no superfluities, and we must do our
best to succeed. Neither can we afford to give, we would sooner accept
from others. For Heaven’s sake leave us in peace with your problems,
and with the woman-problem in particular. As a matter of fact there
is no such thing as a woman-problem, there are washer-women, and
there are Christian mothers, and of course there are family quarrels
and hereditary peculiarities, just as there are free unions which
end badly. Once we saw a girl student who fell in love--but in quite
a sisterly fashion--with a book, and therefore we have the right to
maintain that we understand women. We also knew a socialist who married
a baron after having presided for many years over a mantle warehouse.
And one of our young girls actually went off on the spot with the very
first young man whose acquaintance she made; but it did very well on
the stage. We describe life exactly as we understand it, and everything
that we do not understand is false and fantastical. Women are a useful
institution as wives and readers, but in other ways they are as useless
and insignificant as ourselves.”

Authors are the most conspicuous feature of any given period. When they
are not great precursors, they are like the little house-masters of a
school--a rather more presentable example of the whole class whom they
affect to despise.

What the little house-masters despise most is the populace. But then
Tolstoy and Strindberg despise it also--the former the Christians, the
latter the Atheists. Ours, which is the plebeian age _par préférence_,
makes the same enquiry about everything that is brought under its
notice: “Of what use is it to me?” And even the women are judged from
this point of view.

The man of this weary, utilitarian age is half a decadent and half
a barbarian. What does he want with the superior woman? Nothing,
of course. She is merely an annoyance to him, a burden. If he is
enterprising, he marries a well-filled purse; if he has an affectionate
disposition, he marries a wife of his own class. The more cultured,
more highly developed women are thrust on one side, nay more, they are
starved. They have a gnawing at the heart, a rankling distrust of
happiness, of love, and of men in particular. They are driven to seek
for consolation in their mutual affection for one another, and they
refuse to have anything more to do with men.

This is the phenomenon which Maupassant, with the unfeigned
astonishment of a full-blooded man, has described in _Notre Cœur_. His
is the _fin de siècle_ woman whose whole being has become unproductive,
her intellect, her grace, her gentle nature, and even her powers of
affection. Man is no longer there for her soul and her senses! She is
self-sufficient.

There is no need to describe woman such as she became during the last
half of the present century--how she developed in the struggle to
compete with man, and how she was influenced from the point of view of
personal independence--how she became free and became her own master,
and won for herself a place in the history of her time--how she escaped
from her subjection to man, yet could not forego him altogether--that
is a subject on which there are a mass of confessions written by some
of the most celebrated women of our time, by means of which many women
are led to a better comprehension of themselves, and many men are able
to find the solution to the riddle of woman which has been to them the
cause of much suffering.

A portion of these confessions have been collected by me in my book
called _Modern Women_.




_Gottfried Keller and Women_


I

There are some labours to which we sit down with a sigh, conscious of
having undertaken more than we are able to accomplish, while at the
same time the thought of it attracts us and we do not like to give
it up. I have never yet read anything about Gottfried Keller which
seemed fully to grasp the real nature of the man with the secret of
his separateness, and to place him before us with a certainty of
comprehension such as cannot be gainsaid. He is something so complete
in himself, so apart from others, that like all good things there is no
getting round him. For the essence of good things consists in being so
sound that there is no use in coaxing or persuading them, or in trying
to discover a fault in them; and for that very reason these old jesters
studied the noble art of rendering themselves inaccessible. As an
author he wrote only when he felt inclined, and when he was not in the
mood he waited--whether for months or years it was all the same to him.
As a man he was so reserved that hardly a single one of his personal
experiences found their way to publicity, and after his death it might
have been supposed that he had never had any, if Jacob Bächtold had
not published a collection of his letters under the title of _Gottfried
Keller’s Life_, in which he speaks to us as one more alive than the
living who are still among us. In reading his books we notice that
the purer incidents are mingled with others of a more confidential
nature, and it dawns upon us that he understood how to choose his
incidents, so that afterwards they should not tell tales. This fact
proves, in the first place, that he had nothing to do with those whom
Nietzsche would call “literary women,” this being a silent memorial
to his good taste and noble character. Secondly, it proves that he
understood how to choose his society, and that, like a prudent Swiss,
he never thoughtlessly confided in any one, but remembering that the
world is not so good and particularly not so refined as it might be, he
preferred to keep his confidences to himself. Thirdly, that he, like a
righteous man, was pleased to live until those who had known him in his
foolish youth had died before him with all they knew.

A vase filled with anemones, violets, ranunculuses and other spring
flowers is standing on the table in front of me as I write; I took the
trouble to fetch them out of the wood so that I might have something
alive and sweet-smelling near while I think of Keller. Otherwise it
would have been impossible to write about him, for his books are the
essence of life and gladness.

The spirit of playfulness which, as he tells us in _Green Henry_,
drove him when a child to try all kinds of experiments, has followed
him through life in the treatment of his literary characters, who, by
the way, are never inventions, but always studied portraits. Suddenly
he seizes them by one leg, swings them round, and sends them flying
into a purely fantastical no-man’s-land, oblivious of past events and
present circumstances and such-like limitations. All his stories, or
at any rate the majority of them, are marked with this feature, and
the maddest confusion reigns side by side with some of the greatest
psychological realities; take, for example, the end of _The Poor
Baroness_. How to account for it? Is it that he had inherited the
æstheticism of the romantic school? But considering that he was a man
of sober temperament and not in any way romantic, it is more probable
that the true reason to account for it is that he wrote only for
himself and for his own satisfaction. In his youth he had been afraid
of Providence and had fought a duel to prove the existence of God; in
riper years he amused himself by trying to improve Providence, to put
the crooked straight, to punish the wicked and reward the good, and
act as though he were himself a more practical and zealous Providence.
If, when he had finished, the public read it, what had that to do with
Gottfried Keller? The public might rejoice if now and again he played
at being its teacher and gave it a sound thrashing on that part of the
human body which was especially intended for the purpose. Besides he
was a Swiss, and it never entered his mind to trouble himself about the
rest of the world. There is one special feature in Gottfried Keller’s
productions which, since the publication of his letters, has found
expression in words, and which offers a very drastic contrast to the
works of later authors. It is this--that he never allowed dust to be
thrown in his eyes by any one, least of all by foreigners.

When he, in the person of “Green Henry,” forsook the narrow
surroundings of his home life and went out into the wide world, he
believed that everything good, strong, free and new was to be found
abroad.

After a long journey, undertaken for the sake of his education,
“Green Henry” returned to his home wiser than when he left it. He
became a Swiss in the superlative case--the Swissest of the Swiss.
But although he had occasion to see all the frailties and follies
of Europe disporting themselves in his beloved native land, he did
not include foreign countries in the blame. He possessed the same
sensible, confident self-assertion that characterises his honest
fellow-countrymen who, while they are ever ready to assist strangers in
a polite and blameless manner to rid themselves of their superfluous
coin, always remain in their behaviour towards them as unaffectedly,
great-grandfatherly, considerate and true-hearted as before.

In that Keller is quite old-fashioned. All other writers, at home
and abroad, are anxious to change their skin, and complain bitterly
because they cannot. Keller stretched himself in his with an expression
of well-being that was positively annoying, and declared that it was
a very good skin. He was still more old-fashioned in that he never
sought for a problem, and never made anything of one, although he
produced them by the bushel and left the precious gems lying scattered
throughout his novels. Wherever he went, the strangest, most profound
things seemed to cling to him like burs from roadside ditches. But the
only use he made of them, when he did not immediately throw them away,
was to play a little game of football with them. Three such problems,
as he squandered by the dozen, would be sufficient excuse nowadays to
call forth a new German literature with a new set of publishers, but
he was so essentially old-fashioned in those matters that he was quite
unconscious of the scope of his material, and was certainly not what
we should call an “earnest” writer. He was old-fashioned in other ways
also--for instance, in his best moments he possessed an individual
language of his own which was quite unmistakable, and which seemed to
have fallen from the clouds, no one knew how. Our modern authors, on
the contrary, are always working in the sweat of their brows in the
hope of obtaining an original style, and that without the smallest
chance of success.

Keller was like a ploughed field where the rooks hop about in search of
nourishment, and he has enough left still to fatten many rooks.

Yet there is one point in which our good little Keller is more modern
than the most modern men of our time, and that is in his knowledge of
women. It pleased the old _Pankraz, the Cynic_, to write a great deal
about women, although he never allowed himself to be secured in visible
chains.

Of all German writers, Keller is the one whom we are least able to
understand with our unaided intellect. For in order to understand him,
we must feel him, and he is far too reserved to admit of every one’s
feeling him. Special qualifications are needful, and our modern society
takes good care that these special qualifications should not exist for
the great mass of sensitive readers.

Both as a man and as an author, Keller is distinctly a lover of fresh
air, and for that reason he keeps all genuine townsmen at a suitable
distance. It is true that they snuffle round him and become intoxicated
with the strong scent of the woods and meadows, but it is just this
exaggerated enthusiasm which forms as it were a Chinese wall between
him and them. Keller needs to be passively enjoyed, in a waking sleep,
like the peasant following his plough, or a person wandering in the
mid-day sunshine, or a child resting in the arms of its mother. Keller
as an author is the personification of the quiet equanimity of natural
health.

At the same time he is by nature a recluse. He is that in spite of the
patriotic social duties during the fulfilment of which the majority
of his books were written, and even in spite of his zeal for Swiss
assemblies. He is an eavesdropper; not in the sense in which a lyric
poet may be called one, to whom every outward movement becomes an
inward emotion, but rather as the born thinker whose sympathies live in
all that moves around him, and whose own life is such still water that
every picture cast upon it is clearly reflected. His affections are no
dangerous whirlpool, but a quiet sympathetic companionship, to which
meeting and parting are not the cause of any heartbreaking commotions.

This is the reason why Keller is not a writer suited for summer
sportsmen who breathe in the country air as though they would like to
lay in a store, and who wish the sun to shine full upon them.

His chosen confidants are those who are accustomed to spend their lives
in the open air.

This devotee of the open air had his circle whom he described and his
circle whom he did not describe. The circle whom he did not describe
consisted of those who were born ladies, and them he left severely
alone. But if, on a special occasion, he finds them necessary for
some incident which must be told, he arranges it so that he may have
the opportunity of rebuking them, as with Lucie in the book already
mentioned, _Pankraz, the Cynic_, or as in the case of the busybodies
in the story of poor Regina. When he describes ladies with sympathy,
as in _The Governor of Greifensee_, he transfers them into a period at
least a century ago and places them in the open air.

The women with whom Keller consents to have any dealings must allow
themselves to be placed in the open air. Freshness by candle-light
has no attraction for him, and as for beauty in a drawing-room--he is
suspicious of it. Out they must go, without gloves and veils, stiff
collars or steeled stays, without any of the paraphernalia to which
modern literature is generally so much addicted. If you can allow
yourself to be looked at full in the eyes, with sleeves tucked up and
crumpled--then and only then Gottfried Keller may perhaps stop to
consider whether it is possible to write about you.

Gottfried Keller’s portraits are nearly all open-air studies, and
Gottfried Keller’s women are nearly all lovers of the open air.

There are wonderful disclosures in his great portrait gallery; we find
there the women whom he loved as well as the women whom he hated.
Wherever he describes a virtuous, happy, loving, teasing, laughing
woman; wherever he pictures Eve in whom Adam finds his happiness,
or Eve who finds her happiness in Adam, the decisive moment is sure
to take place in the open air, for the scenes out of doors are the
principal points in his writings, the principal points in the
soul-harmonies of his characters, the moments when love steps forth
from her concealment and the lovers understand one another. _Romeo
and Juliet in the Village_ spend their wedding day out-of-doors; the
neighbour’s children in _The Company of the Seven Just Men_ devise
their plan of association out-of-doors; the married couple in _The Lost
Smile_ meet again out-of-doors, after having been separated by various
domestic circumstances; in the _Misused Love Letter_, the innocent
little woman comes to the still more innocent little schoolmaster
out-of-doors; the heroine in _Ursula_ regains her senses during the
fearful night spent out-of-doors; in _Dietegen_, the situation between
the hero and his lady-love reaches its climax out-of-doors; _Fran
Amrain_, when she has an affair of importance to discuss with her son,
always goes to look for him out-of-doors; and nearly every time that
_Green Henry_ feels his heart beat for a woman, it is out-of-doors.
With Keller all good people are lovers of the open air.

Sedentary natures, on the contrary, are generally characteristic of
persons in whom it is wisest not to place much confidence. There
is always something ludicrous connected with them, and they are
always unfortunate in one way or the other. They are often jealous,
conceited, vulgar, pale-faced and dirty, whereas fresh cheeks are
always accompanied by a pleasant atmosphere. The three _Just
Comb-Manufacturers_ with their miserable follies were all sedentary
people; _The Maker of His Fortune_ and Herr Litumlei were provincials,
while all the wretched inhabitants of Seldwyler sit in absolute
idleness in their little workshops; the tailor, in _Feathers make the
Bird_, became an extraordinary creature in consequence of the sedentary
life which he led; and whenever Keller wishes to draw the character of
an insignificant woman, he makes her sit in her room doing nothing, or
engaged in some silly occupation, or else running in and out of other
people’s houses. The story of poor Regina is the only one of Keller’s
stories in which a good and beautiful creature is misunderstood and
made to suffer, and there all the principal scenes are enacted in large
and gloomy town houses, where the heavy front door serves as a symbol
to show the impossibility of escaping out of a bewitched circle into
the light of truth and freedom. Regina, who was a true child of the
outer air, would never have gone to her ruin if she had been placed in
different surroundings.

Fresh air is the one condition which Keller takes as the starting-point
for his portraits of women, and it is a condition which is quite
original in its way, for it is not as decidedly expressed in the
writings of any other author, least of all a modern one. His women must
have plenty of air, fresh air, air in which they can move their limbs
and which penetrates their clothing. His women are not the productions
of culture, nor the fruit of education, they do not belong to the
species of “clever daughters,” but neither are they idealised country
girls, they are not phantoms, and they are not discoveries, they are
living human beings whom he has seen and known, they are personified
reality like the trees, the meadows, the cows--they are fragments of
nature placed in the midst of other fragments of nature.

They are not Keller’s ideal of what a woman should be, they are exact
descriptions according to his knowledge of what women really are, as
it pleased him to write them down for his own amusement during idle
evenings when he sat over his wine.

It is human nature as the Swiss understand it, human nature personified
and at the same time purified, which moves him to describe women whom
he has known or whom it would have amused him to know, and he describes
them with lively little flourishes here and there.

They came upon him unawares, and he let them do as they pleased and
write themselves down as best they could, but gently and slily he held
them fast by the hair, lest they should try to mystify him. And if they
began to throw dust in his eyes, he gave their hair a gentle pull so
that they might know that he was watching them.

Gottfried Keller was a just man who gave every one their due, including
women.

Here I should like to make a disgraceful confession, and to remark
that, in my unworthy estimation, he--in the great forest of German
authors--is the first, the last, and the only one who thoroughly and
entirely understands the natural woman.

Keller’s woman is nothing but nature, unadorned and unfalsified; it is
true she is not the whole of nature, but she is a genuine part of it.
In order to discover this woman, he journeyed in a circle round the
towns to every road which marks the boundary where town and country
meet. There he sometimes met with women who had a natural disposition
to live, without having learned anything from books. According to him
it was the sign of a praiseworthy woman that she should know where to
find her husband, and as to those who were more or less bunglers in the
matter, he refused to waste his time upon them. He went straight to
the root of the question, like a man who will not allow himself to be
deceived, and according to his knowledge of human nature the principal
business of every young woman was to find the man who was best suited
to her, and having found him, to win him. This is just what Keller’s
young women were busily engaged in doing, and they accomplished it
in various ways, without being in the least aware of it, or, if the
reader prefers it, though it comes to the same in the end, they did
it out of their moral consciousness. But it was not enough for Keller
that they should have proved their true womanliness by these means
alone, more was necessary; they must be able to keep their husbands,
and that again without conscious effort (“moral consciousness” would
be quite out of place here), they must be able to keep him by means
of their personal attractions and that magic charm of womanhood which
it is impossible to analyse, by which the man is made too happy and
too contented to have any wish to escape. When our honest author had
got them thus far, he took delight in adding to the story the welcome
intelligence that they lived long, had many children, and that their
race prospered and increased.


II

There is an old word that was often used in Germany during the merry
days of the Renaissance, and it had a beautiful sound, although at
that time its actual signification may not have been beautiful. It is
the word Courage-giver. The expression first came into use among the
knights of the German Order in Prussia and Livonia at the time when
history tells us of their downfall, _i.e._ when asceticism began to
decline. When a knight of that period had sufficient disregard for
his eternal salvation to procure himself a lady-love, he called her
his Courage-giver, because she gave him renewed courage. But as soon
as the Lutheran pastors, with their protestant ideas about conversion
and discipline, opposed this being who was not acknowledged in the
service-book, the good word came to have an evil sound. But when
one wishes to describe Keller’s women, the old word suggests itself
again, for his women are good Courage-givers; they are bright as a
spring morning which expands the heart and rejoices the soul of man,
refreshing as the first verdure of the year, and sweet as the young,
juicy grass of the meadows.

Where did Keller learn to know these women who are such genuinely
natural beings, such harmonious, unspoilt, sensitive natures? Where did
he first see Judith, little Meret, his village Juliet, and the numerous
other revelations in his portrait gallery? In this respect, Gottfried
Keller stands alone and unequalled by any in his century.

We have only to turn to the classics. Schiller’s woman was composed of
little else than a long skirt, and the same may be said of his entire
progeny of sentimental and pathetic dramatists extending down to our
own time. If one took away the skirt there was something underneath it
which bore a strong resemblance to a young man, a being who was half a
man in its actions and feelings, just as the women in Lessing’s dramas
are, for the most part, dialecticians in veils and stays. At the end
of the last century and the beginning of this there were no less than
an entire group of authors who were remarkable for their inability to
create women, and they tried to make up for it by introducing their own
nature into that of the opposite sex. Even Kleist sometimes resorted
to this method. It was the origin of all their heroines who inspirited
men to brave deeds and encouraged the faint-hearted, from the Maid of
Orleans onwards, they were nothing but men split in half; the authors
personified their own grand qualities and then contrasted them with
their own weaknesses in the person of the woman.

The century advanced, and woman in German literature was and remained
the superior being, the exalted being, the more loving being; it
was always she who was the most energetic in love and who led the
way to action. Compare the writings of Gutzkow and Spielhagen. It
was woman who made man happy with the gift of her love, it was she
who condescended to the worshipping man, while he rejoiced in her
love without exactly understanding it. Woman stood upon a pedestal,
indescribable, incomprehensible, she was “the exalted woman.” Some
partial authors designated her in high-flown language as “sublime.”
This sublime woman, whom men were made to worship with an ecstatic
reverence, played a favourite part in the novels of second-rate authors
and authoresses whose works were most popular in lending libraries.

There was not the faintest trace of anything of this sort in Keller’s
novels. There was no perverseness there, no amazement, no holding up of
the hands in adoration. There were none of those strange moods which a
man is said to respect although he cannot understand them, and which
have provided a subject for many volumes, and problems for as many
authors.

In his representation of woman, Keller very nearly falls out of the
frame of this sentimental period.

What can be the cause of it? What was the sombre influence which failed
to influence him, while it united the other writers of the different
schools, the writers of the classical age, of young Germany and of the
older period? Why is it that he is almost the only one in whom there
lurks no trace of the bombast style or the high-flown phrases of the
“storm and stress” and the eight-and-forty period?

The answer to both these questions is the same. He is, so far as
my knowledge extends, the only one among all the German writers of
the century who has either wholly escaped from, or been completely
unsusceptible to, the Rousseau epidemic in its various forms of
inoculation.

This undoubtedly proves Keller’s superiority to the other authors, both
as an individual and as a man with regard to women.

It was Rousseau who introduced the worship of woman into literature,
and likewise her superiority, and her resemblance to man.

There were, as we ascertain from reading Rousseau’s _Confessions_,
not only psychological but also physiological reasons to account for
this, and here the modern student of culture may find fresh ground for
enquiry.

Rousseau was the author who introduced something entirely new. It
was Rousseau, the half Frenchman, who introduced the element of
high-sounding sentimentality into a literature which had hitherto known
nothing of it. It was Rousseau, the bourgeois with the character of a
plebeian, who introduced a new class into literature, a class which had
grown up in a time of revolution; it was he who introduced the feelings
of a plebeian in relation to a woman of higher birth than himself.

This man was one of those by no means rare specimens of persons who
are born with perverse sexual instincts, who have more than once been
known to exercise a secret influence on the direction of human thought
and feeling. He could not feel as a man in relation to a woman, he felt
strongest towards her as her offspring, her subject, her slave. He felt
impelled to raise her above him and to amalgamate love with filial
affection, and this was how the “exalted woman” found her way into
literature.

Rousseau influenced the younger writers of Germany. The literature
of the _ancien régime_, which had helped to form the early youth of
Lessing and Goethe, had been frivolous and chivalrous, but not in any
way distorted. It was Rousseau who introduced the distorted element,
intermingled with his theories about liberty and fresh air, for in this
latter respect he was as Swiss as Keller.

The younger writers became filled with revolutionary ideas, they went
into ecstasies over Rousseau and wrote like him. The impulses which he
had inspired continued to bear fruit in the works of popular writers
long after the Germany of our century had ceased to read him.

The number of ideas will not bear comparison with the number of their
promulgators. It is a well-known fact that a very few commonplace ideas
are sufficient to nourish the intellect, for ideas in themselves are
of no great importance however much they may be pushed to the fore.
Impulses are of chief importance. Ideas have only to do with thinking,
but impulses distrain body and mind alike, and a given impulse is like
an acoustic vibration which ebbs and flows in numberless vibrations,
and dies away so gradually that one cannot say for certain when it has
stopped. Yet an impulse may be the result of mere chance, and it is so
generally. A young, strong, excitable race, in which the strength of
generations is collected, stands waiting for an indefinable “something”
which shall correspond with its embryo condition. This “something”
comes, and the fruitful soil procreates it over and over again, until
the land is exhausted by the same seed and reproduces it weaker and
weaker. A new literature is always accompanied by a new conception of
woman, because woman is the author’s chief point, and in that respect
he is like the bird in spring who sings as he goes in search of his
little mate. Yet Rousseau’s personal views of woman, united as they
were with a national temperament which was full of deep feeling, though
without much faculty for observation, was destined to bear fruit for a
hundred years in a literature where a thousand figures bear witness to
their origin.

When the German Empire was founded, German literature became extinct.
Germany became the land of manhood _par préférence_, and the worship
of woman was treated as a myth at which people sceptically shook their
heads. But in the fundamental conception of social democracy the myth
descends upon the earth under another form.

Perhaps it is because all eyes are now turned in a different direction
that no one has noticed the inner freedom, the inconceivable stamp of
personality that betrays itself in the manner in which Keller gazes at
woman. That Keller does not reflect with her, that he does not idealise
her, these are the distinctive features which form as it were a key to
the right comprehension of Keller’s women.

If we examine his characters one by one they will soon shew us of what
material they were made.

Gottfried Keller had two starting points from whence he depicted
woman, and which appear to have come so naturally to him that it is
impossible to suppose that they cost him much thought; we, however,
give them our attention, because, in the first place, we are in search
of another literary basis, and, secondly, because on these two points
he is essentially a child of the age with which he otherwise has
little in common. One of his starting points is the simplification
of life and of woman, and the restriction of the same to decided,
easily varied, and primitive forms. To this many will object that the
scheming thus involved is a mistake with which Keller, least of all
men, deserves to be reproached, for he is essentially one of Germany’s
richest authors and the one who possesses most strongly the creative
faculty. But for that very reason, because he is rich, it is all the
more important to examine his works and to discover how small is the
amount of material hitherto made use of in the literature, not only
of Germany, but also of France and Scandinavia. Keller introduced the
true and authentic psychology of a healthy woman, of whom he himself
says in _Ursula_: “She was like a little spot of fruitful soil which
turns green again as soon as it is refreshed by a ray of sunshine and
a drop of dew.” This psychology originated with simple conditions of
life and less complicated personalities than those which surround us
nowadays, when fifty years have gone by since Keller’s youth--youth
being the most impressionable period of human life. Whenever we stop to
observe the characters of people who have attained to a certain height
of spiritual culture, with whom I do not include the inhabitants of
towns, because they are out of the question in a discussion on Keller,
but country people and the dwellers in small villages,--we find that in
Switzerland, as in other parts of Europe, we need only to probe to the
hidden depths of human nature to discover outstanding personalities in
women, even amongst those living in the plainest and least artificial
surroundings.

This is easily accounted for by the fact that our facilities for
gaining a personal knowledge of one another have greatly increased
of late years, and also that our capacity for reading the text of
human nature has developed itself both in breadth and depth. Our
self-consciousness has become wide awake, our personal needs are more
complicated, and our understanding of one another is finer and more
flexible than it used to be, while our feelings in general have become
more sensitive and we are more easily moved than formerly. What before
Keller’s time were whole notes with a stop, became with Keller half
notes dwelling long on an even tone, and are now an irritating rising
and falling of semiquavers which require a finer ear and between
which the pauses are fewer. Our notion of health itself has undergone
continual changes, and is changing still. With Keller it signifies
something symmetrical, something which changes unwillingly and then
only to spring back again into what it was at first. It is health in
the abstract, something universal and typical and authentic, but which
would not suffice for the present creative characteristic, since we
know to how many oscillations, to how much heaviness, discomfort and
suffering, even the most vigorous health is subject; moreover, we know
that health in other words is really nothing but a certain overplus of
vital energy which helps us on to our legs again every time that we
succumb. But as for meaning anything absolute, continuous and unbroken,
as in the case of animal life--that, although it may have been Keller’s
meaning, is not health in the sense that we understand it now.

The literature which bases its creations on this interpretation of
human nature is now only in its first groping beginnings; the authors
whose nerves are as a sensitive, stringed instrument are scarce
indeed--there are but one or two.

Keller, who is the most modern writer of the old school, always
describes woman as normally healthy, whereas the modern French authors
describe her as being always ill; it was they who introduced the great
army of _détraquées_, in the same way as the modern Scandinavians
continually describe the emancipated woman in her various phases.
But, after all, these are only features on the surface of time,
opinions without foundation, rays without focus, they are old ways
and old methods in new and cheap clothing. Our object is to pursue
the outward phenomena to their physiological roots, and to unravel
the intricate skeins which have woven themselves out of the physical
qualifications of woman in her conflict with the laws and influences of
the surrounding world. For woman, as regards her outward surroundings,
is the most dependent creature upon earth, while as regards her
natural disposition, she is the most self-willed. A true poet ought to
understand this without being told. And as it happens the poets have
all written a verse upon it and have altered the text to make it suit;
this they have done out of a manly love of theorising--with or without
experience of life. But the modern French writers, like the modern
Scandinavians, looked chiefly into their own little corner of the world
and studied the little extract of life against which it was their luck
to run their noses. It was an author’s experience, and nothing more!

Old Gottfried Keller saw considerably further, but then he was not a
writer with a purpose.

It was not that he had absorbed himself too deeply in the physiological
question, but rather that it shone through everything he wrote. It
went with him according to the Biblical saying of the many who run
in vain, while the children of Heaven are given it in their sleep.
He never racked his brains about it, and with advancing years the
gift naturally forsook him also, and when he thought over it in order
to make a motive, as with the religious insanity of Ursula, or the
hereditary madness of Leu, there was naturally not much scope left
for individuality. Yet if he did but glance at a real live woman with
thoughtful and contented eyes, all her physical and intellectual
endowments seemed to shine through her. We have only to think of
Judith and little Meret, both of whom we have already mentioned, but
especially of the woman in the _Seven Legends_. The natural impulses,
the instinct which makes a woman of her, the plus or minus of the
sensitive faculty and of individual feeling, the marked nobility
or peculiar perverseness, each resting on its own physiological
foundation, are clearly discernible in every one of Keller’s women; let
us recall, for instance, the gentle approach of old-maid-dom in the
intellectual and cultivated Lux (_An Epigram_), the missionary zeal of
the anæmic Afra Zigonia in the story of Herr Zwiehahn (_Green Henry_),
Frau Litumlei’s indolent obsequiousness, and good Frau Amrain’s
suppression of sexual feeling after her unhappy marriage, etc.


III

Keller preferred to describe women, and he did it with the greatest
ease. We can tell by the construction of his sentences how smoothly the
work developed under his touch, and how easily everything found its
way into its proper place without exertion on his part or any need for
serious thought; whereas with his male characters, or those of them
at least who were not of a purely superficial nature, it was by no
means such an easy task. The thread knotted and broke where one least
expected it, and the texture became unequal and lost its freshness as
though it had been woven by hot and trembling fingers. They were a
trouble to him, not a pleasure, and when we see Keller turning a sudden
somersault in the middle of one of his most serious passages, we may
feel assured that he did it, not out of arrogance, but in order to
make good his escape. He had one characteristic which must have been
as common in ancient times as it is at present, although it may have
sprung from a too individual refinement to find room for expression,
it was a characteristic which is common enough among young lyric poets
whom it generally leads to their downfall, while Keller, because he
had just missed being a lyric poet, was able to provide it with a warm
and sheltered corner where it might grow in secret. It consisted in
that species of love for women which produces great erotic geniuses,
where human longing is mingled with a capacity for spiritual affection,
the body is permeated by the soul, desire is purified, and spiritual
affection itself vibrates with desire. From a condition such as this,
with its great expectations and still greater disappointments, the
bitterest women-haters may be evolved. But it is rare, or at least it
seldom comes into the light of day, and in the case of Gottfried Keller
it was probably only a latent characteristic. It was there none the
less. We can distinguish it in _Green Henry_, the story of his own
youth, in the strange way by which he is attracted by woman and longs
to be near her and to breathe her atmosphere, while at the same time he
is filled with mistrust for the only woman who loves him passionately,
as Judith does. He is afraid of wasting his abundance on a desert soil
which gives him nothing in return, he has an instinctive misgiving
that he must become inseparable from the one with whom he is united,
a foreboding that he is one of love’s elect--a susceptible stringed
instrument, a being with sensitive nerves which awake the impulse and
then hold him back. In the second edition of _Green Henry_, which was
published in Keller’s old age, he added the end of the story of Judith,
which describes his personal manner of giving and receiving love. It
was this love, which was not continued long enough for him to weary of
it, to which he owed his unequalled comprehension of women. His need
of woman made her the continual subject of his dreams and caused his
fancies to take shape whenever he wrote of her. It was to this that he
owed a very peculiar quality which shows itself in his autobiographical
story, _Green Henry_; it lent him that incomparable diagnosis of woman,
which, with its purely intuitive grasp of the everlasting variable,
would have made of him a woman’s doctor of the first rank, if he had
not had too much of the poet and the artist in him; while the absence
of this same attribute is the cause of the grossest blunders in the
majority of women’s doctors, who regard the sensitive woman with a
feeling partly of disgust and partly as though she were a comic figure.

It was this also which made him sensitive and harsh with regard to any
malformations in woman, enabling him to detect every abnormity. If
he came upon any such thing in the act of blossoming, his anger knew
no bounds, he would have liked to strip naked the poisonous vermin
and to beat it across the country from frontier to frontier, had such
punishment been consistent with the laws of our civilisation.

There was one satisfaction, however, which he would not allow himself
to be deprived of. He warned the public against the outrages of the
woman’s rights movement which was then in its infancy, and thus he
became the forerunner of his Scandinavian colleague Strindberg.

I have already remarked that there was one special peculiarity in
Keller’s great romance, _Green Henry_, and I must add that it was one
which puzzled me for years. It was the hero’s passiveness with regard
to women and the insignificant position which he occupied as an active
agent. There was no lack of opportunity, for he was obviously one of
those young men who possess a strong attraction for the Eves of the
opposite sex. Anna tries gently to tempt him, Judith takes him by
force, while the forlorn Agnes nearly dies of love for him and silently
offers herself, thereby claiming compensation for her injured soul;
the starving sempstress is also willing, and so is little Dorothy
of the iron image. But Green Henry is never seen to move. He goes
about amongst them like a sleep-walker and appears to have no other
sensations than such as are caused by a heavy heart. It was not until
long afterwards, when I became acquainted with another erotic writer
and had read his writings, that I understood this characteristic
feature in all its sincerity.

There are a whole row of erotic writers who belong to what we
might call the pseudo-erotic school. They are the conquerors, the
“Tannhäusers.” They recount their adventures and place them in their
true light, and themselves also; they think both of themselves and
their listeners. Woman is to them an object, which they possess--the
rosebud, which they pluck. They are the vainglorious who boast of love,
and whom the multitude run after. The others have positively nothing to
say, they feel in silence, they experience in silence, they are sparing
of their words because their hearts overflow. They do not magnify their
own importance, because for them life is everything, and woman the only
object of their interest and their study. Keller was erotic in this
sense, and that is why Green Henry is so feebly drawn. His experiences
were unconscious ones, but his impressions were a surprise to him and
he was deeply conscious of them. This is the reason why in nearly all
writings where love and woman are revealed to man, the man seems to
fall into the background.

There is a good deal of the _Sensitiva-amorosa_ nature about Keller,
though it is still in the bud, and a comparatively green bud too.
It is there nevertheless, and it shows itself in _Green Henry_,
in _The Governor of Greifensee_, and in other places besides. His
longing for love goes forth in search of an object, but his sensitive
personality holds him back, afraid lest he should be drawn into an
unequal union and made to suffer its painful and destructive results.
He is not formed out of the coarse material which recognises itself
as the master of the woman, he knows that in love and through loving
the woman becomes the mistress of the master, and he shrinks from a
stupid, small-minded, unworthy mistress. This is why his novels are
full of incessant meetings and partings, and while the parting in
_Green Henry_ takes place with all the melancholy natural to youth, it
becomes quite a cheerful event in the _Governor of Greifensee_, and
the lovers separate in one of those half sad, half humorous moods when
we congratulate ourselves on having escaped a serious danger. He never
pictures a woman more alive, or with a keener observation accompanied
by more characteristic details, than when he describes her in just
such a humorous situation as this. At no other time does he describe
so vividly the intellectual poverty, the emptiness of woman--that
emptiness which is so peculiarly feminine, although the exact opposite
is the popular opinion, and which proves the absence of any really
deep, personal feeling. Woman falls in love with externals, with a pair
of large, glowering eyes, a loud voice, an actor, or a clergyman like
the earnest Aglaya, and she leaves off loving as soon as she is wooed
by a person with more individuality than herself, as, for example, in
_The Sensitive Hedge-Sparrow_. Or when it becomes apparent that the man
does not come of a sufficiently wealthy and presentable family, for
example: _Salome_. Or when, like Leu, she is a refined, truly amiable
and intelligent woman, who is led astray by a dubious theory about
heredity, thereby forfeiting her own and her lover’s happiness.

There is another _Sensitiva-amorosa_ trait which is that love makes us
sad and melancholy. For those who are real erotic geniuses, love is
not a trifle to occupy their spare moments, they cannot leave her at
intervals and then follow their professions holding their heads high.
No, they cannot hold their heads high, that is just it; love takes
them entirely by surprise, she has no mercy and no pity; those who
have had other experience may rest content, for evidently they have
never known what it is to love. Love pursues her victim like fate, and
he sinks beneath her powerful grasp. He wanders in darkness as though
it were night, while she is all in all to him, and everything else
is forgotten. This is why Green Henry remains in the Count’s castle,
under the spell of graceful, cunning little Dorothy, when he ought to
have been on his way to the poor mother who was dying of sorrow. He can
do nothing unless her eyes rest upon his work, and for this reason he
can paint pictures for the Count although he cannot write a letter to
his mother. He describes his love for Dorothy in the deep symbol of an
iron image which feels like a heavy burden that he bears continually
in his heart. But in the midst of this enchantment his inner self
struggles for freedom; his sensitive nature is conscious of not having
experienced the fervent affection of which it is capable, his love is
not sufficiently intense for him to give himself up entirely. This
fervent affection for which he seeks, and in which he feels that he can
rest without compulsion and without loss to himself, this his sensitive
nature finds at last in Judith.

Judith is _the_ woman, the apocalypse of woman even for Keller, the
embodiment of warm-hearted sympathy. In this woman, of whom he wrote at
two different periods of his life, are united all his most fantastic
ideas about women, together with all his most personal experiences. She
is the most daring revelation of love that German literature, with its
strict conventions, possesses. She is considerably older than Green
Henry, and Keller is not in the least afraid of saying so. She is a
woman in the full bloom of life, who has reached the age when a strong
healthy woman is the most attractive, and Green Henry is eighteen years
old. These contrasts, who are mutually attracted to one another, are
frequent everywhere except in the literature of Germany. But the cause
of this mutual attraction is by no means the most elevated; Judith
is a mature, sensuous woman and Green Henry is an immature, sensuous
youth. She has lived amongst coarse-grained peasants and is very
coarse-grained herself; but when she comes in contact with Henry’s more
refined and complicated nature, she becomes a thorough woman, _i.e._
plastic material. Judith has none of that innate stupidity which so
often causes the woman to maintain her ascendancy over the man, to the
destruction of his happiness. At first she is imperious and exacting,
but as she sees more of Green Henry she gradually changes into a loving
woman, by which I mean a self-subjecting woman, for a woman who loves
cannot do otherwise than subject herself. He goes into the world, she
goes to America. Keller does not tell us much about her while she is
there. Time passes and Green Henry comes home, a _Sensitiva_ and poetic
nature with whom the world has dealt harshly. His vitality is slackened
and he feels depressed. Judith meets him, after having sought for him
as one whom love has bewitched, who cannot forget; hers is the love of
a strong, whole-hearted woman, smitten in the depths of her nature,
willing to cast everything aside if only she may love. Her love has
nothing to offer, and she does not believe that she can make him
happy, she only begs in silence to be allowed to remain with him, for
he is all she has in the world. She makes no stipulation, she asks for
no outward sign, she requires no vindication in the eyes of mankind, he
is free to come and go when he will. Green Henry can endure love after
this manner, and they love one another.

In the story of little Meret, Keller probes deeper still into the
nature of woman. Little Meret is Judith over again in the person of a
martyred child; it is Judith’s nature in the bud.

In the first volume of _Green Henry_, Keller informs us that he found
the story of poor little Meret among the papers of an orthodox pastor
in the beginning of the eighteenth century; but according to Bächtold,
in _Keller’s Letters_, she seems to have been an invention of his own.
However this may be, the story of little Meret, the witch-child, is the
most valuable contribution towards a study of the psychology of the
child-woman that we possess in German literature.

In this story Keller displayed the secret nature of the child-woman
in its rarest perfection and vitality, which is a thing that a man
can scarcely understand and which no woman likes to talk about. It is
one of those revelations which belong only to him who is born a poet
in soul and nerves and every fibre of his being, born an unconscious
poet, by which I mean an intuitive seer. In this child, tormented
to death, is displayed the primeval trait, the innermost kernel of
woman’s nature, and the woman of genius in the bud is made visible.
Little Meret possesses the one quality, the only one through which
woman is more nearly related to nature than man, it is a carefully
concealed quality, seen only by the few, but which for ever shuts out
the woman from outward conformity with the man, and which is the key
to her most secret, most mysterious witchcraft--her wildness. The best
and the worst women are not docile and tameable, they are not capable
of being cultivated and civilised like man--such are only women of
middling quality--they are ungovernable, irreverent, full of instinct,
nothing but feminine instinct. Whence should come the regeneration of
humanity, unless it be from the unused sources of nature, the source
of woman’s unconscious glory? Whence should proceed the mysterious
power of loving, with love’s inexplicable dominion over souls, unless
it be from the unfathomable, the incomprehensible nature of woman,
with her utter disregard for law and justice and all the rest of the
intricate building of commonsense upon which human society is founded?
Owing to her physiological structure woman is a creature of instinct,
and this instinct is her most precious possession, the heritage which
she bequeaths to future generations; it is always the same instinct,
whether it reveals itself in an evil race of feminine malefactors such
as Strindberg’s women, or in the richly gifted specimens of Keller’s
apocalypse of woman: Judith and little Meret. They are not to be
forced in either case! They are all children of nature.

Judith finds the man to whom it is natural to submit herself of her
own free will. Little Meret is hunted to death because she refuses to
submit herself to a stupid and ignorant training, and one morning they
find her lying naked and dead in the garden. She preferred to freeze to
death there than to live indoors, in a hideous, unbecoming, penitential
dress. Here we have the genius of the child-woman to whom her sense of
beauty and the consciousness of her power to charm is her one and only
possession. Here lies the true genius of woman; all her intellectual
powers and all her strivings after outward emancipation are unnatural
invasions into the territory of man.

Keller kept a sharp and malicious eye fixed on what we might call the
hybrid type of humanity. For him it possessed the attraction of a
repulsive object, and he would not let it escape him. As a man who was
born sensitive and erotic, to whom woman was a necessity and a delight,
he held all such in abhorrence. The same instinct which enabled him
to describe little Meret, that nervous child of the Renaissance, gave
him the power to understand those abnormities of whose true nature the
clever men of our time are so ignorant that they do their utmost to
encourage them. It is true that social problems were far simpler in
Keller’s day, he for instance knew nothing of the daily bread question,
and when he saw any trace of it, he laughed it to scorn, as in the
case of the wretched inhabitants of Seldwyler, who trained their
daughters as governesses and companions, and then cheated the poor
creatures out of the hard-earned savings which they had received in
return for their squandered lives.

But the times when Keller attacked these women in solemn earnest was
when they brought their intellectual or artistic pretensions before his
notice. In the story of poor Regina there is a lady artist who is a
manlike, priggish creature, only there to be the misfortune of others.
Keller in his indignation has not spared the trouble to describe her
character with many carefully studied details. She is the woman with a
profession who “no longer wants man.”

In another passage, in the _Seven Legends_, he describes the learned
woman who does not wish to have any dealings with men, who despises
love, and makes copy out of her male companions.

She ends by becoming a monk and abbot in a monastery. But one day “she
felt with a bitter sorrow that she was thrust out from a more beautiful
world,” and if she, after having arrived at this understanding, did not
share the same fate as Strindberg’s _Miss Julia_, she had only to thank
the nobler character of the man whom she chanced to meet.

Keller speculated a great deal upon these hybrid beings. Not only
on the turning of women into men by manly occupations, of which
England and Scandinavia have provided numerous instances during
the last quarter of the present century, but he also touched upon a
more profound, and as yet scarcely explored territory, the stages
of transition between man and woman and the combination of the two
characters in the same person. The anecdote of the Emperor Nero, who
dressed himself like a woman, and insisted that he was going to have
a child, gave him a great deal to think about. His poetic insight
extended over the whole territory of organic phenomena, and his
instinct was too true to dismiss that which might have a physical
explanation with less thought than that which was a purely mental
trouble. In those most precious pearls, his _Seven Legends_, the
relation of the sexes is the foundation for every single story. Every
time it is a woman with a perverted soul, one who in consequence of
some inward or outward influence has relinquished her feminine nature.
A woman may err as much as she likes, provided she does it naturally,
but should she act contrary to her nature as a woman, Keller will never
forgive her. In every legend he introduces a Bible or Church tenet to
which he gives a profane interpretation.

In this mischievous little book the Holy Virgin, contrary to all
traditions, comes to the fore as an enthusiastic matchmaker, and
disdains no means whereby she may bring together two silly people who
do not know how to manage the matter for themselves. A pious monk is
alienated from the Church by a little girl who is desirous of marrying
him. An hysterical saint makes a love-lorn youth as hysterical as
herself; and even the muses go astray in Paradise and behave in such a
manner that the Holy Trinity is obliged to silence them by a loud clap
of thunder.

In the midst of these distorted elements, the history of the nun “who
went out of the convent to quiet her longing” is great and strong as
the everlasting evangel of the fulfilment of human love. In these
stories we have human love itself in a plain but mighty symbol--spring
with its storms bursting its obtruding bonds, summer with its hot
raptures, autumn with its fruits, and winter with its calm.




_Paul Heyse and the Incommensurable_


I

Warmth, sunshine, peace, and a soft, fresh wind. The blunt peaks of the
Bavarian mountains appear above the horizon with their hollows full
of snow, the pale blue lake glistens with streaks of silver in the
midday sun, and a soft, blue mist obscures the distant view. There is a
gentle, monotonous sound of murmuring wind, the first flies of the year
are buzzing on the window pane, and the buds on the trees are bursting
their scales. The meadows are sparsely clothed in green and speckled
yellow and white with cowslips and anemones. Everything is so still, so
still that you can hear your own pulse beat, but presently you hear it
no more--you are lifted up into the Infinite.

Still, quite still, a half-wakened, susceptible murmuring within, the
soul enjoying its siesta and the mind at rest--such should be your mood
ere you immerse yourself in Paul Heyse. You do not read him, you do not
need to think about him, yet your pulse beats faster and your lungs
breathe the pure air of the silent mountains, while somewhere in the
distance you catch a murmuring sound as of the loud tumultuous world;
or is it only the torrent that flows behind the house?

Paul Heyse’s best writings are only for those who are quite young
or for those who are quite mature, for those who are still dreaming
innocent dreams on the threshold of life, or for those who have dived
down and emerged again from the dusty, gasping tumult, and who stand on
one side, not wishing to enter again upon the “Steeplechase for life.”

This accounts for his unpopularity at the present time.

Outwardly he belongs to an older period which has long ceased to be,
but inwardly he belongs to a new period which has not yet begun. He
stands before the young people of our time as a classic and an Epigoni,
a polished and well-preserved gentleman who contrasts unfavourably with
their unbrushed coats, weak spines and sickly faces; he stands before
them as an old gentleman who has gained an easy victory, whereas they
are panting neurotics ruining themselves in the struggle after renown
and the new culture, who grudge him his intuition and despise his
old-fashioned methods.

There is a peculiarity about Paul Heyse which consists in its being
almost impossible to remember his writings, there is so little material
substance in them, they are not at all attractive at first, and virtue
is seen too seldom to sit at table with him after crime has expended
itself.

But we will now leave virtue for the residue, it is a moral necessity
in which the _juste milieu_ between socialists and anarchists is
encountered. Paul Heyse would certainly never have lived to be sixty
years of age, and a celebrated author into the bargain, if he had not
made some concessions to respectable principles; but the manner in
which he did it is very unsatisfactory. He does not pant beneath the
burden of the moral law, nor does he quarrel with it, he merely avoids
it mechanically, as one avoids a bailiff.

His best writings lie on the further side of the ten commandments,
middle class decorum and the penal code. They are included in the
mysterious province of instinct and impulse, and are sometimes so
dreamy that one sees that they are the production of the writer’s
intuitive nerves rather than the result of serious thinking.

It is this that distinguishes Heyse from the German authors of our
day, and because his intuition is so fine, his susceptibility so
delicately toned, he is one of the greatest diviners in the province of
spiritualised sexuality that has ever been, or now is. And because he
was always an intuitive physiologist, he was also a convinced fatalist.
He, with his poet’s soul, had gazed beyond the accepted standard of
good and evil long before Nietzsche, he had recognised the present
type of emancipated womanhood long before the Woman’s Rights movement
was in full swing. It was this delicate sensibility which put him in
touch with every secret movement before it had gained ground and become
universal, and it is because he possessed this fine susceptibility of
the nerves that he became acknowledged as the only one among German
authors who knew how to write about love.

Outside the birds are twittering, the torrent roars and the wind of
early spring moans around the house, bringing a longing with it, a
vague, restless longing for freedom and happiness, a longing to lose
one’s self and to live one’s own life to a degree that is not possible
on earth, a longing to shake off everything that holds one down and to
be united to the Infinite....

It is the yearning of first youth, which returns again with passionate
tears in last youth ... it is the yearning peculiar to Heyse, the
longing of the awakened child-girl and the sorrowful desire of the
matured woman, these are the two types of womanhood which he has
divined as no one else has done, these are the two passionate ages, the
beginning and the end, between which lies the much-trodden, phlegmatic
middle path.

Woman is a revelation only in her youth and in her age, in her
first blossoming and in the years when she begins to fade; all that
lies between is merely education, common sense, discretion and that
luke-warm temperament in which the majority of bourgeois marriages are
contracted.


II

If we are matured women, we read Heyse as those who know; if we are
child-women, we read him as a guide. Heyse is not one of those who
convey strong impressions to feed the hunger of impatient youth; the
external events, the comings and goings of his heroes and heroines, and
their names and destinies do not remain long in the memory. What does
remain is an emotional feeling, something that words are powerless to
describe, but which returns as often as we read him. And the day comes
when an event in our lives causes it to return again with more force
than before, and with advancing years it begins to personify womanly
nature and to weigh good and evil according to an unknown standard;
later on there comes again another day when this emotion comes forth
from the unknown and reveals itself to consciousness, not to the
consciousness of the mind, and not exactly to the consciousness of
the soul, but to a corporeal consciousness, strange as it may sound.
The time has now come when this consciousness must rule woman’s most
private life in accordance with laws which do not appear in connection
with the outer world, with impressions which custom has never foreseen,
and with sensations of attraction and repulsion which no longer make
themselves feebly felt as of old. Woman has become conscious of her
own personality, she has become manifest to herself, she has attained
the consciousness of her own nobility, she has discovered a foundation
for the expression of her desire to love and be loved. This basis of
the relations between man and woman is not an outward form, it is a
physical condition, it is a sensitive expression of being, it is the
greatness of the soul.

Paul Heyse is the only German author who has made this greatness of the
soul in erotic matters the chief point in his philosophy of life, and
he is the only one who has revealed it as the point of sensibility in
the relations between man and woman.

It was owing to the fact that he introduced this characteristic into
literature and into the consciousness of the period, thereby making it
the foundation of an entire literature, that he became something more
than a German author. He became a world-wide celebrity, one of the few
through whom a new step in sensations has found expression, and through
whom humanity has achieved a marked progress on the road to culture.
I will not speak of all that Heyse has been to the best women. I will
not speak of all that it signified to these women, when, on their
spiritual and physical awakening in this world of barren conventions,
they were met by a man who, with one stroke of the magic wand of his
intuitive faculty for divining, awoke the hot spring which is woman’s
one and only possession, the source of her genius and of her whole
character, her spiritualised, harmonised sexuality. Where and in what
other nation has there ever been a writer who awoke this spring? Not
even the susceptible Paul Bourget, who has been feeling after it for so
long, not even he found it, not one of the Englishmen and Englishwomen
who write so philosophically, humorously and sensibly, not even they
discovered it, not even the otherwise so tender-hearted Dickens ever
had the slightest suspicion of it. And as far as the Scandinavians
are concerned--with one single exception--the Danes are the only ones
who deserve any attention with regard to erotics, and even in the
midst of their refined, purified tenderness, there is a cold spot,
something which resembles a damp fog in the innermost heart of their
susceptibility; for them love is always more or less of an artificial
matter, an æsthetic satisfaction, a satisfaction or enjoyment which
is self-analytical. But in Paul Heyse the nature of passion remains
dark as the night in which one loves, unreflected as all spontaneous
impulses, unconscious as the love in German folk-songs. Think of the
tale of _Laurence and Laura_ which sounds like some primeval melody
issuing from the soul of the German people. It contains nothing
transcendental, for while we would speak of it with all tender respect,
we must own that it is the expression of an entirely sensuous yearning.
At a certain period of his authorship Heyse’s writings were as simple
as these half-forgotten folk-songs; he explained, from the point of
view of a noble nature, that eternal schism betwixt body and soul
which has ever been the favourite subject of coarser writers, he has
explained it as a peaceful, boundless and unconscious emotion whereby
a person is transported into the love which has neither beginning nor
end, every phase of which and every form of expression--the purely
spiritual as well as the purely physical--is equally sweet, equally
refreshing, and is always the same breath of life which cannot be
explained and cannot be imparted. The self-surrender is complete and
unhesitating, because spiritual passion does not end with the physical
purpose; the soul which exists only in the other is humble, as all that
is noble must ever be in the presence of the Incommensurable--which is
Love.

Love is the Incommensurable; who has ever said that before, who has
ever felt it? In the early folk-songs it has been both said and felt,
and Goethe has declared it in the loving and playful manner of the
eighteenth century, but in our youngest literature, and not only in
that of Germany, it is scarcely ever either said or felt. In its
place we have free love, where they take one another on trial and end
by settling down for convenience’s sake, after the third or fourth
attempt. It is a practical and plebeian method, worthy of the age, but
it is not love. What stolid minds and dense souls must they have who
need first to take one another on trial! For these thick-skinned ones
love is an intellectual partnership, or a partnership of interests;
maybe they are two libertines who have come across one another in their
search for satisfaction. Of course these forms are the most frequent,
but they lie on the boundary between barbarism and decadence and are
constantly losing their balance on one side or the other.

The love which Paul Heyse saw and described is vitality itself. With
him love is the essence of vitality, and as the entire philosophy of
life is based on that which one feels to be the spark of vitality, so
love is the central point in his philosophy. He always describes love
as an extraordinary revelation of accumulated strength and power. Love
does not hesitate, does not lead astray, does not diminish; as soon as
love appears she makes straight for the beloved object whose presence
she discerns amongst thousands the instant that he enters the circle
of her atmosphere. No sooner does she find herself in the presence
of the beloved, to whom she is thus sympathetically attracted, than
she becomes the victim of a peculiar emotion which Heyse has never
expressed in words, and which it would be very difficult to describe.
It is an ardent yearning, a stretching of oneself like the plant to
the sun, silent and not to be averted; all the activities of life
concentrate themselves towards this one object, the attainment of
which means a hitherto unknown force, while the reverse would mean
decay. There is no alternative, it must be either an indescribable
salvation, or else extinction. To be susceptible of this kind of love
and, with the certainty of one who walks in his sleep, to discover the
beloved as the one who is organically sympathetic amid thousands whom
we either dislike or who are indifferent to us--is the sure sign of
a very high culture and of a rare physical and spiritual purity. Just
as the instincts of natural selection are being continually perfected
together with more sensitive nerves and soul vibrations, just as the
spiritual and sensuous needs attain a higher degree of intensity and
importance in measure as they are purified and rendered more personal,
so in like manner the unhesitating precision of the instinct of
selection, which is the latest quality attained, is the first which
the approach of degeneration causes to disappear. In the contemporary
literature of Russia, France, and Scandinavia we possess a whole row
of extraordinarily good, analytical sketches of these degenerates. The
majority of the principal characters in these exquisite psychological
studies are no longer able to love, and Paul Bourget has introduced
a peculiar type to which these belong. Or else they are not yet able
to love for want of spiritual and physical culture--Garborg and
Strindberg have made these their special study. On the one side we
have degeneration, on the other barbarism, and sometimes a mixture
of both. Heyse is the only writer who has described the capacity and
necessity for loving which are the organic conditions of love; but as
he is not an analyst, and perhaps only an unconscious psychologist, he
is not able to tell us why it is that his creations are so permeated
with ardent love that his best characters are nothing else but love
intensified and personified.

Does he really not know it? Or is it that he will not tell us? Perhaps
it does not suit the technical method upon which his talent is formed.
Deep though the analytical powers of our modern psychologists are,
their human perception is shallow in the extreme. With him there is no
analysis, but his perception is clear as truth itself. Our best modern
Europeans have not yet got beyond realising the fact that love is a
necessity which it is more or less difficult to satisfy; he leaves the
necessity on one side as being too obvious to need exemplifying. He
does not concern himself as to whether or not it is there, he asks how
it can be satisfied, satisfied in that choice manner which a refined
and spiritualised sensibility requires. From this point of view he
is the most modern of modern writers, and for him love becomes the
Incommensurable.

The question is now no longer whether it is or is not possible to
live happily together, but whether the one finds that other with whom
marriage means rapture and bliss. The union of souls must be complete,
otherwise separation will ensue. These are the requirements of the
highest culture, and of persons who are possessed of a truly noble
personality.

Heyse never wearied of describing this noble personality from every
possible point of view, and every time he did it with more or less
success. He described it in the early dawn of day when the awakening
senses are shy and reserved in the presence of the strange mystical
power which shall decide their fate. He has described it in the quiet,
fatalistic waiting for the great revelation of life which may come,
or may perhaps never come, since it is not in the power of man to
force it. He has described it in that inner self-destruction when the
soul, through its own fault or that of another, tarnishes its proud
righteousness and can no longer be a law unto itself. He has described
it in the evening glow, by which it lets itself be illuminated and
consumed. And all these characters have the greatest self-sufficiency
combined with the immutable conviction of their dependence on fate.
There is a peaceful feeling about them all, a peace which results from
the consciousness of a great, universal destiny; and there is a certain
self-esteem about them too which comes from the knowledge that they are
free from all outer circumstances, from all silly, trivial, commonplace
bonds and conventions in the great hour of Eros. People have tried to
see the Epigoni in Heyse, who, according to the old receipt, raised
his people above their natural circumstances, and let them grow beyond
their natural size. But I think they are mistaken. I would sooner
believe that the studies in erotics which we have hitherto possessed,
excellent and circumstantial though they be, are utterly worthless as
regards their psychology. It depends on the writer, not on the things
themselves. And I believe that Paul Heyse’s way of letting his people
evolve out of a state of dependence--just as the kernel drops from the
shell--shews a peculiarly deep psychology productive of a rich future.
In my opinion psychology is now only in its first rude beginnings, and
the deeper laws of the psycho-physiological life only casually appear
above the surface as though by guesswork.


III

Generally speaking the best people are excessively reserved in their
relations to one another, even when they are living under favourable
conditions and are themselves highly cultured. Our likes and dislikes,
our finest, most private and tender emotions are suppressed beneath
the threshold of consciousness, while the greater part of what we do,
feel, and think is not in the least natural, and is not at all the
true expression of our nature. What I mean is that up till now there
has only been a single point where we are able to break through that
which we call our life, because it is only on this one central point
that our real nature bursts through the numbness and coolness of the
outer world. That is the apocalypse of love. But it is not at all to
be despaired of, that with a more universal refining of mankind, this
possibility may also be realised on other and more prominent points.

I think that Heyse’s way of expressing it is not at all idealistic or
unreal. How many of love’s suicides has he not verified! How many of
love’s suicides, of whom we read in the papers, have not afforded ample
proof to the psychologists of that which Heyse’s more sceptical critics
have accused as being a trick of the imagination. We read in hundreds
of clever and stupid books of how Hans and Grete fight each other, but
we never read of how Hans and Grete live the secrets of a happy love;
we never read of life’s happy ones.

Why? Because it requires a far subtler and more delicate psychological
touch to describe it. Even Heyse has not described it; even he has
not given us a modern picture filled with the rich tones of life’s
fleeting moments, with the magic of the varying lights upon it, such
as an artist catches when he paints a landscape. He has always been
content to make quite a plain little pencil drawing, in which the
distinguishing features are only faintly outlined. The great service
which he rendered was that he called attention to their existence.

In these little drawings we discern the psychological, fundamental law
which has been almost forgotten amid the little world that surrounds us
with its secondary laws; it is namely this: That in every particular
individual there is a central point which, when set in motion, towers
high above its surroundings, while as a natural consequence everything
assumes a new aspect. The result of this aspect is that everything
becomes of secondary importance if it has no connection with the one
central point. This central point is the finer need of love, which no
longer knows anything but itself when once a sympathetic presence has
awakened it to its full strength.

We have now reached the second psychological consideration. Does a like
sympathetic effect proceed from the one influenced? We are not asking
whether the influence is more or less intense, but whether the effect
is sufficiently powerful to raise the other tower-high above everything
in view of new aspects? Because a refined instinct of natural selection
must be able to alight on an equally high temperature, must be as
unconditionally selected as it itself selects. Everything depends on
this--the affirmation or negation of life--a compromise is impossible!
How often, as in _Memorable Words_, Paul Heyse has underlined those
seemingly insignificant details like a tone of the voice, a smile, a
difference of opinion or a trivial expression which suddenly, no one
knows how, acts as a stop to the current of sympathy which had just
begun. The one frees himself, but the other is no longer able to do so,
and the impulse of his heart overflows into chaos. Therefore love is
the Incommensurable. Love cannot be acquired, cannot be earned, cannot
be obtained by artifice, and it cannot be dispensed with. Paul Heyse
describes how some noble-minded men and women remain alone, not from
obtuseness of the instinct of natural selection, but from refinement,
because they could not find all they wanted.

The third psychological consideration, and the sum of his entire
philosophy of life, is his fatalism. That of itself would be sufficient
to place Heyse apart, in these times when the ruling standard is that
of the multitude. He has the proud submission of a profound insight
which knows that, in the final instance and in the highest matters,
we have nothing in our own power. That which we most earnestly desire
comes, or it comes not, but we cannot do anything one way or the
other. It is true that there is in us a mysterious impulse, as dark
and unknown to ourselves as life itself, which drives us on to where
our personal happiness is to be found, draws us into the Unknown and
entices us until we are led towards that which is ours in life. But we
know nothing of it at the time, and not in every one does it attain to
development.


IV

These three fundamental principles form the standpoint from whence
Heyse regarded humanity. Humanity, did I say? I mean women, for he is
essentially their author. He has been accused of writing for women only
and not for men, and it is said that he cannot describe the latter.
But with regard to that I should like to point out that he has been
the teacher and model of some of the best Scandinavian writers, and
the only model which they found in Germany. The construction of his
novels and the grace of his diction won him several followers in young
Denmark, where his influence is clearly discernible, but in Germany he
had no followers, for he is altogether inimitable; thus he remained
alone in his home on the mountain of culture where, although he was
much admired and much enjoyed, he was as a tower without access to
the critical understanding and to the authors who succeeded him. As
for the accusation of his being unable to describe men, the reason is
probably this, that in comparison with the depth and directness of his
comprehension of women, his men appear commonplace and uninteresting.

They nearly all seem a mere secondary consideration, and to exist only
as the indispensable background and emotional force for woman. This
gives one the impression that Heyse is not interested in man as a
whole, but only in that side of him whereby his peculiar sensibility
is brought into contact with woman, and through which his entire
nervous system is set in motion. Paul Heyse’s man is seldom the one who
makes the choice; it is nearly always the woman who gives the first
impulse. The man usually remains long in a state of stupid wonderment,
understanding nothing, while the woman who loves him has great
difficulty in making herself understood.

This is an extremely delicate psychological feature. For man the
choice is not the matter of chief importance, but for woman it is. A
man, however refined and cultured, could be quite happy with twenty
or thirty women who were entirely different from one another, and he
could feel himself warmly attracted by any one of them without his
strongest emotions being stirred or his whole existence responding;
but for a woman the absolute in love is the greatest, the only great
event in her life. For this reason the superior woman will always be
the chooser, she will always realise what the man is to her long before
he knows it; her silent love will always be the first attraction and
will bind him as it were with a thousand invisible cords, while the
strange atmosphere which proceeds from her will wrap him round like
the tremulous mist on a hot summer’s noon. Yet at first he does not,
except under the most propitious circumstances, understand that this
woman is sympathetic to him, but when the secret workings of organic
attraction have completed themselves, he suddenly awakes to find that
he is surrounded by a great and ardent love. In those rare cases when
a man loves with the whole passion of his nature, and when his love
is not, as it is oftenest described, and in our time of cultured
barbarism too often is, a perverseness--_i.e._ love for a woman who has
frequently experienced love already--in those rare cases it is always
the woman who gives the first impulse, and in Heyse’s writings it is
invariably the woman. In order to awake a deep, lasting and spiritual
emotion in man, a woman needs more than mere physical attraction, she
needs a spiritualised womanliness with all the enduring charm of its
indestructible intensity. The Incommensurable in love is not a primeval
quality in man as it is in woman; a man may have great nobility of soul
and yet be able to exist without it, whereas a woman cannot. For her
it is the primal condition of her being; for him it is an unexpected,
charmed light, illumining his whole existence.




_The Author in a Cul-de-sac_

_Henrik Ibsen_


The artists and authors of our day have one peculiarity in common,
which is that they, with one or two exceptions, have no idea of
perspective either with regard to the future or the past. Their
perspective in the past is shown by Ebers among the Pyramids, and Alma
Tadema among the broken pots of Mycenæ. Their perspective in the future
is an outlook into a cul-de-sac. The majority of authors in the latter
half of this century have conducted their readers by a more or less
roundabout path into a cul-de-sac, where they have left them; it has
occurred so often that the reading public have begun to lose patience.
This fondness for cul-de-sacs is clearly perceived in the drama of our
time.

We will not concern ourselves with the lesser playwrights, for the
utmost that they can do is to follow the example of their masters
and parody them by their imitation. We will turn instead to one of
the masters themselves, to one who is justly considered a great
dramatist--Henrik Ibsen.

If we examine his entire life-work, piece by piece, we shall arrive at
the conclusion that it was a persistent wandering out of one cul-de-sac
into the other.

It began with _Love’s Comedy_: Marriage is synonymous with
stupefaction, not to marry is synonymous with theorising; remains the
missing x, the satisfaction of the sexual instinct; result: cul-de-sac.

It is continued in _Per Gynt_: Romantic imagination is synonymous with
self-deception; school of life is synonymous with apathy; the missing x
is synonymous with the result: cul-de-sac.

In _Brand_ the diagram is simpler: Excessive desire for moral
perfection contra absolute religious indifference; result: cul-de-sac.

Whoever reads carefully these three great Speculative works of Ibsen’s
will be astonished to find that it was by no means unconsciously that
he ran into these cul-de-sacs; on the contrary, he steered straight for
them, and the last sentences of _Brand_ read like a triumphal epigram.

But by this time the floor of universal speculation had become too hot
for him, and he trod it no more. He turned to a more comprehensible
genre--if one may so call the popular discussions on social morals and
society problems.

Here it seemed that the author and the thinker might wander arm in arm
towards a clearly perceptible goal. How far he attained is a question
which we will leave for the next chapter.


I

Above my table hangs an old engraving after the portrait of a woman
by the younger Holbein in the gallery at Windsor. It is a face of the
Hedda Gabler type--Hedda Gabler three hundred years ago. Fair as a
lily, dressed after the newest fashion of her day with a half aureole
on her head, puffed sleeves and a high collar, everything fashionably
squeezed and tight-laced, and added to this an inscrutable face with
cold, veiled eyes, and a small mouth which promises nothing good. She
is undoubtedly a well-bred lady of good family, who is not likely to
relax her features or change her deportment, but who might possibly
allow others to make advances to her. She looks so conscious of her
innocence and so demurely attractive, that one thinks that she also may
have had an Eckert Lövborg to initiate her theoretically into the lives
of young men.

Hedda Gabler is a lady who belongs to the higher middle class, and so
carefully has Ibsen analysed her that every one devoted to the study
of natural phenomena and class-distinction may, with the help of some
preliminary knowledge, study and probe her nature down to the secret
structure of her soul. As one well versed in life and anxious to divert
attention from the track which he was pursuing, Ibsen declared that
this time it was only a psychological study, with no criticism of
society and no wrathful pessimism. And so, dear society, good and bad,
you may set yourself at rest!

But society was not at rest. This Hedda Gabler was a creature
who displeased it. Nearly all women objected to her and declined
to entertain such a moral monster at their tea-table, while all
women-worshippers felt that through her the whole sex had been wronged,
and finally the majority of men were opposed to her because they were
not able to discover any traces of either manly or womanly psychology.

This was not only the case in Germany, and in England which is the
home of emancipated women and the birthplace of moral zeal, but even
in the author’s own Scandinavia they fought shy of her. The priests
listened--they who guarded the sacred fire on the altars of the great
mystery. “What is this?” they asked. “Is he beginning to speak with
tongues?” And the chaste priestesses of the pure Ibsen cult maintained
an ominous silence. Everywhere stillness ensued--the stillness of the
storm when it rains hailstones.

Another author would have been made to suffer for it; but the great
name of the great moralist held hands and tongues at bay.

Amongst us it was murmured that the wise augur had not been quite as
happy on this occasion. The strings of the dramatic puppet-show were a
little more visible than usual, and the two pistol shots fired in the
midst of a phlegmatic bourgeois _milieu_ put an end to all illusion.
Then the different degrees of beauty in the death-scenes! Life with
or without vine-leaves in the hair!--Where, in the name of wonder, do
people speak like that, and where in the upper or lower world do they
feel like it?

You, most honoured master, you should carry away the scaffolding and
lay aside your tools as soon as the house is finished.

Yet the story is not easily disposed of! There is something hidden
away which is not expressed in words, though it sometimes beats and
palpitates like an injured nerve, and if anyone were to succeed in
touching it, he would hold the secret in his hand. But with Ibsen we
never know whether or not we are really touching the central nerve,
perhaps because the nerve is not a true vibration of the soul with
which the author’s entire ego is in sympathy, but only a thought
palpitating in the brain which owes its origin to other causes.

The point in Hedda Gabler on which the whole piece turns is mainly
this: the dissection of an ideal.

In _Nora_, Ibsen gives us the ideal of the modern woman; in _Hedda
Gabler_ he dissects it. All that lies between is the slow, laborious
work of digging. The miner[1] climbs down into the depths where he
digs and hammers in the dark. No daylight reaches him there, he does
not know what he is looking for, and he does not know what he finds.
Are they diamonds or coals? In the darkness of the pit the “oppressed
woman” meets him, he takes hold of her and believes that he has raised
a treasure and discovered the diamond. But when he begins to cut it,
he thinks that it is only rock-crystal, and when he examines it more
carefully, he sees that he is holding in his hand a piece of coal.

_Nora_ is the rough diamond, _The Lady from the Sea_ is the
rock-crystal, _Hedda Gabler_ is a piece of coal, and a bad kind of coal
too.

How did Henrik Ibsen, “le célèbre bas-bleuiste,” as an equally
celebrated fellow-countryman called him, become a misogynist _à la_
Strindberg?

“Man created woman--out of what?” says Nietzsche. “Out of a rib of his
god, the Ideal.”

It seems to me that this one little sentence contains the concentrated
essence of everything that has ever been said, thought, felt and sung
by man about woman.

All his vanities and all his wants, from the tenderest melodies of his
soul to the most brutal demands of his senses, all his capabilities and
his incapabilities, his entire cleverness and his entire stupidity, all
these man has immortalised in his songs on woman.

Woman was silent. Or if she made herself heard there was not much sense
in what she said. In olden times there occasionally arose a chirping
sound like that of a little bird; in later times--in the times of the
celebrated writers, George Sand, George Eliot, Fru Edgren-Leffler,
etc.--they moralised on the subject of man. But as the sex of modern
authoresses shows a certain natural disposition to attire itself in
knickerbockers, one really cannot place them under the heading of
“women,” they seem rather to belong to a state of transition.

The woman who is completely a woman has never betrayed herself, has
never told tales out of school; and why? Because she was not so stupid.
She loved and made herself loved to the best of her ability, she hated
and teased, and that was an art she understood right well; while the
happy or unhappy object of her attentions wrote and sang poems about
her, rejoiced and suffered, wrote and sang poems....

Everything that man has written about woman is merely the description
of woman such as he imagines her, it is the expression of what man
expects of her, seeks for in her, asks of her, and finds or does not
find in her. It is a reflection of the varying play of man’s soul
throughout all ages.

Every man, every nation, every age has created its own particular type
of woman.

The superficial and excitable temperament of the French during the
century has produced variations of the type of contriving, vivacious
little coquettes; the two great German authors, Goethe and Keller,
created the thoughtless, sensuous child of nature; John Bull has so
conscientiously simplified himself since the Renaissance that he is no
longer able to create any type of human womanhood, his women are elves
and Medusas; and as for the women in the new Scandinavian literature,
with the exception of Strindberg’s hyenas and Ibsen’s “thinking women,”
they can hardly be said to occupy a very prominent position.

Strindberg’s fates are ghastly vampires who suck the blood of
horror-stricken man. They are not to be described in words, it would
require the art of a great painter to represent them as they appear in
all the unreal reality of their being.--There still remains Ibsen’s
woman.

Ibsen’s woman holds her sway throughout Europe, and that is in itself
a sufficient reason for us to study her as she is represented in his
works, and as she stands before us in real life.


II

“Hedda Gabler,” Ellida (_The Lady from the Sea_), Rebecca
(_Rosmersholm_), Gina, Hedvig (_The Wild Duck_), Fru Alving (_Ghosts_),
Nora (_The Doll’s House_), Petra (_An Enemy of the People_), Selma
(_The League of Youth_), Lona (_The Pillars of Society_), Solveig (_Per
Gynt_), Agnes (_Brand_), Swanhild (_Love’s Comedy_)--here are the
women whom Ibsen has created, since he became Ibsen, the seeker, the
analyser, the doubter.

Their first and universal characteristic is that they are all
misunderstood.

Their second and equally universal characteristic is that they are
either unmarried or else unhappily married, the result in either case
being discontent; _ergo_ we have the thinking woman, the reading woman,
the self-cultured woman, or in other words, the _bourgeoisie_ with
plenty of spare time on her hands.

Ibsen’s earliest period belongs to the traditional historical drama,
which owed its origin to Germany; the romantic, lyrical and dramatic
poems, _Brand_ and _Per Gynt_, thrust themselves between with their
contingent of angel-women who acted as deliverers of men; and all his
other productions as an author were the result of his criticisms of
society, or more correctly, his criticisms of the middle class. He was
the bourgeois who rebelled against his surroundings, who raised the
scorpion scourge against the flesh of his people and the ideals of his
world. In his writings the middle class saw themselves reflected as in
a looking-glass.

Each one of his writings contains the dissection of a bourgeois ideal,
and it is always through a woman of the bourgeois class that the result
is seen.

The first piece in which he condemned society was that bitterest of
all parodies that has ever been written on legitimate unions: _Love’s
Comedy_. Never has the institution of marriage been made to appear
more ridiculous, or the basis of bourgeois society, _i.e._ its
respectability, been more unmercifully dissected. At the same time the
Ibsen keynote of man’s relation to woman, or what is virtually the same
thing, woman’s relation to man, is already struck, and struck with no
uncertain sound. A woman cannot live with a man, with any man; Swanhild
loves Falk, but she will not yield herself to him either for to-day or
for ever, for fear lest their love should not endure. She marries an
old prig instead, and Falk goes away deeply moved and sings a song on
eternal youth.

This bourgeois piece is framed on the negation of life itself, and its
subject is the unnatural one of a solitary being who desires to stand
alone. It is a profound, psycho-physiological moment when sickness has
declared itself. Who is to blame? Bourgeois society? The author? Or
both?

The _Pillars of Society_ is the glorification of the woman who is able
to stand alone--the old maid. There are two old maids in the piece,
the one active, the other passive, and both are perfect providences
on earth. It was really very pretty of Ibsen to have raised these
much-neglected beings to the throne of honour. The principal old maid,
Lona, who is an extraordinary specimen of emancipated womanhood,
refuses to marry because she has had an unfortunate experience, and
she dares not risk her happiness in that most terrible--also most
glorious--of all games of chance, but prefers to stand on the shore
and play providence. Selma (_The League of Youth_), Petra (_An Enemy
of the People_), Gina, Hedvig (_The Wild Duck_), are four genuine
examples of the bourgeois class. Selma--an ornamental little doll,
a perfect Nora in the bud--is the poetry of a rich merchant’s home,
poetry, that is to say, in the sense that the rich merchant understands
it; she refuses to be poetry any longer and acquaints her husband
with the fact that love and marriage must terminate because he has
not “allowed her to take part” in his business troubles. Petra is the
wage-earning daughter in an impecunious bourgeois home, a poor neutral
creature who has forgotten that she is a woman, and in whom men forget
it too. Gina, in Ibsen’s deepest piece, is a young lady housekeeper
who is allowed to sit at dessert with the boarder, and the anæmic,
hysterical, romantic Hedvig is her child; both are genuine portraits
and equally genuine negations of womanhood in the heart of woman’s
being. Finally Nora and Fru Alving, the two great progenitors of the
entire race of thinking and reading women. Nora is a double being, in
whom the author’s observation and reflection grow up side by side like
two divided stems; and Fru Alving is Ibsen himself in the disguise
of a woman. These pieces one and all describe the liberation of the
housewife, the conventional table-cloth on the bourgeois table, the
obvious corruption of bourgeois marriages, noble women who would be
ruined by their contact with bad men, if it were not that they are the
strong women who shake off the weak men, but who, in consequence of
their unnatural behaviour, are changed into neutral beings in their
flight before marriage, just as Daphne, in olden time, was changed into
a laurel when on her flight before the god.

Hitherto Ibsen’s writings have had two sides which are directly opposed
to one another: the one negative, pessimistic, direct, which served as
so many leaves in the school-book of the _bourgeoisie_ as the class
of society which is the ruling class, but which is, by reason of
its moral bankruptcy, doomed to immediate destruction. The scene of
action is always an imaginary one, with a cosmopolitan colouring; it
is not Ibsen’s fault if, on the Continent, his characters are looked
upon as essentially Norwegian, he tried, to the best of his limited
power, to render them cosmopolitan. The other side of his writings is
quite positive, quite creditable as regards its starting-point and its
aim: the glorification of woman as a vessel of good, as a saviour of
society, as the conscience of man.

Then came _The Wild Duck_, which contained the most characteristic
personalities upon the most ricketty foundation. One wondered what the
old man was about.--Gregers Werle, who runs with moral precepts into
the dwellings of day-labourers; and the lies of life, which also have
their moral significance--it was Ibsen himself who held judgment upon
Ibsen. And like a visage, reflected and distorted in muddy water, the
figures of Gina and Hedvig glide past like so many poor, tormented,
guilty or guiltless people with no ideals, no moral trumpets.

A couple of years later _Rosmersholm_ appeared. It startled the whole
circle of flattering women and their flatterers. No more censuring
of society, no more glorification of woman! The bourgeois centre no
longer takes the first place, it fades into a decorative background;
the entire space is absolutely filled by two people, a man and a
woman, who are engaged in a battle against one another. The man is a
noble creature, weak but refined; the woman is a plebeian by birth and
soul, coarse-grained and selfish, one whom nature has designed for a
criminal. Here we also have a weak man and a strong woman, but the
lights and shadows fall quite differently.

There is one thing which the author throws into the balance in the
woman’s favour, and that is that the woman is brave and fit for life,
while the man is cowardly and unfitted for it.

The next to appear was _The Lady from the Sea_.

People were astonished and asked what it was.

“It is a piece in praise of true marriage,” replied Ibsen’s women
admirers, and they wept.

What of this hysterical Fru Ellida who waits expectantly for some one
else, who lives on Platonic terms with her husband and ends by sending
her--very grown-up--stepdaughter into an educational establishment?
What does Fru Ellida do? She indulges in bold fancies and exalted
dreams, and when the subject of her dreams stands before her, and
when the great happiness comes, which is always equally the great
danger--she does not recognise him, she is afraid of him, and she takes
refuge with her safe and trustworthy spouse, the patient Wangel.

Can’t we see Ibsen’s eyes twinkling behind his spectacles?


III

One of the first principles, on which Ibsen’s glorification of woman
rests, is that woman is noble.

Nora is noble, but Rebecca is not.

Another of his principles is that woman is courageous and well fitted
for life.

Rebecca is courageous, but Ellida is cowardly.

... Let us turn to Hedda Gabler. She is what used, in older days, to
be called a “dragon.” All that she says and does, all her smiles and
her kisses are wicked, she is tormented by a love of mischief, she
is filled with an impotent, cowardly greed which incessantly turns
to an envious hatred of all things living, extending even to her own
offspring.

But she is something more, she is a symbol.

Ibsen has resumed the thread which he allowed to drop since the
appearance of _The Wild Duck_. Hedda Gabler is a daughter of the upper
middle class, the class whose moral bankruptcy has afforded a subject
for his social dramas. Hedda Gabler has the courage and the soul of
the bankrupt daughter of a race of bankrupts, whose only rule of life
is a hollow form, and she, in the guise of a woman, represents the
unfruitfulness of this exhausted class.

But Hedda Gabler is something more. She is the reverse of Fru Alving.
Fru Alving is a good woman destined to be ruined by men, Hedda Gabler
is a bad woman by whom men are ruined.

There is yet another point about her. She is the destruction of the
“ideal” in woman, the ideal which Ibsen incarnated in woman as the
absolutely good, strong, clever, pure, courageous, etc.; in her he
repudiates the worship of woman; in her he repudiates the vanguard of
women who were armed by himself, the women’s rights women and opponents
of men; all the deformities of the modern woman are concentrated in
Hedda, who hates and rejects her own offspring.

This accounts for the mysterious silence which pervaded the north when
the great prophet, “le célèbre bas-bleuiste,” began to speak with
tongues.


IV

If we glance over the work of Ibsen’s life-time, we see that every
single ideal of the day which he dealt with in his writings was by him
destroyed. First came that absolute faith which was the fundamental
Christian ideal in _Brand_: he destroyed it. Then came the romantic
capriciousness of a bourgeois soul in _Per Gynt_: he destroyed that
also. In his social dramas he dealt with the conventions of society,
and them he also destroyed. Afterwards came woman....

Ibsen is not an erotic, and his instinct taught him very little about
woman. As woman she has no attractions for him, she is nothing more
to him than an idea--a figure in a game of chess. He began to push
these figures backwards and forwards. His first women were ghostly
dialecticians. He did not know woman sufficiently well to write of
her according to his own perceptions, so he modelled her according
to recognised literary forms, _i.e._ after the writings of former
generations. This was the origin of the glorification of a mother’s
love (Agnes) in _Brand_, and the glorification of waiting (Solveig) in
_Per Gynt_, both of which are creations of undoubted poetical beauty,
for Ibsen was a great poet in his youth.

His social dramas were the result of discontent, and he sought for
and found the discontented woman. His method of creation is worthy of
notice. His men differ, but with his women the course of development
is always clearly discernible. In _The League of Youth_, which is one
of his earliest pieces, Selma already contains Nora in the bud, while
Petra in one of his other dramas resembles a photograph of Lona; Dr
Rank afterwards turns into Oswald; Fru Alving has the temperament
which develops into Rebecca and stands in doubt before the possibility
of murder, Rebecca commits it, and both without moral compunction. Yet
in spite of this, the glorification of woman reached its zenith in
Fru Alving, and as formerly its tendency was to increase, so now it
began to decrease. Rebecca is followed by the Lady from the Sea, and
she in turn by Hedda--lower, ever lower. There is always one special
peculiarity, as I have just signified, which Ibsen carries on from one
character to the other, and which he either increases or destroys.
For instance, Rebecca longs for life and is courageous, while Ellida
thirsts for life but is not courageous, and Hedda is not courageous
nor does she thirst for life, but is cowardly and inquisitive. In each
piece he leaves a little bit of ideality to be dissected in his next
work, and the last remnant of the ideal bequeathed by Hedda is “a
beautiful death.” The Master Builder’s death is no longer beautiful.

Thus Ibsen’s constructive method is revealed.

Men always write about woman as they imagine her to be and as they
desire her, and it is the same when a woman writes, she always pictures
herself as man sees her. It is woman’s nature to mould herself after
a form, and to desire a form in which she can mould herself. But of
course this manner of speaking, thinking, acting always is and remains
only a superficial form. There is something beneath it which follows
other laws and is seldom revealed to the gaze of man. This is perhaps
the reason why Ibsen, though he did not draw his women from nature,
was destined in a few years’ time to meet his Lonas, Noras, and
Rebeccas in real life. The Lonas founded high schools for the advanced
education of women, became students themselves and educated others, the
Noras became authoresses and produced a redundant literature dealing
with morals, and the Rebeccas claimed the right of an unmarried woman
of thirty to take possession of the man whom they considered worthy of
being made happy.


V

When Ibsen reappeared on the scenes with his _Master Builder_, after
an interval during which he had become celebrated, the physiognomy
which he presented was one that was quite unexpected. He seems to be in
the same predicament as “the old fellow who did not know how to help
himself.” Everything goes round in a circle, as it did in Solness’s
head before he fell from the tower. And if it is possible to find
any meaning at all in this very obscure piece, it is that Ibsen had
a presentiment that he was going to fall down off the height of his
dialectic scaffolding, but that he was not able to give up his useless
habit of climbing, which, for such an old man, was a very break-neck
amusement.

This presentiment has been fulfilled, for in _Little Eyolf_ he really
did fall down and break his leg. And this leg-breaking is quite in
keeping with the rest of Ibsen’s dramas. It is as naturalistic as it is
symbolic, and its foundation is logical.

If we to-day glance back at Ibsen’s works, we can borrow the result
of his quiet meditation and say: Henrik Ibsen is himself the little
Eyolf of the middle class, begotten by the union of the Gallic formula
of the rights of humanity with the Teutonic deterioration of race;
compare Rita and Almers. And as soon as the parents had accomplished
this, they attempted no more; again compare Rita and Almers. Their only
achievement was a brain that developed itself in a logical manner.

From the beginning to the end of Ibsen’s work the one thing lacking
is synthesis. Synthesis is one with personality, and Ibsen is not a
personality; he is all brain. He has not, in any one of his books,
the warmth and pulsation that belong to a complete nature; one feels
something resembling warmth, yes, something very like fever-heat,
in the passages where he describes cruelty; we need only recall the
martyrdom of Agnes in _Brand_. He was a man of brains who composed;
but the brain cannot compose. The blood composes, the soul composes,
the nerves compose, but of all these he had very little--there was
indeed a despairing lack of them in the year 1848 and thereabout. What
did that period bring with it? A wordy warfare in which the logic of
Judaism assumed the highest tone. Wherever this logic found its way,
it imported debates upon problems, and Ibsen became the greatest of
its pupils. He agitated, he “revolutionised,” he occasioned more than
one act of momentary liberation. There was one characteristic which he
retained from the days when he had been an apothecary’s apprentice, and
that was an affection for acids. His entire authorship comes under the
head of acids. He was never a psychologist, only a constructive agent,
and since _Rosmersholm_ even his constructive power has forsaken him;
his men, Wangel, Tesmann, Solness, Almers are only variations of the
same Rosmer. His women, Hedda, Hilda, Rita, are obvious derivations
from the woman _à la_ Strindberg. And now that he is nearing his end,
he stands where his own Rita stands, whose last hope it is to make
little civilised Eyolf-cripples out of the ragged, unmannerly, yet
vigorous fisher class.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] See Ibsen’s Poems.




_The High Priest of Purity_

_Björnstjerne Björnson_


I

I saw Björnson for the first time in Paris in the spring of 1886,
where he formed the centre of the entire Scandinavian population. He
was living with his wife and daughters in a quiet side street not far
from the Bois de Boulogne, in which he always took his morning walk.
When I went to see him, his wife was the first to receive me; she was
a dark-eyed native of Bergen, still pretty, with short-cut grey hair,
and at first it seemed as though she meant to spend the customary
quarter of an hour in conversation with me, as Björnson was at his
work and might not be disturbed. Before long, however, the door into
the adjoining room was opened, and a powerful, grey, bushy head was
thrust through the aperture--a high forehead and little sharp eyes that
sparkled behind a pair of spectacles, a large prominent hooked nose,
and a pair of thin lips that quivered with anger and energy--but the
next instant this menacing totality softened into a winning smile,
and the whole man came in view, it was a bear-like figure, not above
medium height, but with shoulders, arms and legs that gave one the
impression of immense muscular strength. A man with this body and
this temperament would require to lay about him in order to make life
endurable, that was the first impression that one received, and the
second was that this great muscular man was not created to understand
the most subtle and hidden problems of human life. At the same time one
understood his popularity. This genius of a bear had something about
him that was irresistibly healthy, straightforward and convincing; he
represented the primeval type of manhood, the leader whom the mass of
the people follow like a flock of sheep, and at whose glance women turn
hot and cold. Björnson’s is not a reserved nature--with such muscles
there is no need of reserve--and owing to his communicativeness one
gets to know him as well in a single day as any one else in a year.
He invited me to join him in his morning walk in the Bois, and having
first divested himself of a colossal Wagner cap, which seemed intended
rather for adornment than for warmth, he stepped along with an elegance
that would have done credit to a dandy, but which among German authors
and thinkers is wholly unknown. The Scandinavians as a rule set a far
greater value on dress than the Germans, and Björnson did not conceal
his personal feelings in this respect, as displaying the silk lining
of his overcoat, he said: “You see I am fond of fine clothes; when I
get a new suit from the tailor, I spend half the day in front of the
looking-glass, but for all that I never for a single instant forget the
great work of civilisation to which we must devote our whole energy.”

We crossed the Place de l’Etoile, and Björnson began to tell me about
this same work. He spoke loud, and in a threatening voice, as though
he were addressing a large audience. Omnibuses rattled by, light
elegant carriages with india-rubber tyres flew past us, and riders
came out of the Bois; it was necessary to concentrate one’s attention,
to make room, to be careful, the crowd of foot-passengers was enough
to confuse anybody; but Björnson behaved as though he did not observe
it, he had grown excited in speaking, his voice quivered, his eyes
shone with tears, and the passers-by stood still and stared at the
strange bear-like figure with the broad, ruddy face appearing beneath
the cylindriform hat and the brand new suit. But Björnson was too
much accustomed to be stared at in his own country to allow himself
to be disturbed by it. He shouted a few words of hearty greeting to
a sad-looking little fellow countryman whom he caught sight of; and
presently an English Bible-seller wandered by, who, hearing a foreign
tongue, offered him the Word of God, whereupon Björnson recollected
that he did not possess a Bible, and commenced a long altercation with
the man, which ended by Björnson commissioning him to leave one at
his house at the earliest opportunity. At last we reached the Bois. We
walked among the fragrant acacias to the waterfall and past the winding
lake, we walked and walked, surrounded by the spring magic of the half
southern landscape, and imbued with the feeling of peaceful melancholy
and comfortable exhaustion which the early spring in Paris brings with
it. But Björnson felt neither melancholy nor exhaustion. Excited, and
aglow with physical energy as though he contained the whole charge of
an electric battery in himself, he spoke of the problem of how the
relationship between men and women was to be remodelled. His great
novel, _Thomas Rendalen_, had appeared not very long before, and he had
just finished the first chapter of _In God’s Way_. He confessed that
until lately he had not understood the importance of the subject, that
he had not in fact possessed sufficient physiological knowledge. In all
his former writings he had treated the relations between men and women
in the old way, as something that is founded on a physical need. But
the moderns will not have it so any longer. “No, they will not have
it,” he said, in a voice that quivered with excitement. “They wish to
get beyond that. The best men and the best women have other duties now,
they recognise that it is their duty to work hand in hand towards the
ennobling of the human race. What they want is a higher union. All the
best men and women are of one opinion in the matter, and the number of
the best increases with increasing knowledge. The time will come when
it will be natural to every high-minded man and woman to wish only for
a spiritual union.”

I was dumbfounded. This doctrine did not please me, and proceeding from
the lips of this robust giant it sounded, to put it mildly, somewhat
strange. Björnson was silent for a few moments, we neither of us spoke.
When the pause had elapsed--the pause which his listeners are wont
to fill with a volley of applause--he began again in a condescending
manner:

“I too used to think differently. In my youth I lived as others do; I
knew no better. No one told me. But if I had known then what I know
now, I should not have done it. I was in America a few years ago, and
there they are further advanced than they are here; I spoke with some
American lady doctors, and they explained it to me. They proved it to
me on paper as clearly and plainly as possible. Strength goes here or
there. In the brain or--in propagation. There is never more than a
certain amount of strength, it only depends on where it is localised,
whether for the highest purpose or the lowest--they explained it all.
There is no ‘must’ about it, there is no natural necessity; that is
deceptive nonsense. But women must make a beginning, they must oppose
their degradation. Women must unite with women to give one another
a hand. You must support each other, and then you will be able to
dictate to men. The talk about not being able is all nonsense. For
instance, you,” he said, turning suddenly on me, “have you ever had any
difficulty of the kind?”

Of course I assured him that I never had; and I could do so with a good
conscience, as he obviously alluded to a very material form.

Björnson took me back with him and gave me a copy of his _Gauntlet_
in Fräulein Klingenfeld’s German translation, which is a new and more
severe edition of his former work. We often saw each other afterwards,
but he never made me such a long speech again; I was not the right
sounding-board for him. And here I must add, for the enlightenment of
my possibly astonished readers, that conversations such as these were
quite common at the time when the moral movement was raging in the
north.

I happened to be in Copenhagen the following year when Björnson’s
great moral tournament was announced. He spoke in one of the largest
theatres in Copenhagen. Troops of “enlightened” peasants had come from
the country to hear him; they looked strangely out of place with their
black neckties and short whiskers as they pushed their way through the
front seats, between Copenhagen elegants and worthy ladies of ripe
years. The whole place was crowded to overflowing. I had a ticket
for the evening reception which was given in honour of Björnson by a
committee of the women “progressionists” of Copenhagen who formed the
advance-guard of the emancipation movement, and I intended going there
when the lecture was over.

Björnson appeared. A desk had been placed on the stage in front of the
curtain, which was lowered. He mounted it, and stood looking like a
righteous lion with a shaggy, grey mane, his eyes firmly closed, his
lips compressed, the very incarnation of fanatical energy, “the man”
for the masses. He began to speak. First he thundered, then he lowered
his voice; first the words fell like hard stones, then his voice shook
with emotion; he commanded, he entreated, he became by turns a man of
learning, a pastor, a prophet and a jailor. But the effect produced
upon the people of Copenhagen was not great. They applauded him very
casually, the Danes--even in the lower stratum of society--are too
æsthetic and critical, too conscious of being the possessors of an old
and refined culture, to adopt the simple Norwegian modes of thought.
Shortly afterwards Björnson visited the provincial towns and sowed his
seeds throughout the whole of Scandinavia, where they took root.

I went home after the lecture feeling disappointed and depressed. It
had sounded so hollow, and considering the past of this great writer
and the future expectations of the three countries respecting him, it
seemed to promise little for the hopes which the young generation
had fixed on him and on him only. It made me shudder to think of the
speeches in which the representatives of a dozen old maids, and about
as many discontented wives, would sing his praises in consequence
of his words this day. The lecture, which was called _Monogamy
and Polygamy_, was the great divide between his yesterday and his
to-morrow; it was then that the words were spoken: “So far and no
further.”

He had been too crude and too pathetic for the people of Copenhagen.
But the further he travelled into outlying districts, where culture was
less advanced, the more this crudeness and pathos gained him influence,
and as this tournament resulted in a change in the moral conceptions
of Scandinavia which was destined to rule over family life as well as
public life--a change which assumed the authority of a whole school of
contemporary thought of which Björnson was the speaking trumpet, and as
this school continues to gain ground in Germany the more surely, the
more it becomes conscious of being the expression of the experience of
a class, it deserves a more careful investigation.

What then was the subject of Björnson’s lecture?

It was a repetition of that speech of his in the Bois de Boulogne, only
it was a larger and more detailed generalisation of the same, because
in it he no longer dealt with noble-minded men and women, but with all
men and all women. He had two fundamental doctrines which he used as
his starting points: Woman’s complete equality with man respecting
marriage, and the unconditional adaptive capacity of mammals.

Whether the latter doctrine is included in the German version of
_Monogamy and Polygamy_, I cannot say, as I have not got it by me. But
with the exception of what the American lady doctors had told him,
Björnson founded his argument in favour of the reform of the sexual
relations on the following anecdote: He met a man who had a large cage
in which he kept a dog, a cat, a rat, a mouse and a bird. He fed them
well and taught them to overcome their natural instincts of enmity and
to live peaceably together. “And they all prospered well, very well,
and loved one another much, very much.” It evidently had not occurred
to Björnson that the chief characteristic of this story is the parable
of the cage and the domestic animals. It is a well-known fact, that
in zoological gardens the ravenous animals are kept apart from the
peaceful ones, as the latter are ready to die of fear and misery from
the mere smell of the others, even without seeing them. But Björnson
places the cage first as a matter of course--the great cage of society
filled with domestic animals and house parasites which have been tame
for generations, and are indolent and blunted in their instincts.
Too satiated, too lazy and too degenerate to fight, the dear little
creatures vegetate in close proximity to one another, which is exactly
what well-fed domestic animals are in the habit of doing, even without
a cage. And then with a bold logical venture, he compared this state of
things to the most central and most complicated of human relationships.
If even the unreasoning animals are able to overcome their natural
instincts, he argues, man also, after being sensibly reasoned with
and encouraged by example, after many generations of training will
be capable of adapting his strongest instinct to moral precepts and
finally attain the ideal of pure sexlessness. Is not the daughter of
the “educated classes” chaste? Have we not many millions of chaste old
maids? Then why should not we have chaste old bachelors, and why cannot
we have chaste young bachelors as well? Arise, you women! Strike!
Refuse to be made “the laundry for unclean men”! Twice before he gave
this lecture, Björnson had dealt with the same subject--in _Thomas
Rendalen_ and in _The Gauntlet_; the last of these two is the best
known in Germany. In both works he declares that there should be only
one moral standard for men and for women, and that this standard should
be that of women.

The supporters of the movement in favour of the emancipation of women
in Scandinavia baptised themselves into the name of Björnson, and
adopted his confession of faith. The life, temperament, and superfluous
energy of man was brought under the horizon of woman, and the eternal
active was to allow itself to be remodelled by the eternal passive,
because the latter was statistically in the majority.

At the time when Björnson was giving these lectures and writing these
books, there was another movement which had just reached its zenith
in the north, and which, by its opponents and by the emancipated
daughters of the middle class, was known by the designation of “free
love.” Its leaders were Arne Garborg and Hans Jaeger, who pleaded for
the universal recognition of the socialist ideal as follows: That the
conditions of society might be so ordered as to render prostitution
unnecessary, by making early unions possible and marriage no longer a
sacrament. Both parties were anxious to abolish prostitution, which
is an evil that is not mentioned in Germany, although here also the
emancipation movement (still in its infancy) is interested in it. It
was the aim of Garborg and Jaeger to hasten its destruction by making
it economically possible for early unions to be contracted in love,
whereas Björnson and the women’s rights party sought another means,
_i.e._ the mortification of the flesh.

No subject that has ever been discussed in the north has met with such
an immense and lasting interest as this one. Beneath the pressure of
Björnson the movement for the emancipation of women assumed a form of
open enmity against man, and introduced a pietistic doctrine of the
superiority of women into the literature and public life of Sweden.
Should the movement ever force its way into the outposts of declining
militarism in Germany, the signs are already to hand that there also
the spirit of Björnson will rule.

How was it possible that this manly author with his impetuous and
progressive nature should lose his way in the cul-de-sac of Christian
asceticism--in the covert places of degeneration--and that having
arrived at the time of life when a man’s opinions are matured, he did
not find his way out again?

Here we come to the spot where the many conflicting threads of
Björnson’s life are knotted together, from whence we arrive at the
various stages of his creation, and from them find our way back again
to the central point of his being.

A piece of contemporary history and class biography is unfolded in
these numerous phases of Björnson’s life, reaches its climax here, runs
its course and finds its ending. The political and social type of the
ruling middle class is sharply outlined in him, and clearly stamped as
though it were in a bronze medal.

But before we come to this chapter, we must examine the course of his
development and the appreciation accorded him by his countrymen.


II

It cannot be said that Björnson meets with an unquestioning recognition
in the middle classes. The influence of agitators is always most
strongly felt by those who are a little below them in the social scale,
that is perhaps the reason why Björnson has succeeded in exerting such
a great influence upon the Scandinavian peasantry and upon women.

A few years ago I was travelling on foot through Norway, aided by the
national means of locomotion, the “skyds.” It was slow work, but it
afforded me numberless opportunities of coming in contact with the
sons of the soil. On one occasion I met with a peasant on his way home
from the “saeter,” who was content to be my guide for hours together,
and he gave me some insight into his admiration for Björnson as a
political speaker; another time, while I was waiting for horses in a
“skyds station,” I examined a little book-case which was hanging over
the writing table in the superintendent’s room, and there I found an
almost complete set of Björnson’s works. And once it was the “skyds”
boy himself who asked me if I knew Björnson. All the women teachers
and book-keepers who, with knapsacks on their backs, wander across
the mountains of their native land, carry his name upon their lips
and his books in their hearts. High up at the foot of Skineggen in
Jötunheimen, in the midst of eternal snow, I asked a haggard-looking
old Valdres peasant who kept the tourist’s house there during the six
weeks of summer, which was my nearest way to Björnson, and he answered
with an approving smile addressing me in the second person singular:
“Thou knowest Björnson, thou art an intelligent young lady. Trust me
and I will tell thee all that thou wouldest know.” Whereupon he went
indoors and fetched a large map of the Norwegian mountains, which he
spread out on the short grass between us, and proceeded to point up
and down with his finger into Gudbrandsdal and from thence to the
south till he came to a spot where he stopped short, and said: “Here
is Aulestad, Björnson’s place. Every one who wishes to go there may do
so, thou also.” Then he began a long complicated account of the why
and the wherefore Björnson is beloved by the peasant, said that he was
a “homely man” who went “straight ahead”; and then he told me of the
difficulties that he and his neighbours had encountered in order to
hear him speak, and how they had gone long journeys to attend meetings
in distant places.

Far from there, in comfortable Denmark, where the peasants are short
and round but none the less zealous readers of newspapers and earnest
politicians, I met a certain self-confident Sören Sörensen in a
third-class railway coupé who bestowed on me the honouring epithet of
“intelligent young lady,” because I let him know of my acquaintance
with Björnson. Björnson’s name was a sure letter of recommendation
among the peasantry of the three Scandinavian countries. It is not very
long since he spoke in Jutland in favour of arbitration, universal
disarm-ment and public peace, and with his usual cunning, called upon
his old antagonists, the pastors, to help him in the name of their
religion in the great work of peace. His name had been sufficient to
collect around him no less than thirty thousand listeners, even in
those years of the apathy and despondency of the Danish people. What is
the cause of this immense influence?

I can explain it in two sentences. It is that in him the peasantry
recognise their own flesh and blood, and that he stimulates the middle
class.

The class distinctions of central Europe have simplified themselves
in the north. There is scarcely any social democracy and no great
industrial class, their place is occupied by the peasantry as a
political power and by the provincial middle class as the rulers in
business. Björnson himself was born a peasant, but became a bourgeois
in his early youth. In the next generation the sons of peasants who
became authors were careful to avoid the middle class. But on the
other hand there is annually a by no means inconsiderable percentage
of the peasantry who go over into the middle class because it is
more highly educated. Among these are pastors, gymnasium teachers,
doctors, lawyers, merchants--yes, and rich peasant proprietors as
well. The provincial _bourgeoisie_ of the north represents what is
perhaps the purest type of that decadence of the middle classes
which has declared itself throughout the whole of Europe; it is
totally unlike the Scandinavian peasantry, which possesses a healthy
strength, the reverse of social democracy, and embodies the power
of a rising class. The great European upheaval of 1848 barely
touched this Scandinavian _bourgeoisie_ with its narrow horizon, its
commercial self-satisfaction, its snivelling morality, its mania for
conventionalities, its love of stagnation, its small-minded, starved
nature and hypocrisy against which Ibsen, the revolutionary bourgeois,
has raised the scorpion whip, and Björnson, the peasant’s son, has
preached in his reform writings, preached against it and its middle
class views of life, though at the same time he always looked upon it
as the highest normal condition.

Ibsen took Hedda Gabler, the daughter of an officer whom he describes
with considerable humour, for the profession of commanding officer in
Norway is the favourite resource of the superfluous sons of tradesmen,
and it has of late been proved by the autumn manœuvres that the
Norwegian peasant soldier can do everything, whereas his commanding
officer can accomplish very little. Therefore Ibsen took this daughter
of the upper commercial class with her superior morals, analysed her
and proved her to be what she was--a sexless nonentity who stupidly
sells herself with utter disregard to her future offspring, and who
retains nothing of a woman’s nature beyond a weak, impotent desire.
He takes her and throws her to the dead with an æsthetic formula on
her lips--takes her and permeates her entire being with that exhausted
vitality which leads to suicidal mania. Björnson takes as his heroine
Svava, the daughter of a rich but very dissipated merchant, who falls
in love with a young man while conversing with him on old-maidish and
philanthropic topics, but throws her glove into his face in consequence
of some backstair gossip through which she discovers that instead
of living like herself, he has acted the part of Don Juan after the
example of her father. Björnson contrasts the vulgar frivolity of the
male bourgeois with the vulgar sexlessness of the superior girl, and he
extols the latter as being the only salutary system of morals.

Of course Björnson’s _Gauntlet_ was received on the bourgeois stage
with great pomp, but not so Ibsen’s _Hedda Gabler_. And while the
middle class was unanimous in regarding Ibsen with curiosity mingled
with horror, as the angel of death whose sign is on his door, it
greeted Björnson as a renowned and fashionable physician who is always
able to effect a cure so long as the illness is not positively fatal.

The Scandinavian peasant does not let his hair grow grey over
these discussions, and in general he is well disposed towards the
emancipation of women. He has long been accustomed to see women work
and earn wages like himself, for it is not at all unusual for his
sisters and aunts to provide for themselves by becoming maid-servants.
That the wife should have the right of disposal over her own dowry,
should keep a sharp eye on all gains and expenses and should put in
a word on all affairs of house and home--to that also he is well
accustomed, and the compliant son of the soil knows how to sing a
song in praise of the matriarchy of the peasant mother. Matrimonial
infidelity is to him an abomination, he does not envy the townsman
that for which he personally has little opportunity, and he despises
the attractions of the youthful life of the idle sons of the middle
class, since he seldom transgresses with any save his future wife. And
since he looks at everything from the utilitarian standpoint, it is
natural that he should give his full approval when daughters not only
cease to cost money, but are able to earn it and to lay by a store
of fine dollars. As for their remaining unmarried--well, you can’t
have your cake and eat it--they have got the money, what more do they
want? The peasant does not look upon married life in the æsthetic
manner that is common to the higher classes for whom it possesses a
certain artistic value, to him it is as much of a business as milking,
ploughing, manuring; and if the one is no longer necessary, the other
can be dispensed with too. He has none of the prudery of the townsman
who finds something offensive in a bold glance at nature, yet he too
has his pruderies, and if the townsman evinces moral and æsthetic
scruples against an open discussion or an undiluted song of love,
so likewise the peasant will not read it in print because to him it
represents the commonplace. This is how Björnson, with his doctrine
of perfection, proved to be the right man both for the middle class
and the peasantry; his lectures were acceptable chiefly because they
partook of the nature of a religious discourse or a Sunday sermon, to
which a man listens when he is wearing his best clothes, but which he
has no time to think about during the six remaining days of the week
when he is busy and has to do his work.

No sooner had I reached Gudbrandsdal than I seemed to be standing on
Björnson’s own territory. Everybody knew exactly how far it was to his
place, and the last two hours of the way I was driven by a little girl
who took me past wealthy two-storeyed farm-houses rising from the rich
pasture land, drove me round a beautiful winding road, jumped down,
opened the gate, sprang on to her seat again, and without consulting
me, drove through the entrance and up the drive, stopping at the door
of a large, low building which was Björnson’s country seat.

Outside, under the wide-spreading roof, sat his wife and daughters,
surrounded by guests who were staying in the house. The author was
writing, but he received me. He was sitting at his writing table in
a large low room--a regular peasant’s room. His feet were resting
on a polar bearskin which had been presented to him by a society of
advanced women, and a gigantic vase filled with cut roses was placed
on a pedestal beside him. He informed me that the house had been an
old farm which he had bought and fitted with all the requirements
of modern life. We partook of the midday meal in the old room
that had formerly been the servants’ hall, and where now, instead
of servant and maid, were assembled a large gathering of Danish,
Swedish and Finnish “women’s rights women.” Having dined, we drank
coffee in the drawing-room, which had been the ball-room, but was
now furnished according to Parisian taste with flowers, _chaises
longues_, cream-coloured curtains with red gauze linings, _bibelots_
and oil paintings. Presently an old lady entered; she had an aquiline
profile and yellow waving curls over her ears, she was thick-set and
broad-shouldered with a fresh red complexion and small sparkling eyes,
one could see at once that she was a feminine Björnson. “My mother,”
said he, “she is ninety years old.” And this giant’s mother, herself
a giant, spoke and greeted us in as lively and hearty a manner as a
person of sixty. When we had finished our coffee, Björnson led me
out on to the new balcony which encircled the house. He glanced over
the rising land with its luxuriant pasture. “Our people are being
corrupted,” he said. “Our press and our life are full of lies. I am
writing an article against lies, the lies with which we are being
poisoned.” He made a gesture with his arm across the distant country,
and exclaimed, “Lying must be abolished!”

I was obliged to go, as my little coachman was waiting. We retraced our
steps through the old room with its low ceiling and exquisite Parisian
furniture, and its glass cupboard filled with plate. I drove away
meditating on the strange contrast between this farm house and its
artificial fittings worthy of a town mansion, and I heard Björnson’s
pathetic voice calling to his country, “Lying must be abolished!”


III

Björnson was the son of a peasant; it was only in later life that
his father became a pastor, and from him Björnson has inherited a
theological tendency. He is essentially a preacher and religious
teacher, he is never happy unless he has something to proclaim. But as
he is not one of those who enjoy self-denial, he prefers that those
very contradictory truths, which he has preached during the course of
years, should take the form of a manifestation of the joy of life.

This is Björnson’s chief characteristic. During his whole life and in
all his writings, he has sought to unite theology with materialism. All
his writings, no matter how extreme, had their origin in a compromise
between the two.

Björnson began his literary career as a writer of peasant tales,
followed by a succession of historical dramas; but when the age began
to demand a new form of literature, his creative faculty came to a
standstill. His last works in the old style are not to be compared with
his earlier ones.

In 1869, Ibsen wrote _The League of Youth_, which was the first of his
social dramas. It is connected with peculiar circumstances to which I
shall return later. Björnson’s next piece was called _A Bankrupt_,
and as an emotional drama it manifested the same tendency as Ibsen’s
satire, _i.e._ the tendency to criticise society. Next followed an
overwhelming mass of literary productions with ever-widening horizons,
and Björnson became a European celebrity. From henceforward he became
the most important factor in the progress of culture in Germany.

The causes of this revolution were threefold. In the first place it was
probably due to a disheartening sense of failure which led him to seek
for a wider scope, forced him to break through the innate narrowness
and stability of his mind with violence to himself, and drove him to
become a disciple of Brandes and to take food for the mind wherever he
might find it, in Stuart Mill, Darwin, Spencer, the religious critics
of Germany, Taine, and the modern Frenchmen. Next the stimulating
influence of Brandes himself, who drove the contemporary generation
of northern writers into the mazes of problematic literature, and
finally--but, as I think, chiefly--the example of Ibsen. Björnson,
as an author, was always a genius, and consequently he was not able
to accomplish much by means of teaching, lecturing, philosophical
discussions and hairbreadth argumentations; these remained dead to him,
until one came who showed him the way.

Next followed a succession of sketches from modern life on a basis
of reform. The tragi-comedy of the merchant’s worm-eaten house was
followed by the tragi-comedy of modern publishing, as treated in _The
Editor_. The prudery of the modern system of educating girls, and the
misfortune of having a dissolute father, provides material for a drama
entitled _The New System_; while in _Leonarda_, the snivelling morality
of the present day is contrasted with the cheerful and unprejudiced
views of the grandmother.

Here also Björnson was the energetic, gifted pedagogue, who by fair
means or foul was the first to inculcate the elements of tolerance
into his countrymen. He had not much psychological depth, and his
tendency was in favour of atonement in the old æsthetic sense as it
originated in Germany. In just this sense life was not realised in full
earnest, nor life’s contrasts in their inexorability. There were always
mistakes which only needed to be explained in order that repentance and
amendment might ensue.

Björnson rose swiftly to the summit of his fame. He became a kind of
head prophet in Norway. There was no political, social, religious or
economical question on which he had not a weighty--often an ominously
weighty--word to say; sometimes it was a suggestion, less frequently an
opinion, or word of advice. Gradually, however, social criticism in the
general sense of the term became stale, while on the other hand a new,
brand new problem appeared above the horizon.

This was the problem of Nora, the woman who wishes to be first a
human being and then a woman, it had been handled by Ibsen many
years before, and had provided a subject for Kielland’s widely known
literary works. Nora’s generation was already grown up and her
children were numerous. Kielland described the virtuous woman and the
good-for-nothing man, the sensible, earnest, thoughtful girl and the
scum of society. In Sweden a multitude of unhappy wives took refuge in
authorship, and called down a fearful judgment on the husbands of all
classes of society. Life had influenced literature and now literature
retaliated upon life with practical results. The petticoated population
of the three Scandinavian kingdoms began to cogitate upon its own
importance. The air was filled with an incredible number of women’s
“works,” and an incredible amount of feminine talent was discovered.
Just as a young girl in Germany is taught the art of capturing a
protector with Gretchen wiles, in Scandinavia she was taught to think
about herself and her own importance with the earnestness of a Nora in
the third act. And just as a young girl in Germany grows squint-eyed
from being always on the look-out for a husband, so the Scandinavian
girl of fifteen and sixteen had already lost her youthful simplicity,
her natural and unconstrained manner. Her walk, deportment, and tone
of voice seemed to demand attention, and everything concerning woman
was discussed and debated. The Liberal press of the three countries,
mindful of woman’s indirect influence on votes, bowed the knee and
worshipped her intelligence and magnanimity, and man’s delight knew
no bounds if, at a meeting of Conservatives, a young lady hooted like
a street-boy. Every number of the progressive journals contained at
least one notice on the results of the struggle for the emancipation
of women. Young women were expected to be as strong as men, and young
women were anxious to be strong in order that they might inspire
men with respect. All young girls were taught swimming, gymnastics,
bicycling and skating. Rowing clubs were started for women, debating
clubs and preparatory schools for university examinations, schools for
artistic handicraft and women’s rights unions, yet in each of these
there was always a man as manager. Marriage was despised, but the
right to propose was claimed should they suddenly be seized with the
desire to make a man happy. They entertained a great confidence in
themselves and in the mutual fellowship of women’s interests, while
they vowed eternal unity, sisterhood and friendship. The universities
were open and all the colleges were accessible to women; they became
students and studied law, philosophy and medicine. Sometimes they tried
to speak during the hour for practice in philosophy, but without any
great result. Indeed, there was very little result at all beyond the
production of a couple of lady doctors, a deluge of village school
teachers, and a remarkable increase of ill-health. But at any rate they
had succeeded in proving their intellectual gifts, although in order
to do so they had plunged up to the ears in the stupefying machinery
of learned study against which an ever-increasing number of the best
men were raising their voices in protest. They became telephone
clerks, telegraph clerks, railway commissioners, statisticians,
superintendents, and in all these newly gained functions they generally
took pains to be more consequential and more disagreeable than their
male colleagues. But what the rising generation of women loved best
were the fine arts. They painted and wrote, reviewed and edited, they
petitioned the government for scholarships and the suffrage, for the
right of property and other rights, some of which were granted, others
promised. The average men joined hand in hand to assist their efforts,
and at first the whole movement promised success. It was an undoubted
success in fact, but only among the middle class. At that time no one
had as yet realised that the movement was purely the result of the
unimaginative, poverty-stricken spirit of the poorer middle class
parent, who thanks Heaven when he has “disposed of” his children,
and weeps tears of joy when his daughters are “able to provide for
themselves” and are therefore no longer in need of being “provided
for,” which last is always connected in his mind with household worry
and expense.

Of course Björnson did not realise it either, and it was not until much
later that he took an active part in the movement, for he had never
been the pioneer of any cause. It was only when the movement was well
started, and the majority were interested in it, that he gave it his
support, and Björnson’s support was the “open sesame.” Björnson was the
right man and the right author to popularise it with success, with only
too great a success.

The northern woman had developed out of wife-hood and domesticity into
different stages of individualism. All varieties of sex were evolved,
and the creative talent proffered a selection of degenerate breeds:
freshly developed and deadened natures, erotomaniacs and sexlessness,
the woman who theorises, the woman who demands her rights, the woman
whose instincts are asleep, the woman whose head is hot and whose
senses are cold, the woman whose chastity is aggressive, every kind of
artificial product in fact, with here and there the rare exception of
the free, proud nature of one who is a law unto herself.

It was in the year 1884 that the novel appeared which was intended to
reform public morals, it was called _Thomas Rendalen_. The introduction
is a kind of ancestral history of the hero’s family, and it may be
counted as one of the greatest things that Björnson has ever written;
its historical spirit and word-colouring are such that one might fancy
it to be a genuine production of the latter half of the seventeenth
century. The continuation of the story describes a model educational
establishment founded on a new moral principle, and is the first
of Björnson’s works which is written from an English and American
standpoint. A victorious warfare is waged against the stupid prejudices
of society and the distorted and harmful system by which girls are
educated. A dissolute man of the world who, with his hypnotic glances,
has seduced a young girl of respectable family, afterwards forsakes
both her and her child in order to marry a rich young lady who offers
no objection in spite of possessing an accurate knowledge of the facts.
The “fallen” girl with her child is honourably received into the model
establishment. But the real hero is Thomas Rendalen, a youth of German
extraction, who was begotten through violence and violation, but is
rescued from this evil inheritance by a wise training, and later on
by an equally wise system of self-training. His mother looks after
him, she has been trained in England as a teacher of gymnastics and is
superintendent of the model establishment, and on one occasion during
her short married life she had a fearful tussle with her brutal husband
in which she sufficiently proved her physical superiority. It is a
novel on the training of the sexual impulse. The idea of the book,
which is repeatedly illustrated by new examples, is to show that the
union between man and woman is not a condition of the highest physical
and spiritual welfare; that philanthropical works, and other more or
less external diversions, are also very fine remedies. In the improved
version of _The Gauntlet_, Björnson maintains that impurity is far
worse than celibacy. A woman beginning life is considered pure, unless
she has been seduced; but a man is considered impure. Education is
held to be the highest means and aim of life, and the union between
man and woman, from being an eternal source of strength for both, is
degraded into a temporary arrangement for the procreation of the race.
_Thomas Rendalen_ became the gospel of the school mistresses, teachers,
telegraph clerks and other women who, on account of their position in
life or their personal idiosyncracies, are debarred from marriage. It
surrounded the compulsory spinsterhood of the feminine portion of our
higher stratum of society with a halo of glory, and the hearts of the
discontented women of the north--married and unmarried--were laid in
thousands at the feet of Björnson.

This was all that he staked in the movement. While new wishes and new
needs were being aroused in a multitude of women, among whom were the
most refined, the most advanced, the most developed of their sex;
while a new type of womanhood was being evolved which sought for
emancipation and groped after it only to find it in an unsatisfying,
stupid, and distorted form; he remained glued to the superficial,
put boarding-school education in the place of domestic discipline,
morality in the place of Christianity, and made woman a generous offer
of independence and personal freedom in return for the renunciation
of her sex. And as to men he had once uttered the celebrated cry,
“Passion must be abolished:” so to women he says: “Sex is nothing,
it is entirely a matter of secondary importance, the fruit of a
poet’s debauched imagination. There are many joys, a teacher’s joys,
a pastor’s joys, a student’s joys, which are far more natural to a
woman’s nature than the artificial and overrated fiction of love.” And
with regard to their intercourse with men, he carried his snivelling
morality and unseemly enquiries as far as the bridal bed.

In his next and, so far, his last novel, Björnson wandered _In God’s
Ways_.

The subject of it is the marriage between a young girl who is
childlike in her ignorance and a man who has become blind and lame
in consequence of his excesses. Their separation, combined with the
subsequent re-marriage of the young woman, is regarded both by society
and by her relatives as an act of adultery. She is unable to endure
the accusation, and dies from the cruelty of her fellow creatures. The
person of next importance in the book is a young man who cures himself
of a secret vice by means of diligent duet-playing with this same young
woman, and by a still more diligent practice of running on all fours
and other gymnastic exercises.

Such is the nature of Björnson’s contribution to the psychology of sex.

With regard to the moral conclusions of his latter period, he takes his
stand beside Tolstoy as an ascetic; and like Tolstoy, who has wasted a
grand psychology, Björnson has squandered a rich lyrical faculty on a
mutilated ideal. Asceticism stands and falls with religious enthusiasm,
and consists, in most cases, of nothing but religious enthusiasm; this
is why, with Tolstoy, it went hand in hand with a return to positive
Christianity; but Björnson, who became a religious freethinker at the
same time that he became an ascetic, planted the moral that he preached
on a far more slippery soil--on the soil of Degeneration.

       *       *       *       *       *

In Ibsen’s first social drama, _The League of Youth_, he has drawn a
satirical portrait of Björnson in the person of the central figure of
the piece--Stensgaard, the adventurer and popular speaker. Hjalmar
Christensen points out the likeness in his newly published work, called
_Northern Writers_.

When we, at the end of Björnson’s career, examine the collected works
of this celebrated author, we are impressed with the superficiality,
the clap-trap precipitation and inward wavering which he displays
whenever he takes part in the problems and social questions of the day.
Every new book of his clearly proves to us that what he pathetically
offers as gold is in reality nothing but dross, and in his last
collection of _Tales_ the tone of persuasion, which in old time so
often won him the victory, sounds distressingly false. It was always
his ambition to advance with the age, and he has met with the fate
that must ever be the experience of those who aim no higher. The age
does not allow any one to keep pace with it for long, and he who is not
in advance of it will soon find himself in the rear.




_The Women-Haters: Tolstoy and Strindberg_


I

_Leo Tolstoy_

There are mornings in summer when the sunshine is radiant, and when
the earth smells so fresh and sweet that body and soul expand in a
feeling of exultant health and strength; and then no matter where we
are, or how it comes to pass, the Russian world springs up before our
eyes, and the Russian woman, with her hearty laugh and motherly figure,
rises before us as the living incarnation of just such a morning.
Working girls with handkerchiefs over their heads, round, red-cheeked,
merry-faced girls with large hips, dressed in pink cotton skirts,
their stockingless feet in high-heeled spatterdashes; little ladies
with smiling eyes appearing under their flowered hats, and the large,
well-developed figures of grown women kindly disposed, walking with
indolent, matronly carriage--they pass us by one by one; we know their
faces as little as we know their names, they vanish as quickly as they
came, and like all the vague though memorable impressions of our first
childhood, they come softly as the twilight, and glide away like the
image of a dream.

I was born in Russia, and in moments such as these it is never the
women of the other countries where I have lived who appear before me,
never French women, or Germans, or Scandinavians, but always and only
the Russian women, because it is only they who harmonise with nature
and unite with her in an indefinable sense of unity and enjoyment.

There are other days in summer when nature seems to weep and shiver,
when the clouds hang over the earth like dirty grey rags, out of which
the rain drips, drips; when the grass lies as though it were mown, and
the harvest is spoilt, when the trees sway hither and thither like
weary people rocking their sorrow, and an unbroken desolate wail passes
through the air like the sound of a monotonous sigh. Whoever has not
seen days such as these dawn on the endless Russian plains and drag to
a weary close, he does not know their solitude and melancholy. Nowhere
as there, in those Russian wildernesses far removed from civilisation,
does nature speak as clearly, and make humanity her mirror. Nowhere is
happiness so careless and the heart so large, and nowhere does fear so
clutch at the throat like invisible hands which grasp and then slacken
their hold--slacken their hold, only to grasp the tighter....

At the moments when these impressions arise, I see behind them and
through them something which resembles a large and powerful man’s head,
with a broad forehead, and the dark, sparkling, deep-set eyes of a
thinker and seer, eyes which seem as though they were trying to creep
inwards. Sometimes this head is set on a uniform, and sometimes on a
peasant’s smock; sometimes he is young with moustaches, and his hair is
cut short; sometimes he is old with a wrinkled face, and the greasy,
waving hair of a peasant, with a long Russian peasant’s beard; but the
head always rests upon the same broad shoulders, the same giant’s body,
and there is always the same shy, sombre gleam in his eyes, the cold
gleam which betokens the lonely fanatic. The youthful head was the head
of Tolstoy when he wrote _The Cossacks_; the aged one belongs to the
author of _The Kreutzer Sonata_.

In the interval between these two were produced works of such a deep
and genuine character as have not been surpassed by any contemporary
writer, I allude to the story called _Family Happiness_, and the novels
_War and Peace_ and _Anna Karenina_.

A short time ago Tolstoy’s writings were the great literary event of
Europe. His reformatory zeal moved and perplexed even the unbelievers;
his confessions startled society; and his probing into all the layers
of human nature, which had hitherto been ignored in accordance with a
highly-respected custom, aroused the anxiety and excitement of all who
had senses and nerves, especially those with a bad conscience who had
suppressed their senses, and with ill-used nerves that sought vengeance.

Tolstoy writes from the moral standpoint--his own peculiar
standpoint--of the man with a bad conscience.

The man with a bad conscience had long led a hidden existence as a
church penitent when the philosophical writer Friedrich Nietzsche
discovered him and drew him into the light of day out of the darkness
of life and of literature. Since then it has become possible to know
him and to study his character.

But it is not often that this study possesses as many finger-posts
to point the way, as many rifts in the veil, as are disclosed in the
personality of Tolstoy.

His books are the personification of Russian nature with its golden
laugh and soul-devouring melancholy; the healthy frivolity and
spontaneity of the Russian woman and the self-tormenting sectarianism
of the Russian man.

In all Tolstoy’s books there is an ever-recurring figure which is none
other than himself, depicted in a manner that combines an intimate
knowledge with perfect candour. This figure is connected throughout an
extensive network of fine root fibres with the profoundest qualities
of the Russians as a typical race. Concerning Tolstoy as a private
individual, we are, so to speak, lacking in all psychological data,
with the exception of those which he has himself given us in his
various confessions, and which, for that very reason, are almost
useless with regard to their psychology. But like all authors, great or
small, he has unconsciously revealed himself in his novels, especially
in those longer ones which he has since disowned; and now when the
_Kreutzer Sonata_ has fixed a boundary, behind which not even the
most extreme moral severity can discover a second, and when the great
life-painter has attained to the negation of life, there is a peculiar
interest attached to the enquiry as to what were the national and
individual circumstances which conducted him thither, and what were
the stations on the road towards the crucifying of the flesh which are
indicated in his books.

Three main points occur to my mind, although they are apparently quite
unconnected with one another; these are:

A depth of intuition in his grasp and comprehension of woman which is
unequalled by anything in the whole of European literature.

An everlasting bad conscience which wears a squinting expression of
asceticism, and which, in all his writings, takes its stand between him
and the woman and lies in wait for love’s sacrifice.

A secret hardness and spiritual reserve which acts like a bitter taste
in the mouth, and gives the lie to the universal gospel of love in his
later works and the craving for union with the woman in his earlier
ones. With an evil-eyed love of cruelty it attaches itself to the most
private conditions of life, and rejoices when sweetness is turned to
gall; it evinces a refined brutality in self-torture, a sensation of
positive delight in the arousing and enduring of pain, all of which
are national and psychological features in the spiritual life of the
Russian race, and a key to the perversities of its countless religious
sects.

At the root of it all there is something like a dark unrest, a
hearkening terror, a mistrust, which makes him uncomfortable where he
is, and lonely where he loves.

No other literature has understood women and described them as vividly
as the Russian. Take for instance Turgenev’s young girls at the time
of their physical and spiritual awakening, think of the wavering
indecision of their lonely inner life, filled with wishes of which
they are hardly conscious, while as yet untouched by experience;
think of the vegetative, half-indifferent sensuousness of his
widows, think of Garschin’s inspired description of the demi-monde,
of Dostoievsky’s Sonias and Gruschenkas and other doubtful social
phenomena, in the description of whom he is as successful as he is the
reverse in his gentlewomen. The new feature in these writers is their
astonishing depth of psychology, their instinctive grasp of the side
of woman’s nature which is not turned towards man, and their intuitive
comprehension of her as a feminine being dumb and unveiled in their
sight. French literature knows nothing of it. In France a young girl’s
life begins on her first meeting with a man, and the charm of her
womanhood is only revealed with her first love-affair in marriage. But
that is the stupidity of authorship modelled in accordance with the
conventional rules and acquired blindness of a school of literature.
In Russia there is, strictly speaking, no school, either in literature
or anywhere else, there is no so-called “good school” for anything at
all, and accordingly there is no tradition, no taste cultivated by
morality, nothing fixed, no fashion, no high road. The Russian writer,
with his gentle erotic nature and sensitive yearning soul, can wander
whither he will. He has the sharp eyes of a young race, the unshrinking
gaze which has not been blunted by generations of culture, and which is
quick to realise all that it has seen. The young Russian girl is not
only “a girl,” she is a woman. She has not undergone the hypocritical
convent education of the French girl, she knows nothing of the German
girl’s bourgeois conventions, and she has more temperament and more
natural spontaneity than either. These are two of the reasons why in
French literature a woman only becomes an individual when she is loved,
and why in the German literature of the last century, even in that of
the newest realistic school, she is not an individual at all but only
a being who belongs to a human species, and these are also the reasons
why in Scandinavian literature she is endowed with a half timid, half
sorrowful individuality.

Woman as woman, unconditional and complete in the essence of her being,
in the relative perfection of her nature before she comes into contact
with man, has never yet been described. To do so is the task allotted
to a future literature starting from other presumptions and working
under other aspects.

The reason that the Russians are in advance of other nations in
this particular is, I think, that with them there has never been a
historic period of the cult of woman with all its visible and invisible
offshoots. As in their religious conceptions the ideal of womanhood is
not so much the “spotless Virgin” as the “Mother of God,” so in the
language of the people there is no separate form for addressing a young
girl, and when the ordinary Russian wishes to ingratiate himself with a
woman he calls her “Matiuschka” (little mother), regardless of her age
or position. Woman in the fulfilment of her natural function--woman as
a mother--is that which appeals most to the direct consciousness of the
Russian. Hence the artificial barrier, which the postulate of purity
had raised between the man and woman of western Europe, falls away, and
the Russian beholds woman as unity, as nature.

The Russian woman sees herself in the same light. No moral arrogance,
no pose of purity has become a second nature to her. With the exception
of a thin coating of western European culture and notions of propriety,
she is more of a natural being, more whole-hearted and spontaneous in
her affections, and more decided in her sympathies and antipathies than
the woman of western Europe.

No Russian writer is more profoundly conscious of it than Tolstoy, and
not one has described it with greater intuition.

It was this that originated characters like the Cossack girl in _The
Cossacks_, who permeates the whole book with the warmth of her healthy
young person, whose silence is more convincing, deeper, and more
apparent than any exchange of thought between a man and woman; who
loves and sacrifices herself unhesitatingly with the instinct of an
animal, and rejects the young officer’s love, without being aware of
it, which is, to him, the bitterest and most personal humiliation of
all.

This was the origin of that child-woman in _War and Peace_; I think
her name was Natascha or Nadieschda. That enchanting being who has
just reached the age of transition when so many shoots sprout which
cause life to perish or starve, unless they are too feeble to grow at
all,--poor little blossoms that vibrate with a nervous shudder, seeking
to hide themselves in fear of the beatings of her pulse, the variations
of her every mood, while she seeks relief from her tears in the bed and
arms of her mother--still a child, already a woman! This was also the
origin of those scenes in the same book where the boy and girl seek
one another, play and dance together, and cannot be happy without one
another. A true picture, a piece of child-psychology, the depth and
truth of which is shown at a glance.

There is also a thoughtful young officer in this book, who is in love
with the merry playfellow of his childhood; but she slips away from
him, and he marries an elderly, faded, impersonal spinster, and looks
for happiness in a marriage grounded on mutual sympathy.

Then, for the third time, and this time the portrait is better executed
and the likeness is more striking, the same young man steps forward
as Lievin in _Anna Karenina_. He is tall and strong, honest, with the
Gallic temperament, but awkward and somewhat clumsy in confiding his
inner life; he belongs to the class of men whom women ignore, whose
presence awakens a vague shyness in them. There is something in his
nature which arouses a feeling of distrust and dislike in women.
What is it? Can it be a want of feeling, an absence of sympathy?
Or is it something in his person that is physically repellent? His
first advances meet with no response, it is possible that they are
misunderstood, and he is bitterly disheartened. Later on, when the
young girl has herself undergone a disappointment in love, she
expresses herself willing, and they marry. But here already, many
years before the aged Tolstoy wrote _The Kreutzer Sonata_, the first
months of marriage are described as a torture. Lievin experiences a
feeling of shame and disillusion. They try to avoid one another, to
avoid being together; they have nothing in common. When they avoid each
other, his conscience reproaches him; when they are together, his bad
conscience is a torture to him. It is really nothing but a process of
animal existence, represented as a psychological mystery. The husband
goes on his way in careless indifference, and held fast by the circle
of ideas belonging to society and the Church, becomes displeased and
irritable. There are a number of men in whom the prudery of the spirit
and the denseness of the perceptions never permit of that refinement of
impulse which is love. It is merely a psychological peculiarity, and
is neither moral nor immoral; but according to our ideas of morality,
love must co-exist with marriage, and the thinker who realises that
it is not there has a bad conscience. His bad conscience makes nature
appear evil in his sight, and casts a halo over everything that might
deliver him from it. Asceticism, as an eternally unsatisfied desire,
possesses the extra advantage of being a never-ending delight, an
inverted pleasure. This feature is deeply impressed on the character
of the Slav; it is a combination of those two principal features of
the Russian temperament--sensibility and passiveness. It is from this,
the psychological standpoint, that we must view Tolstoy’s increasing
moral rigour as displayed in his works. When we remember that it is a
Russian author who chooses this problem for his motive, and that all
great Russian writers are as admirable in their powers of observation
as they are second-rate thinkers, as subtle in their psychology as they
are helpless altruists--both indications of a young literature--then
his obscure personality loses much that is incomprehensible and
confusing.

At last Lievin finds rest for his conscience and satisfaction in his
marriage through the birth of a child, which seems to bring a meaning
into it and also, to a certain extent, an excuse. The other couple,
Anna Karenina and Vronsky, cannot find either, because in their free
union the child is no excuse, but only a burden. With an incomparable
discernment and rare genius in the delineation of the characters and
their social surroundings, Tolstoy describes the unceasing torment of
this union, until Anna Karenina’s wish to destroy herself breaks out
into a brutal form of suicide. Not one single moment of happiness has
fallen to the lot of these equally warm-hearted and passionate people;
the entire description presents nothing but a continual judgment on
injured morality.

But before the sinful relationship had begun--as long as love is
nothing but an unconscious wave, a sweet, painful, sunny smile in the
soul of Anna Karenina--what writer can compare with Tolstoy in his
intuitive understanding, his unhesitating description of the woman?
With what yearning sympathy his thoughts must cling to her in order
to grasp the impalpable lines of her being! But the portrait of the
young girl in _Family Happiness_ is still more worthy of admiration
than that of the matured woman. There we have everything: the innocent
sensuousness of the first awakening of womanhood in the child, the
woman who is such a thorough woman, with her inexplicable attraction,
her thoughtless impatience, and her active imagination which transforms
the first man whom she meets into _the_ man, the beloved man, to whom
she gives her whole affection.

There is a scene in the book after the young girl has had her hot
Russian bath, when, with her hair still wet, she sits at the coffee
table out of doors and turns the head of an elderly gentleman, who is
her only male acquaintance; then there is a second scene where they
both look for cherries on the trees--and such a description of pure
sensuous delight on a warm, damp, dreamy summer’s day as I have never
seen equalled anywhere.

And yet it was this same author who wrote the dangerous, poisonous
_Kreutzer Sonata_, and preached the doctrines of a misogynist on a
basis of universal love for humanity, a love which was to end with the
extermination of the human race.

The time must soon be at hand when “universal love” will be dragged
from under its consecrated veil, and examined psychologically and
physiologically as to its conditions and its origin. The question is
whether it springs from a superabundance or a deficiency. All-embracing
love, such as the “universal love of humanity,” has always looked
down with an evil eye upon the great natural basis of all love, love
between man and woman, and has never ceased to preach its inferiority
and its baseness. Nowadays we hear the old song accompanied by new
instruments resounding simultaneously from Russia and Norway. But
nowadays we take the preachers themselves and analyse them through and
through, heart and soul.

When we examine the personality of a great master like Tolstoy, what do
we find? First that strange, absorbing impulse, the desire to create,
to reveal himself, which indicates an excessive consciousness of the
ego. In his youth there was apparently an intense longing to make
himself understood without the mental capacity necessary for success;
failure resulted in shyness, uncertainty, doubt, and according to
his own confession he experienced a transient, sensual love without
spiritual depth. He was out of harmony with himself in consequence,
and at last the longed-for event took place--he married. It was a
marriage such as there are thousands: healthy bodies, dried-up souls,
the temperament of a thinker and fanatic with a narrow and obstinate
nature, very little real knowledge, very little power of intellectual
expansion, while with increasing years was added an increase of moral
severity. Discontented with the primal conditions of existence, his
writings showed an increase of pessimism, while an ever greater number
of past joys escaped his memory, and there was no pleasure that did not
leave an after-taste of bitterness. When as an elderly man he looked
back upon the first time when a young girl caused his pulse to beat
the faster, he sought to explain the circumstance in the _Kreutzer
Sonata_ by describing her as the only one who is pure and good, thus
rendering a coarse touch to the imagination which betrays itself in the
glorification of the child-woman. Hence the pose of a social reformer
who takes an egotistic delight in nourishing the consciousness of
martyrdom.

These are a few general outlines contributing to a picture of Tolstoy,
as he appears to me in his writings. For I believe that it is a
man’s personal experiences which determine his opinions and form the
rudiments of his mind and character, and that these rudiments, however
much they may be obscured by time, are still there to be discovered by
those who seek them.


II

_August Strindberg_

August Strindberg is one of the most wonderful and perfect examples
of a type which, in our vacillating age, frequently rises to the
surface and endeavours to make its mark everywhere; a type full
of aggressiveness and impatience, seldom made after a pattern and
frequently full of imperfections, but with touches of real genius as
well as barren wastes, full of lapses, but full of promises for the
future. It is a mixed type. The strange combinations in his character,
the seeming contradictions and the flaws in his education make it a
very difficult study for the average person. It would require a genius,
one to whom the many hostile elements appear microscopically enlarged.
The mixture of races, that inseparable ingredient in human physiology,
is as yet an unexplored region of investigation. The question is one
with which Strindberg has been greatly troubled, and he has contributed
abundant material for its solution.

He has done more. The great literature that he has created is more
priceless as raw material to the psychologist than as a work of art.
In all his writings Strindberg occupies the reader’s mind in a twofold
manner: first, with the psychological results to which he individually
attains; secondly, with the psychological results to which the reader
_malgré lui_ attains, and which often contradict the others on matters
of chief importance. Whoever studies Strindberg finds himself in the
presence of a double mirror; in the one he sees the world reflected in
Strindberg’s mind, and in the other as an antidote, he sees the mind of
Strindberg presenting its own solution in the moment of its birth and
reflecting its psychology in the reader’s soul.

Strindberg’s collected works are really only biographical contributions
towards the solution of the riddle of his ego. He has never ceased to
speculate on the mystery of his own being, and this speculation has
always vented itself in indignant storming against outward enemies.
What does he mean by his angry guesses at the riddle of the woman
sphinx? You have but to turn this sphinx round and it is no longer a
woman. It is the man sphinx--the riddle that is himself.

No writings have ever been of a more personal character than those of
Strindberg. But perhaps no writings have ever issued from an ego that
was less complete. I should like to express it as follows: In a mixed
type like Strindberg’s no unity has as yet been able to form itself
beneath the threshold of consciousness, for there the instincts of
different races and epochs rush helter skelter. All that he has written
fell as an instantaneous reflection on his soul, and was thrown back in
an impressionist picture. In Strindberg’s works we find no transitions,
no coherence. And since he has always presented himself as a riddle
to the passing crowd, it is quite fair to regard the riddle as common
property, which any one may seek to solve if he is not afraid to do so.


I

I have often met Strindberg and have received the most contradictory
impressions concerning him. But in one way he was always the same,
and that was in his outward manner. He demanded respect, and he
invariably treated himself with the greatest respect. There was always
something subdued and severe about him as though he were keeping
guard over an invisible and holy relic, against which neither he nor
others might sin; his voice, when he spoke, was low and imperious, and
his threatening gaze was always ready to quell any signs of feminine
flippancy, although he would have been very unwilling to be deprived of
it altogether.

That was Strindberg as he appeared to the multitude. But for those who
knew him better, there was another Strindberg, not more sociable and
affable than the first, but one who was certainly not pompous, who was
a thorough Swede, a boon companion whose good hours fell at the first
cock-crowing, a humourist with an indistinct smile who played at chess
with life, and cared less about the results of the game than for its
subtle tactics, a man of great foresight, unreliable, impulsive, a man
whose intellect impressed you and who wished to be impressive, and who
in addition to this possessed the cunning of a boy.

The keynote, which was the solution to the nature of this contradictory
and purposely mysterious being, was a suspicion that knew no bounds;
suspicion for its own sake, suspicion as a principle, as the
prerogative of a superior intellect, a suspicion against every one and
everything which ended by becoming a suspicion of himself.

Strindberg has Finnish-Lapp blood in his veins. He comes of a
poverty-stricken middle-class family which was undergoing a period
of great pecuniary distress at the time of his birth. His father had
known better times, but through his union with a servant-girl he had
dropped out of the social circle to which he belonged. Three children
were born before marriage, the author soon after the wedding. The
mother was always ailing, and she died of consumption after the birth
of her twelfth child. While the boy was growing up, the father and
mother, with seven children and two servants, inhabited three rooms.
The furniture consisted chiefly of beds and cradles. Children lay on
ironing-boards and chairs, children lay in cradles and beds. Baptism,
funeral! Baptism, funeral! Sometimes two baptisms one after the other
without a funeral. The father was only seen at meals; his name was used
to frighten the children, and “Papa shall hear of it,” was equivalent
to a whipping.

Education consisted in scolding and pulling the hair. Stern discipline
was enacted in the home. Lying was unmercifully punished, disobedience
likewise, and in after years corporal punishment was superseded by the
menace: “What will people say?”

These facts are quoted from Strindberg’s many-volumed autobiography,
_The Maid-Servant’s Son_, in which he lays down the law with inveterate
bitterness against his origin, his childish impressions, the order of
society, the system of education, and against all bonds and fetters,
customs and duties, which chain a man down from his first days to his
last. He knows from the very beginning that he has not the courage
to break loose from them, and that is why he pursues them with such
untiring and embittered vengeance.

August Strindberg wrote _The Maid-Servant’s Son_ in his altruistic,
socialistic period, when he believed in a social revolution that was to
bring about the radical redress of his personal wrongs.

Strindberg is in this instance the link of a chain which winds through
central Germany, but has scarcely forced its way as yet to the North
and the South, for the North and Bavaria are peasant districts, and
are, therefore, almost inaccessible to socialism. The middle class
with its overflow into the proletariat is the real fostering soil of
socialism. From a home like the one that Strindberg describes, the
more gifted sons must necessarily go forth as socialists, if they have
brains to think and souls to feel; or if they have any aspiration in
their blood which calls itself the “honest ambition” of the bourgeois,
they as surely become “jobbers” and “snobs”--or if they are geniuses,
they aspire to the “super-man,” and with a juggler’s _salto mortale_
flee past their misery into space. Strindberg’s nature was possessed
of a considerable share of all three categories. Chiefly genius,
which, among the many surprises of life, always prepares for itself
the greatest, for geniuses live in a state of continual astonishment
at the revelation of the great unknown in themselves, till at last,
like Strindberg, they move about with an invisible crown on their
heads, one might call it a crowned consciousness, for which they claim
respect from all the world. The sure sign of a young bourgeois from
a populous town is that he always requires a crowd of admirers. His
self-confidence needs to be upheld by constant applause. Hence the
striving for recognition, the love of advertising, and the longing to
be puffed, which is the peculiarity of the newest literature proceeding
from the middle class. Hence the prolonged cries of despair when
this recognition or its material expression is lacking. The horizon
of the bourgeois townsman is naturally bounded by the thin luminous
line of those whom he sees in possession; the men who have enough,
and more than enough, who inhabit the golden islands where enjoyment
dwells; and whither he yearns to go, to take them by storm as a
revolutionary, or enter them in triumph as a crowned genius. It is
not their individuality merely which stamps these things with their
personal value, they have a priceless, an imaginary worth, and only
when they are his--the outward show of refinement, the elegant home,
the newest fashion in dress, the woman of the upper class as wife and
worshipper--everything “first-class,” in fact, only then does he feel
himself in the full possession of his ego. These characteristics show
themselves early; they are the phenomena of the age. It is interesting
to observe whether the strongest personal emotion in a child is the
desire for affection or the longing to occupy the first place. With
the boy in the autobiography the last was the case; he wanted to be
the favourite in the upper court--in other words, with his father and
mother. When he found that the place he coveted was already occupied
by his brothers and sisters, he would not accept of his grandmother’s
proffered affection, but despised it, for the simple reason that his
grandmother was a person of no great importance in the household.

This absence of spontaneous affection is a trait which meets us
everywhere in Strindberg’s personal biography and his other literary
works; it is a peculiarity that is extremely common in our day,
although it is not often met with in geniuses, because genius is
usually accompanied by a greater warmth of temperature. It is perhaps
partly accounted for by the natural temperament of the people of
northern Sweden, who are to the highest degree possessed of what the
French call “la fougue,” which burns like a conflagration and not like
the all-pervading heat of a continual flame. But there is a deeper
reason still which is to be found in the isolation and excessive
inadequacy of Strindberg’s nature, the restless, nomadic tendency,
the savage impulse which impels him to obliterate his footmarks, to
make himself inaccessible, mysterious, terrible, for all of which
his autobiography presents many an authentic proof. It may be his
inherited, restless, undomesticated Finnish-Lapp blood which feels
itself imprisoned in a small bourgeois family, and gazes around
distrustfully like a wild animal in a cage. It is the blood of a race
that remains always apart, that does not allow itself to be fathomed,
but with the true nomadic instinct seeks to wipe out all traces of its
own existence. It does not give its whole affection, as a child it has
no comrades, as a man no friends, only a few stray acquaintances and
boon companions. It is the blood that scents the enemy everywhere,
that dreads the enemy yet goes in search of him if only for the sake
of the long lonely raids which it remembers in the past. What in other
phenomena of the age would signify a dying, a complete withering of the
expansive faculty, was in Strindberg a beginning, a youthfulness of
culture, so that one can point to him with tolerable certainty as an
atavism--a reversion that is driven forward by a tremendous force, a
combination of atavism and genius.

There is one special feature of this poverty of feeling in the
autobiography which is peculiarly striking and suggestive, it is
namely this, that the boy is not only lonely with regard to his
parents, his brothers and sisters and comrades, but he is also lonely
in his first love. Strindberg has not omitted to give us a study on
sex in his _Story of the Development of a Soul_, as the sub-title is
called. Psychological and physiological studies on this subject are
sufficiently plentiful in modern Scandinavian literature, and some of
them are contributions of permanent value to culture, contributions
towards a truer knowledge of mankind, casting a bold and honest light
on the unknown territory of human existence, such as will only be
understood and appreciated in a more subtle and less prudish future.

With regard to Strindberg’s contribution on the subject, the
circumstances are not quite the same. But one thing is certain, that
whatever has been confided to publicity on this subject in the north,
however far-fetched and plain-spoken as regards the history of the
strongest natural impulse, it is but the first seedling of a future
literature--a pan-Germanic literature which will come perhaps soon,
perhaps not until after our time. In these confessions everything
is natural, productive and honest; souls and bodies, physical and
spiritual emotions are one. Not so with Strindberg. It would need a
searching discussion, a full statement of every single point in his
autobiography, in order to prove the apparent and hidden crookedness
of the emotions, the poisonous hostility of his terrified gaze at the
opposite sex. From the very beginning his relationship to woman is as
insipid as is usually the case in the middle class, and as brutal as
the wildness of the nomads. The German passion, expanding with the
first emotion of love in the desire for a reciprocative affection on
the part of the woman, is not to be found. And here it is important to
remark that this peculiar trait in his character is the origin of the
celebrated drama which bears the device: “Battle of the Sexes.” There
is also another point of importance connected with it, and that is
that Strindberg from the first represents the man as good, suffering,
tender-hearted, normal. That is not psychology, but it is the same in
his later works. While his psychology of the woman is very deep, the
man who is the unhappy victim of this brute is always the same brave,
honest and worthy fellow. There are two sides to that. In the first
place it is mere sophistry, in the second it points to a distinctive
racial feature.

We find here a resemblance which few people would have looked for in
Strindberg, and which certainly no one among his countrymen has as yet
perceived. It points to the east, to Russia. Not only to the Russia of
Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, but further to the east and deeper into the
secret history of the races. It points to Asia, to the barren plains
where wandered the Mongolian hordes. Yellow faces with prominent cheek
bones and projecting skulls, faces with an expression of cruelty and
suffering, envy and greed, terrible conquerors who exterminated the
ruling races of ancient Scandinavia and the old Norse blood in Russia,
amalgamated the gentle, lyrical, Slav temperament with their own
fierce blood, and left memorials of their victories in mounds of dead
men’s skulls. Since those days every one who knows the Russian race
discovers the same conflicting elements; on the one hand the gentle
lyrical faculty, the melancholy sensibility, which makes the Russians
born psychologists, makes them the only intuitively psychological
people in the world, and on the other hand the brutality of the
Mongolian blood which, after long intervals of peace, vents itself
in deeds of horrible cruelty. Hence that profound untrustworthiness
that lies at the background of the Russian character. And here we must
seek the connecting link if we would understand Strindberg. For this
same Mongolian blood, thinned, it is true, forms the ancestry of that
nomadic race from whence the Finnish Lapps and Strindberg himself are
descended. It also forms the lower class in Finland from whence his
first wife, although of noble birth, originated. Her features bore
traces of the Finnish type as distinctly as Strindberg’s own, and
perhaps this accounts for the strong attraction that he felt towards
her, for he doubtless felt the need of one of the same type in order to
complete himself.

The Finns in Finland are a people belonging to an ancient culture, they
are a poetical people, whereas the Russian Mongolians and the Swedish
Lapps are quite uncultured. The chief characteristic in Strindberg’s
nature is the close proximity of genius and barbarism.

Strindberg is very un-Swedish in his outward appearance. The Swedish
type is tall, slender, broad-shouldered, and the complexion, when it
is not ashen grey, is fresh and delicate, the head small with fair
hair. Strindberg is a strong powerful man with sloping shoulders, and
latterly he has assumed a corpulence that is characteristic of the
Russians; his penetrating, far-seeing eyes have the uncertain, livid
hue which is never found in the north except among mixed races, his
jaws and cheek bones are broad and prominent, his hair long, black and
curly, the slight moustache turned upwards, the mouth small and pointed
as though he were about to whistle, the lips gracefully curved, and a
complexion the colour of leather. This phenomenon is crowned with a
powerful, square skull. The ears are diminutive and lie close to the
head. His hands are remarkably round and small.

Behind this powerful forehead all the ideas that have moved the second
half of this century have fermented, but only one thing original and
new has taken shape, and that is the sombre instinct of sex hatred.
Strindberg’s one act has been to drag out this enmity from beneath
the threshold of consciousness, where it had hitherto lain, to lend
it speech and clothe it with an artistic form. He grasps hold of
woman like an impetuous bourgeois, and treats her like a captured
savage. Strindberg is like an instrument on which the age has played
her shrillest tunes, but the strings have retained no recollection
of them. As a young man he was a sincere Pietist; later on he became
a pessimistic Altruist, then a Socialist and Utilitarian; he has
experienced social contrasts and class warfare as few have done, and
has reproduced them as none of his contemporaries have ever done. He
has writhed beneath the ineradicable consciousness of belonging to
a lower class, and his daily habits and sole ambition were fixed on
asserting himself as a member of the upper class. He was reckless,
unruly, but he does not seem to have had any of that proud confidence
in his own greatness which is the birthright of great personalities,
who look upon themselves as the beginning and the starting point, and
to whom the idea never occurs of fatiguing themselves in the race after
that which is theirs by right. Strindberg is a genuine son of this
plebeian age, for it needed a Nietzsche endowed with volcanic power to
enable him to rise above himself and to proclaim himself a super-man.

His self-psychology is full of contradictions, and it requires the
reader’s critical attention to disentangle the undercurrent of personal
confessions from the artistic super-structure. It is very interesting
to watch how the absence of spontaneous affection changes to a painful
yearning for tenderness; when, for example, as a child, he has the
feeling of being dependent on his busy mother, a common woman who did
not bestow much love on him. It is still more interesting to watch how,
on the occasions when he fell in love, he seems always to have had a
reason. There is his first love-affair as a boy of fifteen, when the
object of his affections is a thirty-year-old girl, who is excitable
and hysterical. She is engaged to be married, and forms a centre of
attraction; young men and old men admire and rave about her, amongst
others his father, and it is an immense gratification to be able to
draw her away from them.

Already a feeling of repugnance--so often described by him in his later
works as though it were the usual accompaniment of love--pervades their
amorous _tête-à-têtes_, when she evinces her motherly superiority and
completely captivates him; it is always the same manœuvring that he
describes in his later women. But when writing from memory he can never
depict them ludicrously and repulsively enough, cannot sufficiently
indulge in expressions of antipathy and repugnance with regard to them,
and this same characteristic is very apparent in his last book, called
_A Fool’s Confession_. Here also a former love and destined bride is
described as an utterly worthless being, just as the noble lady whom
he married was afterwards unmasked as an abyss of iniquity. The same
is the case with the newly-married wife of the super-man in _By the
Open Sea_. It is an abiding feature of Strindberg’s works to separate
with a shudder of disgust or in a paroxysm of anger and hatred after
having tasted love. It is a characteristic feature of the Slav, and
may possibly be a heritage from the savage blood of the Mongolians. We
find it invariably, although not so strongly expressed, in Tolstoy’s
otherwise pleasing descriptions. There are only two possible ways of
accounting for it in Strindberg’s literary productions; it must be due
either to the author’s temperament, or else to his experience of women.

For a long time I accepted the latter explanation, but after having
learned to know him, and having often read his entire creative works, I
am compelled to think that it would be too shallow an interpretation.

This rage against woman is connected with his indignation at every
bond, every pressure, every circumstance and relationship that
threatens to become permanent. Everywhere we find the same longing
to escape, to leave no mark behind, to isolate himself, to hide.
Everywhere in his studies, his interests, his opinions, the same sudden
change, the same hatred of his broken fetters, and every intellectual
and spiritual stage of development that is past appears to him like
a broken fetter. In all Strindberg’s writings we trace the struggle
for the possession of his ever-changing ego; we continually observe
an exaggerated self-consciousness, making vain and angry attempts to
attain to his real self, reproving the whole of modern science for
the sake of justifying and explaining the non-existence of a central
point, a unity of the ego which is the missing centre of gravity in
the unknown. Everything in him is temperament, nothing the result of
coherent thought; he hates coherence as derogatory to himself, he
is determined to be incomprehensible, understood by none, and he
introduces a dummy as a sort of pattern man, like the unhappy “Father,”
or like Axel, in _The Comrades_, who withdraws his own pictures from
the Salon in order that his wife may exhibit hers--which he himself
has painted; like the second man in _The Creditors_, who submits to
being sucked to death by a female vampire; like the “Fool,” in _The
Fool’s Confession_, who worships another man’s wife as though she were
a pure Madonna. When he sees the steamer passing by, on which she is
travelling to visit some relations, he goes further and further into
the sea, magnetically drawn towards the ship in which she is, and
afterwards becomes her husband only to discover by degrees incredible
details of iniquity in her. But he does not part from her, he does not
experience that unconquerable feeling of positive aversion after which
parting is no longer an act of the will, but an almost unconscious
proceeding. Who is there who is not acquainted with all these traits in
Russian literature? Turgenev has already described the weak man who is
held captive by a brutal and licentious woman, the man who is passive
and allows himself to be ruined by her, while all the while he looks on
as a spectator might, and despises himself.

Despises himself! Here we find the difference, and perhaps also, if I
may say so, the psychological quicksand in Strindberg’s works. I take
for granted that we are all agreed that the great Russian writers are
honest psychologists. I would certainly make an exception of some of
Dostoievsky’s writings, some things he has concealed, and one could
point out certain places where he has substituted a false trait and
purloined an experience upon which the plot was built. But the earlier
works of Turgenev, Garschin, Tolstoy, were never false either in
themselves or with regard to their public. And when the men in them
allowed themselves to be loved by a woman who claimed for herself “the
man’s prerogative,” they saw clearly what they were doing and despised
themselves for it.

Not so Strindberg’s man. He cries out beneath the iron-soled slipper,
but none the less he holds himself in high esteem; he esteems himself
all the more highly for his forbearance with the daring she-devil who
derides him on account of it; in this matter he possesses a higher
degree of development, and before all else, he is incredibly moral.
Strindberg’s man is--especially in the stories where he manifests his
hatred of women--moral to a degree such as in the New Testament is
only expected of a Bishop, of whom it is said he must be the husband
of one wife, and elsewhere only by Björnson and Young Men’s Christian
Associations. Strindberg’s man is always strictly monogamous, because
monogamy denotes a higher stage of development; his woman, on the
other hand, is always polygamous, because woman and polygamy represent
a lower stage of development. This monogamous man is devoted to the
polygamous woman, the worse she is, the more devoted he becomes, and
the more she treats him with contempt, the more tightly his fetters
bind him to her. There is something in this that resembles a trait in
the character of the “maid-servant’s son,” of whom it is related in the
autobiography that “he was quite indifferent to the fresh, red-cheeked
girls whom he met at the dancing lesson, while on the contrary, the
highly anæmic and hysterical girls, with the pale, waxlike complexions
and black lines under their preternaturally bright eyes, had an
irresistible attraction for him.” ...


II

I should like to take Strindberg’s women one by one and examine them
in connection with his personality and temperament, as it originally
was, and as it became when accentuated by friction with his social
surroundings and influenced by the atmosphere of the age in which he
lived. His women are a set of dismal, mischievous, heartless creatures,
only fascinating so long as the man is young and easily duped;
afterwards, when he develops into the great mind who sees through the
small mind and mimics it, they become ever more and more shrewish, less
attractive, more perverse, till at last the day comes when the man
with the great mind has grown sufficiently old and wise not to allow
himself to be led by the nose any longer, and the woman, whose name is
baseness, is finally dismissed.

The woman? Yes, for there is only one woman, the same woman whom he
has described in all his principal works during the fourteen years
of his authorship. It is a type that never varies, but grows more
exaggerated each time, and he clings to it as though it were the only
sounding-board for his cutting discords.

Strindberg is already to the fore in his first book, _The Red Room_.
The hero, Arvid Falk, is himself. He is a man who has not yet found
his own self, who does not venture to believe in himself, and who
hopes in no future; a poor, penniless fellow who allows himself to
be overawed by every bragging, self-confident person--in a word, a
peculiar, unhappy, harum-scarum individual who is not yet awake to the
consciousness of the ego.

There is only one woman in this book; she is Arvid Falk’s
sister-in-law, and has married above herself, she is a lazy and
indolent person, coarse-minded and untruthful, stupid and vulgar.

This bashful man, who is like a timid savage, and the vulgar woman have
as yet nothing to do with one another, they are types upon which the
gaze of the young genius first fell--they represent his ego and his
type of woman.

In _Herr Bengt’s Wife_ he has developed body and temperament. It is
the description of a woman’s many phases: discontent, happy love,
the child, the quarrel after marriage, coquetting with others,
reconciliation--it seems as though it had been written in a paroxysm
of love. The description is outwardly full of admiration, inwardly
full of psychological analysis. It is the work of a seer who worships,
while awake, the woman whose true self he perceives in his sleep and
already despises. _Herr Bengt’s Wife_ was acted at the Dramatic Theatre
of Stockholm, and Strindberg’s wife played the part of heroine with
great success, the only success she ever had on the stage. His next
work was a book called _Marriages_, which consists of twelve stories of
married life, black with the weft-yarns of life, beginning with pain,
ending with death. He describes the tame love of the latter end of the
nineteenth century which, fast bound hand and foot, drags her span of
existence through economical, pathological and “universal human” gulfs.
He describes the young student who engages himself to a fully developed
girl of fourteen, who, during the ten years of their engagement,
becomes a thin, shrivelled, nervous being, he marries without loving
her and she grows to look more wretched than ever after giving birth
to numerous children. He describes how the penniless young man brings
the poor girl home, and they do not know how to bring up the children
on an insufficient income; the couple are isolated from their social
surroundings and forced to live in a back street, where their children
play about in the gutter.

He describes how the young notary and his wife begin their married
life by giving expensive dinners, because it is only possible to be
young and newly married once in a lifetime. And when the child comes,
the bailiff comes too, and all the fine furniture finds its way into
the creditors’ pockets, and the old father-in-law, the Major, who
had foreseen what would happen, takes charge of his daughter and
grandchild, while the young husband is left to become a celibate. He
describes a man who both in character and temperament is predestined
to be constant in love and marriage, but his wife, though of good
family, is dissolute and wicked. He has to pay for her riding lessons
and to entertain her lovers, look after her children and conceal her
drunkenness--he is chained to her, he cannot free himself, he is
monogamous in spite of his better judgment.

Or else he describes the marriage of a private tutor with a lady of
noble birth who has never experienced a single womanly feeling, abhors
her duty as a wife, and only does not refuse her husband when she
wishes to obtain something from him. At the same time she is anxious
to enjoy all the social advantages of a married woman, and for the
sake of her frugal caresses the poor honest fellow allows himself to
be chosen a member of all the associations and public institutions in
which her empty vanity wishes to shine, till at last, much against
his inclinations, he becomes a member of Parliament. In the midst of
these tales of woe, of social and intellectual privation, Strindberg
describes himself in a story about an author and his family, called
_The Bread Winner_, in which many of his brethren will recognise
themselves. It describes the great author who gets up in the morning to
make his own coffee, while his wife and the servants are still asleep,
it describes him hard at work till the evening when he throws himself
down upon the bed dead tired--Money! Money! All for Money! It tells
of every single unsatisfied longing of which our age is possessed, of
the everlasting means which never ceases to become an end in itself.
The children run about aimlessly, while the servant girls read novels
and the wife allows her friends to pity her for her husband’s neglect.
His mornings are spent in feverish effort which exhaust him till he is
ready to faint, but the whip of anxiety and uncertainty urges him on
till the post comes, and he opens his letters with a beating heart;
the remainder of the day, until the late dinner hour, is consumed
by negotiating with extortionate publishers and pressing creditors,
corresponding in three languages with foreign newspapers, and reading
reviews where anonymous rivals seek to deprive him of the goodwill of
the public by which he lives, pointing at him with their inky fingers,
leaving a dirty smudge on his reputation. And he is defenceless. How
is he to punish the nameless vermin who lay their maggots in his
flesh and afterwards fly off? Then follows the dinner in a strange
restaurant, where the celebrated author is expected to contribute
wit and intellect to the conversation, and people are offended if
the exhausted man stares at his plate in dyspeptic silence. In the
evening, when he would like to be with his family, his wife goes to a
party or to some place of entertainment. And one day the overworked
“bread-winner” dies suddenly, his wife faints in the conventional
manner, and her old women friends--with or without petticoats, as the
case may be--exclaim in pained sympathy: “Poor unfortunate woman! He
always was inconsiderate towards her, in life as in death!”

It is real life that Strindberg has described in his _Marriages_, that
real life which the many live, but of which only the few are conscious.
It is the profound inadequacy of the closest relationship, which
neither our grandparents nor our fathers and mothers experienced, but
only the children of the eighties of the nineteenth century. Everything
in our day--joy no less than suffering--leaves a bitter after-taste on
the tongue, which neither mineral waters, baths nor digestive pills
can rid us of, since the evil is not of the body but of the soul, and
proceeds from the incapacity to lead a vegetative life, or to resign
oneself to circumstances. Formerly this discontent was general, and
in Strindberg’s works the blame was equally divided, but a couple of
years after the publication of _Marriages_, a change took place. The
universal picture of the age retreated, and everything pointed to woman
and man’s relation to her. In the course of a few years there appeared
a collection of dramas evincing a hatred of woman quite unparalleled
in the literature of the world. It was just at the time when the
Scandinavian movement for the emancipation of women was in full swing,
with its natural accompaniment of women authors, and the air was filled
with cries for equal justice to both sexes, the married woman’s rights
of property, the man’s pre-nuptial chastity, etc.

It would be impossible to say that the Swedish ladies were graceful
in their manner of introducing the new order of Society. Seldom has
anything more discouraging been witnessed than the manner in which
they enforced their demands upon men--demands which were in part quite
reasonable. Woman forgot her womanhood and relied upon the thickness of
her skull and her elbows, and in this her masculine phase she was by
no one more seriously taken than by Strindberg. He waxed warm in the
delight of the conflict. Armed to the teeth with the entire arsenal
of superior qualities pertaining to man, brain and pockets filled to
overflowing with the latest results of investigation, he went forth to
wage war against the Amazons. He went forth because he wanted to be
with them, for he loved the emancipated type. The emancipated woman
attracted him, which the pious Marthas were never able to do, and
because he loved her and because she appealed to his emotions, for that
reason he also hated her, for with him hatred is another form of love.

He aimed at the wife in three dramas. The first attack took place in
_The Father_.

The fable of _The Father_ is comparatively well known. A Captain is
bullied by the three women in his household, he is driven half mad by
them and is reported to be quite mad, and is literally, not merely
figuratively, put into a strait waistcoat. These three women are his
wife, his mother-in-law (who does not appear in the piece), and his
nurse. The three conspire together. The wife and the nurse drive him
mad with their petty arguments, and the mother-in-law’s bell ringing at
stated intervals serves to precipitate his desperation.

But what makes these three women conspire against the man who is master
of the house? The nurse and the stepmother, says Strindberg, are of an
advanced age, consequently sexless, consequently men-haters.--Good.
But the wife?--The wife is also a man-hater.--Why?--Because all women
are men-haters, with a few exceptions.--That is all very well, but it
does not explain why the nurse, the mother-in-law and the wife should
combine together. Mutual forbearance is not exactly a feminine quality,
and to begin with, it is extremely unlikely that his nurse should live
on friendly terms with the wife’s mother. Yet in spite of that they
combine. Why?--In order to embezzle the books that are sent to him, to
pamper his mother-in-law and to spoil the child. From pure wickedness
in fact? Well and good. But why do they not vent their wickedness upon
one another?--Because they are all three equally stupid, and that is
why they prefer each others’ company. Strange that the pretty young
wife should not be bored with the two old women! Something is surely
rotten in the state of Denmark? No, there is nothing rotten, it is the
normal condition of all families.--That is all very well, Captain,
but have you ever asked yourself whether your wife is satisfied with
you?--To this question the author is wont to give an answer which,
owing to its plainness, we cannot quote here. But I think that in this
instance the author renders the psychology of the woman too easy. The
lords of creation are apt to be rather conceited. Time is short and
choice is limited, and in most cases the woman takes whoever she can
get, and it often happens that she does not care for him afterwards.
The more he loves her, the less she cares for him, and there we have
the tragic conflict. The man does not observe it and goes on loving,
the woman knows that he does not observe it, is offended, and revenges
herself by tormenting him. He bears it patiently and loves her, but his
love is clumsy and brutal. Now the woman gains the upper hand. She sees
that he has not found her out and she knows that she will never be rid
of him, the thought goads her anger, she feels that she is unpunished,
and by degrees she becomes a fury. Who is the greater fool of the two?

_The Comrades_ deals with the same problem. Axel sacrifices himself
in slavish subjection to his wife, who has artistic pretensions. He
not only paints her pictures, but he also sees that they are accepted
for the Salon and his own rejected. He works hard to earn money, and
she throws it away in making merry with her friends. If he loses
patience, she propitiates him with caresses. He lives solely for her,
but she preserves an attitude of reserve towards him and is stupidly
coquettish, easily attracted by other men, an all too tender confidante
to her unmarried women friends. The society which she introduces into
his house is a perfect menagerie of abandoned persons. Another yet more
unhappy husband appears on the scene and confides in Axel. His wife
has been a drunkard for many years, his daughters, who are still quite
young, have had their minds polluted, but he allows them to be with
their mother because he loves her. The dialogue between man and wife is
a continual dispute with really clever variations on a limited theme.
Here, as in _The Father_, there is the same reasoning of the great mind
with the small one, which ends by the great mind becoming perplexed,
yet always anxious to resume the fight. Final result: the woman is cast
out and the man finds that his life is not worth living.

In another story, called _The Creditors_, we find the same woman and
the same man, but this time the man is split in two halves--the one
half consists of a great mind and the other of a sensitive nervous
system. The sensitive nervous system becomes epileptic from exhaustion
brought about by the efforts of the great mind (who has lived so long
without a better half) to concentrate its energies and rub up its
dialectics to the sharpness of a razor. By virtue of this dialectic
razor the breach between Adolf and Thecla is completed, but when she
throws herself sobbing over the husband who is stricken before her
eyes, the great mind is thunderstruck. Is it possible that she loved
him after all?

In his drama, _Miss Julia_, the instincts of the upper and lower
classes rebound upon one another with terrific fury. John, the son
of the maid-servant, who is the best male character that Strindberg
has ever created, gains the victory in a brutal struggle with his
wife. In this piece Strindberg seemed to assert his deliverance from
the clutches of woman, and afterwards, in his _Playing with Fire_,
the man conquers again. A superficial abuse of the opponent is the
inevitable accompaniment of a victory, and in _By the Open Sea_, the
super-man triumphs over the dubious maiden, whose obvious dissoluteness
he--the noble man with the great intellect--is extraordinarily slow
in perceiving, and after seriously compromising her, he leaves her
unmarried as a punishment.


III

Strindberg’s next novel, _Tschandala_, is one of his least known
works; as literature it is of comparatively small importance, but as
a contribution to the psychology of the author it is an exceedingly
valuable production.

Strindberg had gone to spend the summer in a country lodging where
the proprietors are notoriously bad people. An ordinary man would
have perceived the fact at once, but Strindberg’s imagination began
to work and swelled itself into a book of gigantic proportions. The
outward circumstances remain the same, but the scene is pushed back a
century and becomes a war between the patrician with the great mind
and the plebeians with the small minds, who do all that they possibly
can to ensnare him and to bring about his ruin. The only reason given
is the envy felt by inferior minds and small souls for the great and
noble. It is difficult to understand how a learned and distinguished
man can exist with his wife and children amid such extremely revolting
surroundings as those described, unless he is too poor to make a
change; it is still more difficult to understand why he should have any
dealings with the populace, unless it is that he takes a psychological
interest in their study. The landlady’s gipsy lover, who rules the
house, has got him almost in his power, when the distracted lodger
resolves on a plan whereby to annihilate him, well knowing that the
ignorant man is subject to superstitious fear. He allures him into the
meadow at night, and by the aid of a magic lantern he causes superhuman
figures to pass before him. The trick is successful. The tormented and
ignorant landlord dies from his fear of ghosts.

This single instance proves to how great an extent Strindberg works
upon his own experiences, and it also shows that his imagination is of
a nature to magnify everything to a degree that is quite immense. It
is a characteristic trait in his nature. His imagination is not the
weak, tame, conventional imagination of a bourgeois, which is elsewhere
commonly met with in literature. It is the imagination of a savage, in
which every impression is echoed a thousandfold on the sounding-board
of fear. It is fresh as the wind that blows from the mountains and no
less incessant. It is always at first hand, and that is the secret of
its power. After reading Strindberg you may raise objections against
his arguments, but at the moment you are forced to agree with him.
There has never been an author who could convince with such brutal
authority as he.

As long as you are under his immediate influence, everything seems
possible, even probable. While recognising the truth of the principal
traits, you forget the numerous errors that are never absent, the
superabundance of evil qualities which he never omits to pile upon his
enemies--woman and the lower orders--with both of whom he once felt
himself related, and by whom he now feels himself pursued.

The second reason of his immense influence is that he is such a perfect
son of this torn, restless, over-stimulated age, this age with its
combination of decadence and barbarism. His writings are full of the
plebeian snobbishness, the moralising hypocrisy, the perverse instincts
of the sons of the present day, while at the same time they contain
the direct opposite: the superhuman effort to rise above himself, to
attain beyond good and evil, the unbaptised, grandiose sensuousness,
the indignation against feminism and the cult of woman. His is the cry
of an indignant nature in a corrupt civilisation. His is the duplicate
personality of to-day, cankered and yet healthy, at once the whited
sepulchre of the dead past and the vessel of the future. He reflects
his secret sufferings, his half-conscious untruthfulness, his conscious
boasting, the god and the beast in him.

Yet all combined could not have made his name a torch which will burn
long and be held for that which it is not--one of the eternal stars.

It was a twofold influence that helped to create the red flame which
proceeds from him: his language, in the first place, which only
produces its true effect in the original. German gives it quite a
different character, harsh and barren. But in Swedish it is like the
sea that breaks upon the shore and thunders from afar, like the trumpet
that brays its battle signal through the night, like the short hollow
beat of fortune: “I am there, I am there!”

There are northern writers who can be rendered in German, taught new
nuances, enriched with new words and new rhythm, and in whom the
symphonies of the German language may be heard to advantage. But if
any one tries to translate Strindberg the result is disappointing; in
Swedish the sound is like bell metal, in German it resembles tin.

Materialism is the second influence which makes Strindberg a giant of
his age. He has the materialist’s philosophy of life, the materialist’s
ideal, the materialist’s cult of the intellect, and the materialist’s
interpretation of the sexes. However deep the problem, his
interpretation is always flat. In his descriptions everything is clear,
sharp and rectangular; he is like an inquisitor who only enquires into
that which lies above the threshold of consciousness, and only sees
the growth on the rough, hard surface. The rich fruitful soil in the
unseen, where everything that exists must grow organically like the
seed in mother earth, is as good as undiscovered by the great and noble
mind of the materialist.

As a materialist he does not acknowledge the mystic element--which
is love--in the relations between man and woman; but the union,
without love, of two persons of culture leads in course of time to
degeneration, and this degeneration he has always very consistently
described.




_Woman: “Fin de Siècle”_

_Guy de Maupassant_


I

I had been to a hypnotic _séance_ and was on my way home across the
Paris boulevards. The sirens of the _trottoirs_ were sitting in front
of the brightly-lit _brasseries_ with their lords, drinking beer,
while others were still wandering up and down under the wide awnings
in front of the _cafés_. The thought occurred to me how much the type
had altered during the last four years; it used to be the fashion
to be as slim as a willow, with stays like a coat of mail, but now
loose, negligent figures were to be seen under tight-fitting dresses,
and where formerly people used to wear buds, they now decorated
themselves with full-blown flowers. The rattling of the omnibuses
mingled with the strident music of a Roumanian band in one of the
neighbouring _brasseries_, and one’s eyes were dazzled by the glitter
of real and false diamonds, and by the glances of their wearers, real
or false as the case might be. The faces of the multitude as they
swept past me were confounded in my mind with those I had just seen
in the over-heated hall where the hypnotic _séance_ had taken place.
The perfumes that were wafted through the air were transformed in
the memory of my olfactory nerves to the penetrating scents of musk,
patchouli and _poudre-de-riz_, which the Parisian ladies carry with
them into all theatres, omnibuses, and picture galleries whither they
go, charging the atmosphere with a strong, oppressive, artificial
odour, exquisitely compounded, and dry as the colours of the majority
of modern French artists--a suspicious atmosphere, the excessive
sensibility of which suggests sickness and hidden corruption. Again
I seemed to see the faces of those who surrounded me in the close
atmosphere of the small room where the newest fashionable pastime, a
demonstration of the “magic circle,” had taken place--empty, weak,
brutal, affected faces, such as form the larger portion of every
popular assembly; and suddenly I realised, what my instinct had long
since told me, the difference that exists between the expression on the
faces of this race and the expression on the faces of that other race,
to which I myself belonged, and which in its national varieties I had
taken infinite trouble to understand, perhaps not altogether without
success.

This _séance_ of hypnotic, magnetic experiments was given by a new
literary and theosophical set of young Frenchmen, called “the Adepts”;
the people who assembled to witness the performance were members of
the lower middle class, and ladies and gentlemen from all circles of
society. The discovery of which I have spoken came upon me suddenly
from under the giant roof of a straw hat trimmed with a wreath of
roses, where I caught sight of a strange, death-like, glassy look in
the eyes of a smiling beauty of uncertain age. I was struck by the
number of cadaverous physiognomies which rendered it almost impossible
to guess the age of Parisians, whether men or women. Young people
wore the same expression as those of riper years, and even extreme
youth had something ashen grey in the complexion, something that was
like a breath of mildew, unpalpable, deceptive, as of premature old
age. In the north everybody looks about as old as he is, not only
according to the fixed sum of his years, but also according to the
varying life-limit which is determined by a person’s vitality. There
we have old and young and middle-aged. But here the majority are
neither old nor young, and for the women there is no middle age. What
is the reason? Is it entirely owing to the art of dress? Or is it
due to that _memento mori_ of an ancient civilisation--a counterfeit
susceptibility? When we compare the French fashion papers with the
faces of young Frenchwomen, the former might be taken for portraits.
Here and there the same sweet smile which renders the mouth small and
pointed, the same studied charm, the same artificial personality and
excessive caution which mask the woman’s real nature until all that
is spontaneous about her--age, soul, instinct--is for ever lost. It
is perfectly true that these expressionless faces are to be met with
everywhere. In Germany there is a large percentage of ladies in good
society whose faces look like copies of the illustrations in magazines
provided for family reading. But beneath it all there is something
else, something absolutely different, a kind of broad, and as yet
unspoilt, natural foundation in the Teutonic race, which compares
favourably with the more and more narrowed, almost extinct nature in
the Gallic race.

That which struck me most about these restless, expressionless eyes,
was not the absence of soul in them which one notices in the German who
broods over his beer and toddy, but an empty look such as you find in
the eyes of a dead animal--an absence of feeling, a vacant stare, the
Narcissus-look of self-reflecting satisfaction....

The omnibus for which I was waiting had not arrived, and I remained
standing in front of a bookseller’s table where the newest publications
were displayed. There in a row, side by side, lay _Flirt_, by Paul
Hervieux; _L’Amour Artificiel_, by Jules Cazes; _L’Inutile Beauté_ and
_Notre Cœur_, by Guy de Maupassant. They lay there like a continuation
of my thoughts, confirming the truth of those observations of which I
had as yet hardly convinced myself. I came nearer and examined _Notre
Cœur_, and meditated on the new element which this book contains,
and on the old element which caused it to run through three editions
in a fortnight. Old mingled with new, boldness with conventionality,
there you have the secret of the best and most critical of modern
French romance writers, Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget, and J. K.
Huysmans, combined with that unsurpassable art of telling a story, that
short, simple clearness of diction which renders Guy de Maupassant the
greatest of the three.

An open carriage came driving out of a side street. A pretty little
woman in a light-coloured dress lay back with her head resting against
the cushions as though exhausted with lassitude and ecstasy, and under
her large, yellow straw hat, pressed against her face, was the face of
a man dressed in black who was sitting beside her, kissing her like one
possessed, without ever raising his head, oblivious of all else....

It looked like the old French love, the love of Heloïse and Manon
Lescaut and George Sand. The French women of to-day have ceased to love
like that; it is only paid love that loves in that fashion now. The
ladies of the _bourgeoisie_ and the _hautes mondaines_ do not love any
more, and cannot love any more. That is exactly what those three books,
lying side by side on the bookseller’s table, have to tell: _Flirt_,
_L’Amour Artificiel_, and _Notre Cœur_.


II

There is a strangely feeble pulsation in these three books, the voice
is hushed, the colours broken. In reading them we seem to sit as on
a rainy day in a finely furnished, richly perfumed drawing-room,
before an open fire-place with a red glass screen, in which the flame
flickers and is magnified, producing an effect that is wonderfully
sleepifying and unreal. Yet in the midst of all this luxury we can
hear the pattering of the rain outside, and our souls shiver as the
artificial home comforts glide further and further away, and we are
left surrounded by cold and emptiness....

The reason is that the women who live in this home have no warmth to
give, their charms are restless and unsatisfying, their vanity is
cruel and insatiable, they need men as they need the mirrors in their
dressing-rooms, in order that they may be surrounded by them and able
to see their own images reflected from every possible point of view.

The new element in these French writers consists in their having
simultaneously discovered and appropriated this type, a type which
is international, but which, in its psycho-physiological development
can only be properly studied through the medium of a French author’s
unprejudiced views, and only properly appreciated by the moral
large-heartedness of a French public.

The women in these books are ladies, of whom it is said in society that
they are “without reproach.” Their conduct is blameless, they never
forget themselves. They keep within the bounds of innocent flirtation,
and have developed the same to the dimensions of a science which
renders them almost irresistible; they are intelligent coquettes, and
they are more, they are creative coquettes, who turn themselves into
works of art, and only as such do they wish to be admired and enjoyed;
they are _objets d’art_ which must not be touched or handled, and their
cunning consists in endowing these works of art with an appearance
of life, soul and passion. They, with their empty natures, are not
satisfied with emptiness in the opposite sex.

They have a longing to replenish their own natures at the cost of
others, and they cling like vampires to the men who have something to
give, and who are able to vouchsafe to them the delight of seeing them
suffer. For they never satisfy the wishes which they have awakened.
They never forget themselves.

So far it is fortunate for the man who falls in love with them that
they do not forget themselves, for however worthless their gifts may
be, there is nothing so worthless as the gift of themselves. All the
disappointments of which they are the cause are as nothing compared
to the disappointment of the man when he clasps them in his arms.
There is something strangely soulless and impersonal about them, his
heart seems to beat against a lifeless body, no warmth encircles him,
no electric stream proceeds from them, they give him no joy, nor do
they experience any. These women who have so much mind, cleverness,
intelligence and reflection, who are so beautiful, so fashionable, so
superior--they have no nature. They are like those barren ears of corn
that tower above the corn-field with their long stalks and slender
pannicles, waving to and fro, and attracting attention to themselves,
but in whose husks we find no seed. They are like those large empty
nuts, which, when cracked, are found to contain nothing but a little
mildew. And all the while they seek for that which is lacking in
themselves, they like to talk about the weariness of life, the vanity
of hope, the secret attractions of love; they tease and charm and
beckon from afar, they let it be supposed that they have much to give,
yet all their desire is to play with their idle delicate fingers upon
the soul of man as upon an instrument of music. They want to strike a
note to hear it sound and vibrate, and they make themselves his friends
for the sake of being loved, and of quivering with the passion of
self-love, they nod to their reflections in the mirror, and invent a
new way of doing the hair, or a new and sprightly _aperçu_ when they
find that they have succeeded in their desire, which is to experience a
faint reflex glow from the feelings which they have kindled in man.

Their looking-glass is their lover, their sole interest is centred in
themselves, the aim and object of their lives is to be self-conscious,
and life for them consists in circling round themselves.

Men of this sort, men who are sterile egoists, have frequently been
described; but until now no one has ever probed the depths of woman’s
lack of feeling. Here, as in almost every subject that is new to
literature, the French are the first to lead the way. But in real life
these types meet us long before literature sees them and makes them her
own, and women have long been familiar with this side of one another’s
nature. The silent struggles which man does not perceive, and which
both parties conceal from him, the coquette from vanity and her rival
from pride, these silent struggles are legion as the sacrifices which
they have cost.

It is not moral prejudice that restrains the best types of the species
from satisfying the more or less forbidden love which they awaken, for
they pride themselves on their open minds; and it is not cowardice, for
they are clever enough to escape any suspicion of scandal attaching
to themselves; their inward coldness is the only cause. They are not
willing to disturb themselves, lest in so doing the work of art, which
is their own selves, should discover its defects. They lose nothing, or
if they do, it is their imagination that is the loser. And if at the
last they forget themselves it is not their blood or their heart, but
it is the glow of reflex desire that forgets itself.


III

The coquette in _Flirt_ is a lady of the ordinary bourgeois type. She
is determined to have admirers at any price, and despises no means
whereby to capture the indifferent, fears no humiliation if only she
can render submissive those who seek to resist her, nor does she
hesitate to hold out hopes wherewith to attract the doubtful. She would
have them all burn on the altar of her vanity like incense rising in
her nostrils, but for the sake of convenience she remains an honourable
woman. Her toilet is the sole occupation of her mind; to charm and
afterwards reject is the daily excitement without which she cannot live.

_L’Amour Artificiel_ is a truer and more striking picture of the age.
Jules Cazes has emancipated himself from the conventional French custom
of never describing any erotic experiences except those of married
women. This story takes place before marriage. Stella is a daughter of
the Plutocracy, probably half a Jewess, spoilt, pretentious, talented,
with all the coldness of soul and temperament that belongs to the
emancipated woman, and which she mistakes for pride, she has that same
feeling of superiority over the man combined with the consciousness of
being unloveable--a new type that is very un-French, and which offers
a singular proof of the manner in which foreign influence has forced
its way through the closed circle of culture belonging to French
perception. Stella is a young lady imbued with the tone of Ibsen’s and
Kielland’s women’s rights women. Her story is a continual withering of
the soul.

She has a fine voice and a remarkable talent for execution, but what
is she to sing when she feels nothing? She is a stranger to the depths
of life; a young girl _comme il faut_, belonging to the moneyed
aristocracy, is not likely to experience anything very deep--from lack
of disposition, lack of opportunity, or both; she is unbearably bored
in the society to which she belongs, and has a longing for sensations;
her mornings are spent in gazing at herself in the looking-glass, in
paying visits and trying on dresses, in annoying her friends, and in
practising the newest songs; but how in the world is she to spend her
evenings? She lures a penniless young author, flirts with him and
makes prodigious advances, only to chase him away again like a dog.
The young man sees through her game, but his poor, foolish head is
turned by her perfumes, her fashionable dresses and her cold, proud
beauty, and his sufferings are quite sufficient to afford her an
agreeable distraction. The type which she represents bears a certain
resemblance to that which Marie Bashkirtseff records in her diary.
It is the same fever of girlhood, the same wild desire to attract
men, the same self-deification combined with the utter incapacity for
loving which undermined that great talent and hot temperament, and
drove its possessor to an early illness and death. But Stella is far
from possessing a hot temperament. She has that injured consciousness
of her actions which is the property of all calculating souls. She
seizes one initiative after the other with regard to the poor silly
youth, to whose modest mind the idea never occurs of seducing such
a self-possessed young lady. But Stella, who has been over hasty in
breaking with her intended who did not allow himself to be sufficiently
tyrannised over to please her, has grown anxious to be married. Without
love, without tenderness, without ever forgetting herself, cold and
brutal, she tempts him to the act of love. The hardness of her heart
undergoes no change through the experience, and when soon afterwards
her father becomes bankrupt, she marries a rich old dandy who had
always been the object of her scorn.

In this study of a girl the new element is compounded of shallow
curiosity and soulless impulse; it is an unprejudiced attempt to depict
a degenerate woman, who among the many caricatures of nature and
society, is no rarity; it is a step on the way towards a psychological
analysis of modern humanity. Though it were nothing more than a search
after a truer description of human nature than that presented to us
in the models of the old æsthetic school, the author would still have
rendered an undoubted service.

The cleverest and most profound study of a woman occurs in the
description of Madame de Burne in Maupassant’s _Notre Cœur_.

Maupassant was in fact the only realist among modern French authors,
whereby I mean that he had the clearest and most spontaneous vision
for the nature of things and their connection with one another; he had
that nobility of temperament and sense of proportion that never thrust
itself between the world and himself, to distort the former after the
manner of a bad looking-glass. He let the facts speak for themselves,
and as he was possessed of that health which neither requires the
digestive expedient of moralising, not yet that of sentimentalising,
one could feel tolerably certain of protection from the so-called
“contemplation of the world,” from which one never escapes in the
writings of Daudet, Zola and Bourget. It is certainly not the great
depths that are measured in such transparent water, but we will return
to that subject another time.

_Notre Cœur_ is a very clever book, and Madame de Burne, herself a
clever lady, is at the same time a very clever study of a woman. There
is a philosopher in the book, a French novelist called Lamarthe, who
has many characteristics in common with Paul Bourget, amongst others
an unceasing interest in the analysis of woman. This man, who loves
in order that he may study the object of his affections, and in whose
mind the most intimate experiences are changed into psychological
perceptions, passes the following judgment on the present generation
of ladies in society.

“No, they are not women; the more we know them, the less they give us
that sensation of sweet intoxication which the real woman never fails
to give. Look at their toilets; they are birds, they are flowers, they
are serpents, but they are not women. The object of their lives is
to rival one another and to pursue their admirers. It amuses them to
see men overpowered, conquered and governed by the irresistible force
of woman, and, as time goes on, the tendency develops like a hidden
instinct, and grows gradually into an instinct of war and conquest.
Take Madame de Burne for an example. She is a widow. Perhaps it was
her marriage with a despotic churl that awoke in her heart a longing
to execute vengeance, a sombre craving to make men suffer for all that
she had endured at the hands of one of them, to feel herself for once
the strongest, able to bend the will of others, to inflict suffering,
and to conquer opposition. But before all else she is a born coquette.
Her heart does not hunger for emotion, like the hearts of tender and
sensitive women. She does not desire the love of one man, she does not
seek the happiness of a strong passion; what she would like is the
admiration of all, and if you would remain her friend, you must love
her. It is not the real wine of former times. Love was different under
the Restoration, it was different under the Second Empire, and now it
has become different again. When the romanticists idealised women and
made them dream dreams, women introduced into life the experiences
of their hearts whilst reading. Nowadays you pride yourselves on the
suppression of all deceitful, poetic glamour, and your novels are as
dry as your lives; but believe me, no more love in your books, no more
love in your lives!”

Afterwards he continues: “Look at this Madame de Burne who is so
charming, so amiable, so clever and so fascinating. It is not her
wishes that torment her, it is her nerves. She thinks, she does not
feel; or she thinks her feelings. She is proud of her intellect and has
no idea of the narrowness of her intelligence. Nothing interests her in
which she cannot make herself the central point. She expects too much
from men, she expects too much from their goodness, their nature, their
character, their delicacy, while she herself never has anything to give
that is not for every one alike. Woman was created and came into the
world for two purposes--for love and for the child. But this kind of
woman is incapable of loving and does not wish for children. If she
happens to have any, they are a misfortune and a burden to her.”

Then follows a subtle criticism of this entire group of women, who
are to be met with in all countries at a certain level of culture,
especially where comfortable circumstances predominate. Flowery
declaimers for the most part, women who interest themselves in
every kind of question--pampered beings with numerous wants and
an affectation of simplicity. A description of these “détraquées
contemporaines,” to whom Madame de Burne belongs, flows from the pen of
Lamarthe in his novel called _One of Them_. He writes as follows:

“They are a new race of women with reasoning, hysterical nerves excited
by a thousand contradictory emotions, which are hardly worthy of being
called wishes; disappointed with life without having tasted anything
owing to lack of experience; void of passion, void of affection, they
unite the temper of spoilt children with the dulness of aged sceptics.”


IV

The great merit of these books consists in the boldness with which
they force their way into a new and intricate sphere of psychological
study. They lay hold on woman in the hidden depths of her personality,
as one who stands alone and lives her own life--her life of the many
days, weeks, months, years, when she grows in herself, educates and
miseducates herself in the loneliness of her being, in that inner life
which is made up of wishes, dreams, hopes and disillusions, before
any appointed man and any appointed event appears on the horizon of
her soul. And should the appointed man and the appointed event come
at last, or should anything else, anything unexpected come into her
life, it very often happens that the entire spiritual construction is
already completed, the material hardened, and the feelings have lost
their power of adaptability. These phenomena and their offshoots have
as yet scarcely been taken into consideration by literature. Novels
have always begun with love when dealing with woman, and the subject
was always her relationship to man, or her preparation for that
relationship. But this is a simplification of the subject which rests
on the ingenuousness of an obsolete philosophy of life. Life is not as
simple as ruder minds would have us think; and before all else there is
one fact that deserves recognition: Life advances and humanity changes.

We are standing on the threshold of a new culture, the nature of which
depends on the mental and spiritual qualities of the individuals who
are its bearers. It may be like a mighty bird which spreads its broad
wings and soars into the darkest space of futurity, or it may be like
a misshapen monster that falls to the earth. We have never yet caught
sight of the bird with the broad wings, but of monsters we have already
seen several.

The contributions of French culture have hitherto been the forerunners
of a highly susceptible race. But the signs are not wanting to show
that the genuine stream of literary production in France is beginning
to wane.

Even in these books there are interesting and deep-rooted problems
leading up to the conventional _Chambre garnie_ love, which must never
be absent from any novel that is to satisfy the French public. The
French are conquerors, but they are not colonists.

It is left to the Teutonic intellect to force its way into these
preserves, to plough the ground and to enter into possession.




_An Author on the Mystery of Woman_

_Barbey D’Aurevilly_


In Paris for some time past, Lemerre has been publishing the collected
works of the Norman author, Barbey D’Aurevilly. They are edited by a
lady who was a friend of the author’s, and from time to time a new
volume falls like a heavy weight on the book-market. They march along
in two columns--the first is called _Les Oeuvres et les Hommes_, and
consists of reviews of books and plays long since forgotten. These
criticisms, most of which were written hurriedly during the many years
when he occupied the post of critic to a paper which exists no more,
are issued in a set of fine quarto volumes with beautiful, clear print.
The second series consists of his novels and short stories, containing
much imperishable matter belonging to that everlasting species that
was, is and will be as enduring as the primal laws of existence, and
these are published in the most fascinating little octavo volumes with
pearl lettering, so fine that after two hours’ reading our eyes are
quite worn out and our heads begin to whirl. It was thus ordained by
feminine wisdom. The ephemeral criticisms were to take their stand in
monumental form as appropriate counter-balance, while the imperishable
novels were to look as pretty and dainty as possible and to behave with
as much coyness as young maidens in the presence of the reader, because
it was thought that they possessed attraction enough, even when it was
necessary to enjoy them with the help of a microscope. Let us hope that
the cunning lady was not mistaken; but Barbey D’Aurevilly was not a
popular author in his lifetime, and it is to be feared that the trying
circumstances under which he has lately been placed within reach of the
public will serve to frighten away omnivorous readers and all who are
in the habit of reading quickly.

It may be that this young lady, now grown old, who nursed the man of
seventy and eighty with a mixture of motherly love and hero-worship,
who served and cheered him and now carefully guards herself from
appearing as the editor of his works, although the entire literary
world of Paris recognises her as such--it may be that in this she has
preserved the same course of exclusiveness which was the peculiar
characteristic of her author during his life-time. Perhaps she does not
wish that the common herd should read him? Perhaps she has chosen the
nonpareil type for the purpose of raising a protecting barrier between
him and the reading public? It may be her wish to admit only the strong
souls and genuine readers who can stand the test of small print, and
who have no objection to spoiling their eyes; readers of the kind who
never swallow any book, who only care to digest a couple of pages a
day. There are not more than two hundred such readers in Europe and
about as many in Boston and New York. But these two hundred will love
her author and carry his memory with them to the grave.

When Barbey D’Aurevilly died a few years ago in a small room in one
of the quiet side streets off the Bon Marché, little more was known
of him either in the history of literature or in his public life
than that he used to dress in a very eccentric and remarkable manner
in his younger days, and that both in his conversation and in his
writings he displayed an obsolete and antiquated form of Catholicism.
It was not likely that a man such as he would be considered a great
author; Hugo and Gautier, Dumas fils and Zola were very different
people. They occupied themselves with “modern problems,” they were
liberal and radical, pessimists and writers who described the habits
and customs of the day. None of them were reactionary, least of all
orthodox Catholics. And latterly, when the Church has regained her
influence, and devotion has increased to so great an extent that even
the profoundly sceptical Bourget finds it convenient to become more and
more Catholic in every new book that he writes,--even this did not make
any appreciable difference to Barbey. He is too strong, too liberal,
too radical and too terribly realistic to be welcomed by modern piety.
In these days of exploding bombs, the anxious souls who take refuge
under the dreamy arches of the Church do not want to be still more
terrified by the reading of books. Times may change as they like, but
Barbey D’Aurevilly never was in harmony with the spirit of the age,
he is not in harmony with it now, and in the form that his friend has
published his books, there is ample prospect of his continuing to
remain out of harmony with it.

A man who has such a difficult and doubtful prospect of fame must be
already a great author--or nothing at all.

Paul Bourget was of the former opinion when, after Barbey’s death, he
wrote a clever and valuable essay upon him, aided by the advantage of
a personal acquaintance. This essay is now out of print; he omitted
to republish it in his _Etudes Psychologiques_ on celebrities of the
age, like the Goncourts, Amiel, Turgenev, even Taine and Stendhal. For
Barbey is too strong, he leaves the Renaissance figure of Stendhal far
behind.

It was a sad, quiet worshipper of Barbey’s who first turned my
attention to his works. The author had dedicated a small book to her,
almost with his dying hand; the dedication was one of those graceful,
pathetic inscriptions which are now a lost art. When I began to read
him his style influenced me like the sharp, bitter smell and the
infinite breadth of the sea, while his descriptions of life’s mystery
ran through me like the stab of a knife, causing me to shudder with
a suppressed cry as only a woman can cry when she sees the innermost
sanctuary of her womanhood exposed to the public gaze. Shakespeare is
the only one who has this greatness without mercy, this self-sufficing
completeness of a human being, this pride which is justice, moral law,
religion and a world to itself. There is nothing so vile, nothing so
horrible but would necessarily experience a shudder of exaltation when
exposed to the world’s gaze. Barbey D’Aurevilly belongs to the race of
Shakespeare.

He belongs to it in the actual sense of the word and also on account
of his Norman descent. There is nothing of the Gaul in him either in
his moral judgment, in his views of life, or in his sympathies and
antipathies. He is a landscape painter, which no truly French writer
has ever been, he is a lover of solitude in remote country districts,
a lover of nature on the lonely seashore. He is not a townsman and
he escapes as often as he can from Paris, the centre which is looked
upon by every successful Frenchman as the only beautiful, honourable,
interesting and pleasurable place in which to dwell. He has no
frivolity, he does not care for pleasure, but on the contrary he has a
grandiose mood and an iron grasp of the situations which he describes.
He seeks the more veiled sides of human nature, but there is a modesty
in his descriptions known only to Northerners, and not to Italians
and Gauls. He is the fellow-countryman of Flaubert and Maupassant,
but he has none of the plebeian exclusiveness of the first or the
Rabelais Gallicism of the second. He is of pure race to an extent that
is unheard of and inconceivable--a Scandinavian Norman without any of
the ponderous blood of the Anglo-Saxon, so often found in Shakespeare
and his contemporaries, but which the course of centuries has served to
dissipate until it has completely vanished.

When we look at his portrait we are unconsciously reminded of
certain pictures by the younger Holbein in the Windsor Gallery and
in the collection at Bâle; there is the same peculiar combination
of refinement and strength scarcely ever met with among his
contemporaries, the same sharp, subtle moulding of the features which
is only produced in a race of long standing. His head recalls to our
memory another, the head of one who is not long dead, more massive
perhaps, less developed, more thoughtful, but with an equally calm
expression; a head belonging to the same racial type, with the same
proud, princely features, the same prominent nose with the large
eyes of a discoverer--the head of a Normandy peasant, of Millet, his
fellow-countryman, the creator of a new feeling for nature and a new
aspect of nature in art.

The one feature that separates Millet from all other artists, in his
drawings far more than in his heavy, dull-coloured paintings, is that
he saw his people as one with nature. Where is the difference in
Millet’s picture between the flock of ravens alighting on the autumnal
field in the midst of the grey eternity of a damp day, and the man
and woman who, with rake and spade stuck in the ground beside them,
stand praying at the sound of the Angelus in a position which is of
itself a silent devotion at the approach of darkness? Just as the
forms of the flying ravens break the great self-sufficiency of the
landscape and thereby attract attention to it, so the powerful simple
outlines of the man and woman are only a more emphatic expression of
the solemn silence which the evening casts over the land. Just as
Millet places his people in the landscape, as an inseparable part of
nature, one with her, so Barbey D’Aurevilly places his characters on
the great, lonely sea-coast, on the yellow sands and the long, flat,
green meadows of storm-bound Normandy. The outlines here are the same
as there, standing out great and simple in their solemnity, silent and
weird as fate against the great, simple, peaceful landscape. In the
same way that Millet’s women stand firm and immoveable as a mountain
against the everlasting heavens, so Barbey D’Aurevilly’s defiant yet
submissive women stand in relief against the eternal landscape of their
native country, with the same powerful simplicity of Millet’s pictures,
inflexible as regards strange and transitory laws, but submissive to
the laws that appeal to them from the depths of their own natures.

Just as Millet’s peasant woman strides across the melancholy field,
weak yet unhesitating, individualistic, yet ever the same woman who
yesterday was, to-day is, and to-morrow will be, so _L’Ensorcelée_,
the large-proportioned, plain-thinking daughter of an ancient and
aristocratic house, wanders home from church across the fields in
spring, with the glow of an eternal flame in her honest face--the
glow of a passion conceived in church when in the pulpit she descried
the man whom she is proud to own as her master at the first glance.
This woman is the childless wife of a rich plebeian at the time of
the French Revolution; and the man--is he any different from that
peasant of Millet’s who draws on his coat, standing alone on the
broad plains after a hard day’s work? The mantle of an emperor in the
picture of a coronation is not more imposing than this raised arm,
standing in relief against the grey heavens, and commanding respect
as though it were engaged in the performance of a fearful and holy
action, instead of being merely the outline of a strong, rough, tired
figure in a lonely field. And what is it but the peasant strength and
peasant greatness of this former _Chouan_, now a priest of Barbey’s,
that attracts the nobleman’s daughter, wife of the _parvenu_, when
she sees him in church during the procession and catches sight of his
face hidden beneath the cowl,--a face that has been unrecognisably
lacerated in battle against the soldiers of the French Revolution,--at
the sight of which she is consumed with a mad, wild, passionate
love. She was a woman in whom her own sub-conscious strength called
for the strongest man, and felt with a shudder of injured pride: This
one is the strongest! And he is the strongest, for this inflexible
conspirator will not allow himself to be led astray by any woman,
and _L’Ensorcelée_, conscious of the destruction of her womanhood,
conscious also of the ignominy of having married beneath her, drowns
herself.

This is one of Barbey’s women who perished, a woman with the nature
of a mighty ancestress whose pride in her race and family was long
suppressed by a marriage repugnant to her inmost instincts, till at
last, in a moment of fearful agitation, she revolted. The same primal
instinct accompanied by the same horrible, unrelenting spirit, where
the conscience is dead during the perpetration of a crime, appears in
that unparalleled story, called _Le Bonheur dans le Crime_. A proud,
pure girl poisons the wife of the man whom she loves, and poisons her
with as much ease as a lover might have done in the days of the early
Italian Renaissance--(one of those incomprehensible women with the
passionate lips, as Botticelli paints them)--she poisons the wife under
his very eyes, with his silent consent, and then, in the same house,
with the same furniture, surrounded by the same solitary sequestered
nature, these two celebrate their honeymoon, which lasts without
interruption for weeks, months, years, scores of years, and they are
true to one another and happy for a whole life-time; not only do they
feel no remorse, but they are able to live without giving a single
thought to the past. This would not suit Protestant standards, yet
these are people such as Shakespeare depicted, figures such as Millet
in his pictures placed against the horizon, beings of whom Burkhardt
writes in his work on the Italian Renaissance. Conventional characters
they are not, but conventional characters are frequently incomplete
natures, whereas an individual character is a complete being, a being
who is fully developed and who possesses a standard of his own.

How else are we to describe that daughter of the _bourgeoisie_ who
comes home from the convent where she was educated, to be watched by
her parents with a severity that is now unknown? She steals away night
after night with bared feet along the stone passages, passes through
the bedroom where her parents are and goes to the young officer who
is quartered in their house, and one night she dies in his arms, dies
so silently and suddenly that she is dead before he has recovered his
self-possession. What men are able to transport women into such an
ungovernable passion of love? Woman does not create her own passion
like man; she is what man makes her. He either binds her instincts or
loosens them, he makes her good or bad, cold or passionate, according
to the manner in which his temperament affects hers, and according to
how great or how small a degree he himself is the man. Barbey’s men are
a race peculiar to themselves; they in their various characters, ages,
and persons are always himself--natures without lead and sand in their
veins, with the fire, the tension, the nervous energy of a full-blooded
race.

It is not the Frenchwoman whom Barbey describes, and no Frenchman
either could or would describe her as he has done. He is no more of a
Gaul than Millet, any more than the Italians of the early Renaissance
were real Romans. Like the author Tolstoy, in whom the Mongolian blood
is more clearly manifested as he grows older, so with Barbey and
Millet, the two great Normans, the Teutonic element appears on the
surface, the same element that we recognise in the pictures of the
Pre-Raphaelites, and which was afterwards set aside by the intrusion
of the Spaniards and the Classics. Millet’s landscapes represent the
Teutonic aspect of nature; while Barbey’s writings are the essence
of the Teutonic style, with its characteristic expansion, its abrupt
pauses, its utter indifference with regard to the main point, its
dislike of concluding the story as soon as the climax is reached. It
is here that we find the Teutonic sense for the infinite--a feeling
that is the peculiar property of a people who dwell near the sea--a
kind of absorption into nature, whither men vanish like black spots.
Both are equally possessed of that feeling for the real which has not
existed anywhere in the same degree since the days of the early Italian
Renaissance. Millet shews it in the reality of his drawing, Barbey in
the reality of individualism in the sexes. It is in this that Barbey
stands alone and unequalled by any of the authors of the present day or
of the past, and it is this that reminds us that three hundred years of
physical and spiritual refinement of human feeling and comprehension
lie between him and the age of Shakespeare.

His first youthful work, _Ce Qui Ne Meurt Pas_ is broad as a novel by
Bulwer and as full of feeling as a poem by Lamartine; already here he
strikes the key in which woman’s inmost soul vibrates, resounds and
awakens to a sense of its most intimate and complicated delight in man.
_Ce Qui Ne Meurt Pas_ is woman’s eternal affection, which eternally
manifests itself, even when the woman is no longer young; she is the
beloved mother whom the man, especially when he is quite young, loves
more ardently than he could possibly love a young girl, and through
him she becomes a mother--a matron already in her soul. Both in his
aphorisms and in the most popular of his novels, _Vieille Maîtresse_,
Barbey continually returns to this deepest of all man’s passions for
the woman whom he sees growing old beside him, and who for him grows
young again; the woman to whom he is bound by a thousand inextricable
memories, memories of his childhood when his own mother was young,
memories of youthful happiness and of his own youthful manhood spent
with this same woman, whom he still loves. A refined man expects a
great deal from woman, and in her who binds him with the cords of love,
he will always love the whole woman--the girl, the wife, the mother.

Woman is for Barbey the tragic, by reason of her inevitable destiny.
Woman’s age is more sharply defined than man’s; her youth is more
limited. She is unconscious of her own being, and when she realises
it, she also realises her destiny. She stands so strong and fearless
beneath the pressure of nature, that man cannot think of it without a
shudder of intense compassion like that which inspired the deepest of
Barbey’s stories, called by him _Une Histoire Sans Nom_. The subject
of this extraordinary story is a woman who becomes a mother without
wishing, without even knowing it. Kleist has described a case somewhat
similar in one of his novels, only there the woman is experienced
and understands what has happened. Kleist shows little sympathy in
his development of the plot, which he describes from the man’s point
of view, and the novel ends happily; Barbey, on the contrary, lays a
peculiar stress on the tragic element, on the woman’s passiveness,--the
reason of her eternal subjection to man--which renders her unable to
do anything towards the furtherance or the hindrance of her inevitable
destiny. An innocent young girl of sixteen lives alone in the old
family mansion with her mother, by whom she is sternly watched, and
where no one is admitted save a missionary preacher of the strictest
order who is going his round from church to church. This unsuspecting
child has begun to wander in her sleep without attracting the notice
either of her mother or the maid, and one night, while she is in
a somnambulant condition, the monk meets her on the doorstep and
through him she becomes a mother. The following day he goes off on his
mission, and both mother and daughter congratulate themselves that the
melancholy man has departed. Time passes, until there is no longer any
doubt, and the mother begins to torture the daughter, determined to
discover how and through whom this can have occurred; the miserable
child is terrified and can explain nothing. In this dreadful condition,
under circumstances which woman only of all creatures of the earth
has to endure, the poor girl’s mind undergoes a terrible trial which
results in idiotcy.

Barbey’s descriptions are physical rather than psychical, and only
women can judge of the truth of his psychological divinations, and
judge--not with words, but with the quivering of their nervous fibres.
It relates not to this one case only, but to thousands of other cases,
which to a man would appear quite human and endurable,--cases, not of
violence, but merely of error and self-deception.

There is one thing that is known only to ourselves, and that is that
woman’s most inexorable task-master is woman, as in this instance, when
the otherwise irreproachable mother torments her dearly-loved child.
If only on account of this one novel, Barbey may be said to belong to
the future, when there will exist a psychology of man and woman and
human conditions, of which the germs are only just beginning to show
themselves in him and in one or two others.

But what of his Catholicism? He lets the monk die after having
undergone a severe penance in a Trappist monastery, after which he
receives absolution and is duly reconciled with Heaven. Everything that
has broken with nature can be reconciled in nature, because all life
is only a fragment and a groping in the darkness, and in the deepest
sense there exists no immutable link between cause and effect, crime
and punishment. The innocent must suffer more than human martyrdom,
while the guilty escapes with an insignificant, but as he supposes,
just penance. Barbey’s Catholicism is that great, deep, intuitive
understanding that fathoms all humanity.




_How do we Stand?_


In this book I have tried to draw a characteristic sketch of the eight
most remarkable heads among the legion of authors belonging to the
nineteenth century. I have not stopped to make any literary estimates,
as these are of no lasting importance, because they vary with the
change of standards. What I have done is to uncover and expose to view
the subject-matter of their productions. I have tried to drag forward
the personality of the author, in order that the man may be measured by
his work, and the work by the man; for a man’s work is no fortuitous
incident. The man and his work are one; the work of a manly man is
man’s work, the work of an effeminate man is fancy work, and the work
of a half man is half work.

Now I ask: What is it that we women have to demand from the men of
this century who have offered to be our guides, teachers, deliverers,
cavaliers and religious teachers? And this is our reply: We ask that
they should be men, nothing more. The more manly they are, the more
womanly we shall be--preaching and education, rivalry and competition,
boasting and flattery are all of no good, only the manly man can
redeem the womanly in woman; all else is make-believe.

Let us consider these eight representative men in relation to their
work. We must confess that the oldest and the two youngest among them
have bequeathed man’s work, by which we mean lasting work which will
be valued more highly as time goes on. The manliness of their work is
proved by the fact that they looked neither to the right nor to the
left, nor hearkened to the course of time, nor winked at the women, but
said what they had to say--neither more nor less--and wrote what they
were obliged to write, owing to their personal temperament. None of
them wrote for us, neither Keller, Barbey nor Maupassant, nor did they
stop writing to wonder what we should say. They never thought about us
at all, and that is why they are the greatest of women’s authors, not
the authors for the women of yesterday, to-day or to-morrow, but the
interpreters of woman, authors from whom we can learn to understand
ourselves as we gaze upon the reflection of our own images in the soul
of man.

The authors who were young about the middle of this century form
a group apart, and they treat both us and themselves with equal
solemnity. How excellent are their intentions, and how deep their
interest in us! They want to raise us, purify and deliver us, and they
want to do it so thoroughly that they would rejoice if they could
deliver us from our womanhood. They write for us, they appeal to
us--Björnson, Ibsen, Heyse, Tolstoy, Strindberg--each in his own way.
The one would have us be intellectual women, the other sexless women,
and the third (in his latter years) would like to make us into apple
dumplings with whipped cream, the fourth into men-haters, etc. We have
their permission to be anything we like--doctor, professor, and a lady
to the tips of our fingers, only not the mother of future generations
to whom nothing human is strange, because she carries humanity at her
breast.

It is thus that the half man seeks to create woman in the likeness of
his own image, to make her only half a woman.

There have never been so many books written in any century as in ours,
when so much is written that men have long ceased to read at all, and
they are by no means the worst men who do not care for literature. But
women read for two; and the authors, who live by being read, write
for the cultivated, thinking, studious woman--for the woman with the
adjective.

Time passes, the century is drawing to a close, and the bankruptcy of
its “intellectual attainments” becomes ever more apparent. Are we women
to allow ourselves to be the only ones who are duped into the next
century by these same intellectual attainments? Or shall we take our
fate into our own hands and measure our being by a higher standard than
that of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity?”

In order to do that there is no necessity for us to read the books that
are written for women--it were better to read those that are written
for men. Reading is a substitute for “living.” If we would build up for
ourselves a life out of our own womanhood, we need have no recourse to
authors, thinkers and prophets, such as this anæmic century produces;
we must turn to our own natures--not to our intellect, for that will
not bring us very far, but to our instinct. And it seems to me that
the first signs are already to hand, that woman will again determine
to be nothing more, but also nothing less, than the mother of future
generations.


PRINTED BY TURNBULL AND SPEARS, EDINBURGH



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