_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.